DEAR KENYANS OUR "NORMALITY" IS MADNESS

"Veronika decides to Die" is the title of a book by renowned author Paulo Coelho and he tells the story of Veronika a twenty something year old girl from Slovenia whose suicide attempt reults in her ending up in a mental institution.It follows up on her life there and offers a peek into her mind and that of other patients there as a result of their "madness".

At one time while Veronikah is trying to understand "madness"she meets Zedka another patient there who in trying to define madness tells her a story that goes like this:


"There was once a powerful wizard who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom,so he places a magic potion in the well from which all inhabitants drank.Whoever drank that water would go mad.The following morning ,the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad,apart from the King and his family ,who had a well set aside for them alone,and which the magician had not managed to poison.The King was worried and and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health.The policemen and the inspectors ,however ,had also drank the poisoned water and they thought the King's decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them.



When the inhabitants of the Kingdom heard the decrees they became conviced that the King had gone mad and was now giving non sensical orders.They marched on the castle and called for his abdication.


In despair ,the King prepared to step down from the throne ,but the queen stopped him saying,"Let us go and drink from the communal wel.Then we will be the same as them."


And that was what they did,the King and Queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking non sense.Their subjects repented at once;now that the King was displaying such wisdom,why not alllow him to continue ruling the country?"



The country continued to live in peace,although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbours.And the King was able to govern until the end of his days" 






Kenyans have become like the inhabitants of this mythical kingdom who have drank from the poisoned well.That is why tribalism,corruption,impunity,blatant theft and misuse of public funds and recklessness on our roads are like terminal illnesses we all seem to be suffering from.We are all mad!

Our road carnage statistics are some of the highest and most of the time you hear people blaming it on God's will.We find it normal to fork out a few thousand shillings to get a driving licence after you pass your competency test.We even raised hue and cry when drivers were subjected to sobriety tests by the infamous alco blow.It is very normal for a matatu in Kenya to be breaking the speed limit while the passengers silently watch and pray that they get to their destination safely yet they can clearly see the driver is shuttling their bodies  to the cold slab of a morgue and their souls straight to the gates of heaven or hell.


When public funds find their way inmto private accounts,we chuckle and guffaw at the civil activists when they chain themselves to the gates of the Ministry of Education to protest the misuse of these funds and we label them mad.We forget that these very funds are not gifts by donors but loans that we are paying and that our children are going to pay back. Even the newbies being born today are being saddled with loans that were squandered or spirited away to foreign countries by government officials.

Last year maize meal which is a staple food item in 90% of Kenyan households was retailing at sixty shillings for a 2kg packet at the beginning of the year.Right now the price of the same  packet costs more than a litre of petrol and many Kenyans who live on less than a dollar a day are either going hugnry or looking for alternative foods which given the current economic crisis are not many.Drought has ravaged parts of the country and indeed much of the horn of Africa and now international donor agencies are calling for aid to mitigate the current crisis the region is facing.


We are also witnessing a curious spectacle by members of our August house fighting taxation on the pretext that there aren't any laws permitting taxation of members of Parliament.If they all paid tax all 222 of them we would see 700 million go into the excheqeur and hopefully some of it would be used to feed our poor brothers and sisters in the arid and semi arid areas of the Northern part of the country who are grappling under the effects of the worst famine and drought in decades.


With an election looming,we are having the same old story of tribal alliances going on and the big tribes are aligning themselves for possible victory come August next year.We are listening to the same promises we have been told over the past years and which have never come to pass.


Tell me if we havent all gone mad,then what has made us immune to everything that would be declared wrong  and  unacceptable in other countries.When children are going to school barefoot,having their classes under trees,people dying from poorly constructed buildings ,farmers barely eking out a living from the back breaking work of feeding the 40 million Kenyans and no one seems to give a damn.

We all seem to think it is normal for a country such as ours that showed so much promise at independence is now  a pale shadow of itself .Year in year out we hear promises of fighting corruption and tribalism but none have come to pass.It has become normal to let our leaders get away with lies and blatant disregard for the law and what is right and moral and then we hail them as leaders.What madness!


We are all mad and unless we act quickly we will be like the mythical kingdom Coelho writes about.We have already seen what normality can be like so refreshing and bold when we got a new Chief Justice the Judicial system got a facelift.It is time we gave the same antidote to our electorate so come next year we wake up to brand  spanking new crop of leaders and not the old order we have known for  what seems to me to be eons.

