African Ghosts Back With Vengeance

If we ever imagined that the dark era of bad African political manners are gone, then we need repentance because current events have disabused of this in a large scale. The bad old days are back with a vengeance with our despots and striving to outdo each other in silencing their opposition and media, both perceived and real.

Dinosaur leaders rule by borrowing bad political manners from their peers. Down south senile Mugabe is speedily driving his beautiful country into abyss and here I Kenya, Kibaki seem to be keenly taking note and proving such an astute student.
The Kenyan government has done it again, having both feet stuck in the mouth. What a primitive show of might in silencing the media. While the world press recently splashed on their front pages a battered Morgan Tsangirai's in the hands of Mugabe’s police, Kenya is threatening to outdo Zimbabwe.

We can condone errors of commission but such grandiose abuse of our national pride, freedom, must be resisted at all cost. We must defend the media and press at all cost lest we lose all that we have gained in the last 15 years. Comparing present freedom to the dark ages of Moi is to feed us on tokenism which we must resist and reject. Whoever authors spins for Kibaki’s government must have been weaned on colonial mentality. Harassing innocent Kenyans working hard to measure to the working nation call is an unprovoked upfront of our collective intelligence. The timing couldn't have been worse in an election year.

Kibaki's propensity to shoot itself in the foot is unparalleled and we must stand up as a nation to shine light in all the dark shades of our leadership. The role of journalists in this endeavour is irreplaceable and we only keep quiet at our own collective peril. Attempt to intimidate the media in this era of information highway is not only destined to fall flat on its ugly face but is also symptomatic of what dinosaurs we have for leaders. The police engage in wild goose chase by shamelessly wasting tax payers’ money in harassing professionals sweating to put food on the table while murderers roam Mt. Elgon unhindered maiming and raping innocent Kenyans.

Ours is a country in the 21st Century led with models of the 1960s. We must reclaim our motherland from these fraudsters in demanding freedom of the press lest we perish both individually and severally. Choosing the cheap option of lynching the messenger and conveniently avoiding the message is the height of intellectual naivety at best and dishonesty at worst.

And our so-called elites are no better than their village mates except they cloth their rawness in eloquent English. They always start an objective argument with loaded facts but no sooner than you read a paragraph than you get confronted with their stories trapped in hole of bad-mouthing. We all appear intelligence in public but remain shameless tribalists in private. It is incumbent upon us to redeem and reclaim our motherland by stripping its leadership of political scavengers now and not tomorrow.

We must refuse to played against each other while imbibing cheap stereotypes. Each one of us is born into a tribe and we must proudly speak out native tongues. But the identity end there and we must embrace and defend Kenyans as one people devoid of prejudice. Otherwise being the country of conspiracies against each other we are destined to collective doom. Politics is a game and the heat it generates is mostly felt by the less-valued loud-mouthed rather than the key players. We must sober up and not be cheap and fast in making insinuations that are akin to character self-destruction. We need not take offence on behalf of our tribal chiefs knowing that we remain the grass that suffers when the bulls fight. When a fellow human being employs reasoning from the lower faculties, they only succeed in making apes look geniuses.