This slide into totalitarianism must be resisted

Kenya has come from far, to milk an overused phrase. We have come from a time when the president was considered immortal and gospel songs were composed in his honour.

We have come from a time when the ruling party ran a parallel government with its own disciplinary machinery rivalling State law enforcement agencies.

We have come from a time when one wrong word spoken in the wrong place would result in disappearance without a trace, or a planned ‘accident’. We have come from a time when the president could appoint and dismiss government officials on a whim, the so-called roadside declarations. We have evolved from a de facto monarchy to a more responsive system of government, even if it doesn’t always look like that.

In short, Kenya today is a very different place from the country it was twenty or thirty years ago. A lot of lives have been lost to bring us to this place, and we are now in the process of renegotiating our nationhood, agreeing on what binds us together and what pulls us apart.

DEMOCRACY

We are an aspiring democracy, a place of experiments, a place of boundless opportunities for all. We are a reasonably open society, reasonably tolerant of opposing viewpoints, and compared to other countries in our neighbourhood, we are a very progressive place in which to live.

A price we have to pay to live in an open and democratic society is that the amount of arguments, even over seemingly inane and idiotic issues, increases exponentially. Every Kenyan with an opinion has an opportunity to prosecute it in the many democratic spaces that have opened up since the end of the KANU kleptocracy.

 Inevitably we will all get annoyed about some silly posturing by a random Kenyan, and the more powerful we are, the greater the likelihood of being the target of annoying jibes.

As a result of this, in a society that aspires to be a civilised democracy, those on whom power is bestowed are also given heavy responsibilities. They are expected to grow the thickest skin in the Republic, to listen with equanimity to both praise and criticism, to grin and bear it when they are the subject of unsavoury conversations.

STATE MACHINERY

They cannot afford a prickly demeanour that seeks to respond to every slight with the most overbearing of State machinery. State power is the equivalent of the atomic bomb, a weapon of last resort, whose result may include mutually assured destruction.

It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the Jubilee government sees nothing wrong with employing the repressive tactics of regimes gone by to deal with criticism against it.

Since taking power, this regime has had the penchant for deploying State security with instructions to be unnecessarily violent and not to shy away from killing dissenters and protesters. People have been killed for shouting slogans or running around in the streets protesting against one thing or another.

This has reached its peak in recent days when, under the threat of the installation of a parallel “people’s government”, the state seems to have panicked and decided to deploy the most egregious of historical tropes- the accusation of treason and the repressive tactics associated with it. Media houses have been shut down, serious counter-democratic threats issued against citizens, and politicians arrested and gagged ostensibly to forestall an attempt to “overthrow” the government.

REPRESSION

Any objective observer with any sense of history will agree that events in the past few days bring back memories of KANU’s most oppressive periods in our history, and any progressive Kenyan will agree that we cannot allow those days to be brought back.

The tragedy is the re-enactment of the KANU-era repression has been carried out so amateurishly that it looks like a sad parody.

Unfortunately, we can take no comfort from this, knowing as we do that a gun in the clownish hands of a monkey is way more dangerous than in those of a trained professional soldier.

We have no choice today but to resist attempts at restricting our constitutional freedoms in the guise of protecting our own republic from ourselves!

Atwoli is Associate Professor and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine [email protected]