A SUNDAY AT THE POOL IN KIGALI

This was Gil Courtemanche's first novel and it traces the Rwandan genocide through the life and tragic love story of Valcourt an older Canadian expatriate working there as a journalist and Gentille a young Rwandan working at the hotel Mille Collines as a waitress.

The story is fictional but the events taking place in the story are real.It is said the events in the book are an eye witness account of how Rwanda burned as the world watched as the land of a thousand hills drowned in the blood of innocent civilians doomed to their fate by the color of their skin,their slight build or their height.

At the beginning of the book the writer gives a brief history of how these tribal animosities between the Rwandans started.Gentille's great great grandfather is quoted as saying'it seems we are not what we are ,nor what we appear to be.....and the future of my children will be bearable only if we become what we are not.'.And from then Kawa did all he could to change his childrens ethnicity from Hutu's to Tutsi's.It is sad therefore that a few generations later Gentille who is described as the most beautiful girl in Butare though Hutu was always mistaken for a Tutsi because of her light skin,slight build and height.

The stereotypes Africans have of whites are beautifully captured in the book through the eyes of Valcourt who fortunately or unfortunately is so enamored of his adopted country Rwanda despite the evils and the problems that bedevil it then.Reading the book the failings of us as humans is so well captured through the characters in the book but so is the unfaltering human will to do good through Victor who saves so many Tutsi's while risking his life.

AIDS,the African problem is ever present in the narrations in the book.Maybe this is well viewed through the eyes of Celestine who figures we are going to die anyway and he goes ahead to give pleasure to all the women in the market where he sells tobacco while also gifting them with the HIV.

Its a wonderful book and though it had to have the white man as the her there are many good things to be said about African characters like Victor,Zozo,Elise and Emerita's mum who fight tribalism and show why in the final end the human spirit and will does more good than harm most of the time if not always.

JOHN GITHONGO-HERO OR VILLAIN?

"If you're walking in the Savannah and a lion attacks climb a thorn tree and wait there for a while".....Kamba proverb


What an apt way to start the 2nd chapter of Michela Wrongs 'Its our turn to eat-The Story of a Kenyan Whistle blower'.It is said that bookshops in Kenya are too scared to sell it yet what it brings out are facts that are already in the public domain.


Reading the book i moved from amazement at the way Michela perfectly encapsulates the Kenyan society in words.She has also done a wonderful job tracing Kenya's history.I chuckled when i read of the sameness of presidential lodgings in former British colonies be it Zambia,Tanzania or Kenya.Fall asleep in the waiting room of one of them say in Nairobi and you might as well be n Lusaka,Zambia.On Kenyans obsession with land she quotes the late president Kenyatta who wrote"There is a great desire in the heart of every Gikuyu man to own a piece of land on which he can build his home.A man or woman who cannot say to his friends,come and eat,drink and enjoy the fruit of my labor,is not considered a worthy member of the tribe."

History offers lessons for anyone who cares to learn .And it is said we cannot all make similar mistakes so we need to learn from the lessons of yester year.Kenya political history is riddled with tribal coalitions .And 47 years after independence we are still using the same formula and expecting different results.

Michela Wrong's book should be made a mandatory read in our institutions of higher learning because she presents an outsiders view on Kenya's issues.We are too often as Kenyans looking at our peculiarities with rose colored glasses and we accept them as part of our culture.It is time we evaluated ourselves and sought to rectify history before it teaches us the hard truth,that we can never ever move forward while we still cling to our tribal groupings.


Love him or hate him John Githongo did what many of us are afraid to do in our daily lives,he stood up for the truth and he lost.We labeled him a traitor for airing our dirty linen in public .When he came for an interview at one of our TV stations it was heart breaking to see the kind of responses he was eliciting form fellow Kenyans.Kenyans have chosen to live with corruption and have accepted it as the norm.

But something John's story taught me is that when we sacrifice truth we may not see the results immediately but we will live with it and our children are going to pay for it.We have lost millions through shady deals over the course of the years and impunity has become an accepted Kenyan phenomenon.

When we passed the new constitution we welcomed a new dawn for the country and future generations.We need to pick up from where John left off,lets stand up for the truth lets forgo instant gratification and work at building and leaving a legacy for our children where truth ad justice above all are the pillars that we build our country on.Finally lets cut John some slack he has taught us a lesson on tough love.