Hello Kenya, as I write, you must have
resumed duty. I heard from my neighbour that he had a great time celebrating
your 50 year old accomplishments and to be honest, I too, thought that a Birth
Day wish for you, would be in order. But as an afterthought, I decided not to
stoop that low. I didn’t and won’t celebrate with you as a matter of principle.
Both you and I know that you are a hard core criminal and that celebrating your
50 years of successful breech of law, murder of innocent people, theft,
ineptitude and injustice, is not the wisest thing I can do as law abiding
citizen. Make no mistake, I am not protesting against your merrymaking, which
does not also approve that you had reasons to celebrate anyway. Let me be
magnanimous with truth, gauged on any logical developmental verisimilitude, you
are a dismal performer who at 50, should be more worried and moody than
restlessly jovial. Of course I know it wasn’t meant to be 50 years of
perfection, but when you score a pathetic 8 out of 10 on the scale of
imperfection, I don’t just see the sense in publicly celebrating that you are
proudly a failure. At midnight on December 12th,1963, President Jomo Kenyatta,
your founding father, full of empty promises, led your children, Kenyans into
lowering the colonial flag and raising the independence flag as sign of
emancipation from colonial subjugation. 50 years after, Uhuru Kenyatta, then a
baby, is your forth President and just like his old man, presided over a
similar event, to commemorate what Jomo did a half a century ago. Apart from
that, did you have any other reason to justify your celebrations? Be honest and
specific! Here! Bite this bit of straight talk and do it double-quick .Whether
or not you like the taste should be your own business, because as you should
have known by now, it’s not the intention of this letter to please you. Some
fifty years ago, you made a sacrilegious mistake and a great symbolic blunder
when you crafted and adopted a national anthem with a lullaby tune. And as is
the nature of insensitive mothers, you regrettably entrusted the fate of your
children in the hands of gluttonous baby sitters who with great zeal, have sang
the lullaby and soothed your innocent children into slumber as they plunder your
national coffers and steal your babies’ milk for 50 years. The handful of your
sons and daughters who wouldn’t shut an eye no matter how sweet the lullaby
seemed, are most probably somewhere in Heaven, hell or in between. Those who
are still determined to journey on the same ragged terrain of trust and honesty
are either gagged or ‘followed’ today so that they won’t disturb the sleeping
compliant lads. But what have you done? No need for answers! We both know what
you did- Nothing! And just as a reminder, it’s only you among nations, who has
two different national anthems for your children. Each time any two of your
children sing the national anthem, one in English and the other in Kiswahili,
one of them must be lying! ‘’Ee Mungu nguvu yetu ilete Baraka kwetu…’’ and ‘’Oh
God of all creation, bless this our land and Nation…’’ are completely two
different songs. At 50 you should be old enough to settle on one of these two
songs which in your wisdom, or possible lack of the same, could unite your
children. When ‘mkoloni’ relinquished his rule and handed power over to you,
you seemed just fine. Do you remember Malaysia and South Korea? Of course you
can’t forget Singapore! They were your peers. You all grew up together. Confide
in me Kenya, what happened? No doubt, you slept in your economic and
politico-social policies, only to wake up to a country of a handful of
millionaires and millions of paupers. While you settled for gurgitation of your
national wealth, your peers revamped their economies and soon you shamelessly
went begging for help from their door steps. Do you even have a single thread
of decorum in the fabric of your mannerism? Are you ever shameful? Get annoyed
if you must, lose your hope in humanity and break my head, but I must tell you
this; in 1963, you suffered from disease, ignorance and poverty. Annoyingly, 50
years later, apart from ignorance that you have not yet fully eradicated,
poverty which has become your national emblem, and your diseases which have
greatly multiplied, you now suffer from corruption, impunity, graft, and the
malady of ethnic polarization. Is this the Kenya that my grandfather an ex-
soldier fought for? Is this the Kenya whose children were ranked the most
hopeful in the world in 2002? Alright, I can see you hate reproach. Well,
mother Kenya, forget my earlier ‘harsh’ words. By the way, I suspect that you
had a reason to throw a party to celebrate your 50th anniversary and even
though you might not believe me, I think you do deserve a nice celebration. You
have of course come from ‘far’. Let us toss in the air and celebrate your
achievements.Oh yes! Let us celebrate your 50 years of falsehood, 50 years of
corruption and impunity, 50 years of poverty, 50 years of gross inflation, 50
years of greedy politicians, 50 years of squatters, 50 years of poor health, 50
years of hunger and famine, 50 years of insecurity and of course 50 years of
collective ignorance. Congratulations mother Kenya on your 50th year in the
business of achieving nothing and mustering the courage to celebrate it!
