It is time to pull back from the brink
What you need to know:
- We never mourn properly, never take time to reflect and above all never know the whole truth of what happens in these brutal attacks.
- As we deny, forget and conceal the truth and pretend we have moved on, we are going headlong towards another round of political and ethnic violence.
Last week I made the long road journey to Mpeketoni for the burial of one of the 65 Kenyans slaughtered in last month’s attack.
It was a harrowing, depressing experience bringing back painful memories of similar violence that I have witnessed in the North Rift and elsewhere for the past 30 years.
More discouraging still, you leave a burial ground with a heavy heart knowing you will soon hear reports of more deaths, and indeed within an hour, we passed through Witu where traumatised residents relayed news of five more killings.
We never mourn properly, never take time to reflect and above all never know the whole truth of what happens in these brutal attacks. We can blame Al-Shabaab, MRC, local politicians, Mungiki, land issues and even the devil for the Mpeketoni massacre, but will investigations ever uncover the truth?
Truth is the first victim and in the Kenyan case, also the last, as we blame, politicise, cover up until the media moves on to the next massacre.
We still don’t have an agreed narrative on what happened in the 1992, 1997 and 2007 violence, primarily because neither side of the political divide could cope with what the truth would reveal, so we have some details but not the full truth about Naivasha, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisumu and Kibera from PEV 2007 and we certainly won’t be allowed to know the truth about Westgate.
So don’t expect to be told what happened in Mpeketoni. But there are other narratives that cannot be denied even if they are ignored and those are the stories of the victims.
INVISIBLE AND UNREPRESENTED
Mpeketoni residents sleep in the bush, constantly dreading another door-to-door round of targeted killings.
There are the 314,000 victims from the PEV whom the government refers to as ‘integrated IDPs’ but who remain unsettled and impoverished countrywide. They have been denied any substantial help, remain invisible and unrepresented and have frequently become a burden to their families where they have relocated.
In a new bizarre narrative, ‘forest evictees’ have become the new IDPs, thanks to the efforts of Deputy President Ruto as they receive Sh400,000 each while most of the ‘integrated IDPs’ missed out on even the paltry Sh10,000 allowance.
Another hierarchy of victims has emerged.
So as we deny, forget and conceal the truth and pretend we have moved on, we are going headlong towards another round of political and ethnic violence.
We are bombarded with contradictory half-truths, entitlement prejudices, persecuted syndromes, marginalised complaints all emerging from the political class that have learned nothing, repented nothing and are as dangerous to the nation as ever.
Sure, the Constitution guarantees us the right to assemble, speak and think freely, but it also befits all of us to be responsible and take cognisance of the fact that our country is fragile, cracking and far from healed.
Neither the Opposition’s aggressive approach nor Jubilee’s arrogant intransigence is helping this nation right now.
Most Kenyans are fed up with both sides, but are either side listening to the masses, who want them to pull back from the brink?
