“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers. No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end…Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions.”
Who said those words? It was, of course, Barack Obama during his recent tour of Ghana. Was he referring to any particular country, do you think? You can send me answers on a postcard if you like, but I won’t be dishing out any prizes. Not for so easy a question.
I sense some easing of ‘Obama-mania’ amongst a certain class of Kenyans. Our political leaders have always maintained a thunderous silence on the subject of Obama from the outset, for a simple reason: he makes them look so bad that the simplest strategy is to look the other way and pretend he doesn’t exist.
But now a different bunch of people, previously adorers of our young homeboy Barack, are grumbling about the man in the White House. There seem to be two reasons for this. One, that despite being ‘one of our own’, Obama shunned us and went off to visit a prettier neighbour instead. Well that one we can kick out of court without too much ado. As president of the US, Mr Obama decides who he visits and why. Full marks to him for picking a country that also experienced a contentious election and managed to resolve it without resorting to crude tit-for-tat violence and ugly ethnic posturing.
The second reason for rumbling dissent, however, is more interesting. Apparently, some of us are getting tired of Obama’s hectoring tone. By talking openly and repeatedly about how bad a country we are, he is showing us up in the front of the whole world. He is picking us out unfairly in terms of corruption, we say; the whole world is corrupt, so why keep harping on about Kenya?
So we don’t really want to know how Barack’s dad and cousins were hindered by corruption in Kenya; we all are, every day, and we just get on with it. And that, fellow Kenyans, is precisely the problem. We just get on with it.
Just take a look at what we have learned about ourselves in recent weeks. Transparency International told us that our police force is the most corrupt institution in East Africa. How many eyebrows were raised at that shocking bit of information? Simultaneously, we are experiencing the worst crime wave that I can remember, and no one is making the connection.
We have had revelation after revelation about our parastatal bodies. Boards have been dissolved and entire management teams shown the door. Accusations fly everywhere about how something as basic as water is sold corruptly, about diversion of relief food, about mismanagement of funds meant for youth enterprise, about how our key transport and telecommunications entities are handed over to dubious, shadowy entities.
We have had revelations about how goods enter the country without duty being paid through Eldoret Airport, a facility that was possibly constructed for that very purpose. We know that public examination papers are sold routinely, and that candidates can pay to come in to exam rooms with notes. Every other week or so, a building collapses somewhere and people are killed.
The point about all those ‘revelations’? They are not revelations at all. They are part of business as usual in Kenya. They are our daily drip-feed of news about ourselves. We just ingest all this toxic material, and we carry on. We don’t expect, far less demand, that anyone is ever arrested in connection with these crimes. We are content that the most that will happen is some lowly set of scapegoats will be ’sent home’, or merely transferred. We know more than we need to about our two biggest scams, Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing, but we just sit on the knowledge.
Perhaps all Kenyans should be flown to Mars so that they can look down and see the reality about themselves. We are not just corrupt, we are obscenely, grotesquely corrupt. Some of us may not be, but we are silent partners in the crime. By acquiescing, we are holding our own development by the throat in a death-grip and refusing to let go.
So, Barack Obama, there may be little you can do for us but please do carry on shouting about your father’s infested country. Do tell the world, and do keep shunning us. You are only saying what we should be saying ourselves. Do it until we understand that we must end our own rottenness for our own sakes.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Spot on, Sunny!
I also noted with disappointment the waning of admiration for Obama because of his repeated harping about our corruption-infested country. I agree that the REAL problem is that we seem content to accept it as a usual occurrence: the inevitable hurdles and obstacles that come from living in Kenya. Instead of becoming tired of the Obama talk, why don’t we raise the notch even higher and ask ourselves if we are not indeed genetically predisposed to corruption?!
The point is that as long as we don’t talk, question, debate why things are the way they are in Kenya, we will not more forward. There is a certain ‘numbing’ effect when we are in our comfort zone, surrounded by people who think just like us or probably don’t even care to question the status quo. But when we begin to appreciate how others perceive the country (with well-founded facts), it should be enough shock therapy to want us to aspire to be better.
There seems to be a high degree of selfishness and self seeking within the society. E.g. you go to a restaurant and they have cut all the serviettes in half to ’save money’ (plus tomato sauce full of water); a driver thinks that he is in more of a hurry than other drivers so he drives on the wrong side of the road and blocks all the smooth -flowing on-coming traffic! shop keepers think that it is not their obligation to smile at customers; an ordinary person is treated like he or she does not exist but a VIP! (I once witnessed an assistant minister being allowed to park his car at the space for disabled people at Uchumi Langata – because the basement was too far!); traffic cops think that its their job to stop traffic not to let it flow; the only department that seems to work in the city-council is the inspectorate unit… and the list goes on.
So long as people do things always with their personal needs in mind first, do not expect anything good.
Overall, I found Obama’s message to Africa to be shallow (a view supported by articles by Caplan and Cockburn in The Nation – the US left political magazine), although many more have praised him for telling Africa the “truth”.
Your perspective as it relates to Kenya is very interesting. It gives me a different view of the matter, that we shouldn’t accept the current state of affairs to be the norm, which our silence seems to indicate. So, instead of stating the obvious, which is how I felt initially, you seem to believe that Obama is trying to jolt us out of our stupor.
I think I have to weigh this view of the matter. I hope you don’t mind my posting your piece on my Facebook page.
Elizabeth, Constant:
As you rightly observe, we are like frogs being boiled in our own juices. Because things get slightly worse every year, we fail to realise how bad they actually are. So we need someone to shout: “People, you’re boiling in there!”
Kofi
No problem with Facebook posting, as long as the source is attributed and a link to this website included.
In Kenya’s case, Obama knows our obstinacy. He knows that only intense international pressure gets us to budge at all. This pressure may be humiliating for us, but it is through our own misgovernance that we have handed over this power to others.
Paul Kagame, for instance, is able to tell international busybodies to take a hike, simply because he is achieving big things in his country in his own way. He is able to dismiss Western thinking on Africa as shallow and hypocritical, and for him it works.
This was actually in accord with Obama’s speech, which emphasised self-determination repeatedly. We are only going to ever do this by ourselves. But the point is, we must DO it ourselves. In Kenya, we are numbed by our daily rottenness. We regard corruption not as an abomination, but as business as usual.
I agree with sunny.Our country is in a mess because of failed sytems which is secondary to ineffective leadership.However I believe the change we desperately need in our country will begin from the people going up to the leaders not vice versa.If we were to regain our morals and not condone corruption then corrupt leaders won’t find themselves in parliament and if they do they would find it impossible to cope.We have corrupt leaders and institutions beacause we have tolerated corruption for long until our conscience has become desensitized and Its no longer a big deal to us.
It is time we stop being arrogant and face facts.The Rainbergers of this world will never stop short of critising us.We must be diplomatic at all times.