Children of Kenya, my fellow human beings, I salute you all. Is it really true
that we are celebrating, or is it our facial expressions that are misleading
the observers? Is it 50 years of ‘man eat man Kenya’ that we are busy
celebrating? Or are we simply sick and stupid? I tend to think and it might be
true that only fools celebrate hunger, bloodshed, insecurity and apathy.
Swallow me, if you must, but do we really have a nation which as a people, we
can feel proud enough to celebrate? How about a little truth? Kenya was
poisoned with tribalism shortly after it was born, buried secretly in the tomb
of greed and only a mental picture of what it ought to have been, provided to
us through fruitless national cohesion initiatives. Verily, we’re not celebrating
Kenya but 50 years of Kikuyus, Kalenjins, Luos,Luyhias pokomos, Abasuba,and all
the other cultural groups which make the 42 tribes of this country. There is no
such thing as a united Kenya, we are lying to the world. We are cheating
ourselves. We are not one. We might never be. Period. How can we be one when
masses of this country live in abject poverty, die like flies in terror attacks
and watch their young and old die of hunger while others within the same
nation, are safe, live in extreme affluence and proudly display their pomp and
splendor? How can we be united, when only less than a quarter of the total
population, celebrates our ‘advancement’ in health care while not one, but many
patients have just succumbed to preventable deaths as I write? Sadly, our
national and county governments don’t seem to agree on who should hire and
remunerate medical practitioners and as long as this stalemate is not
addressed, the doctor’s strike is on. In simple terms, the sick must continue
dying until we finish partying and get back to the table of negotiations. While
we boast of our success in the fight against ignorance as evidenced by the
numerous public and private colleges and Universities, there in a small village
in Ukambani, a humble group of ‘religious’ Kenyans still think that vaccination
against polio is an unnecessary and a demonic temptation from government. Fifty
years into independence, insecurity as a ‘sector’ is booming in Kenya, the
Northern part of this country has become a favourite playground for bandits, in
Nairobi, life is unpredictable! Recently, our government fiercely fought and
vanquished ‘about 10- 15’ imaginary terrorist at Westgate, and of course we
don’t need a reminder on how much ‘water’ was drank from Nakumatt and other
Business premises that were under ‘siege’ during the multi-agency operation by
our very own (in)disciplined forces. The Kenya that was militarily ‘strong’
enough to succeeded in Somalia where the mighty USA had failed, cannot
safeguard its own internal security? And with a President and his Deputy,
suspected to be powerful criminals by the International community, I find more
reasons to be gloomy than to expose my molars in unrealistic jubilation. I
won’t lie to you Kenya! 50 years ago, you begun a race but sadly oscillated
around the same point of stagnation in all aspects of your development.
Precisely, you have only moved on, never forward. By openly celebrating our
failures before a local and global audience, Kenya has appended the signature
of failure on the form of her national character. We have become a bad
influence to the world and especially to those other countries who wasted their
tax payers’ money to send their heads of states and envoys to come and witness
our national insensitivity. Had I the unfortunate duty of advising the Kenya @
50 celebrations committee, because they wouldn’t listen anyway, this would have
been my advice; “Instead of spending millions to mock ourselves in meaningless
celebrations, let us, as a nation, purchase sack cloths, assemble in all our
village headquarters and declared three days of national mourning. Let us
reflect on the opportunities we have lost in addressing poverty and hunger, on
joblessness, impunity and nepotism, Let us think of all the lives we have
assassinated, on all the innocent lives we have lost in careless road
accidents, terrorist attacks, extrajudicial killings and on the lives we are
currently losing because of the Doctors’ strike. Let us take this time, to make
a national declaration to begin a new, this time more seriously and with honest
diligence.”
