{"id":442768,"date":"2011-06-17T05:43:32","date_gmt":"2011-06-17T05:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/06\/17\/life-in-this-country-has-become-too-crude\/"},"modified":"2011-06-17T05:43:32","modified_gmt":"2011-06-17T05:43:32","slug":"life-in-this-country-has-become-too-crude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/06\/17\/life-in-this-country-has-become-too-crude\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in this Country Has Become Too Crude"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nairobi Star<\/a> (Nairobi)<\/p>\n

Sarah Elderkin<\/p>\n

16 June 2011<\/p>\n

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opinion<\/p>\n

I wasn’t born in Kenya, nor was I here during colonial times. I came after Independence and became a citizen a few years later, long before more than half the people in this country were born.<\/p>\n

It takes commitment to relinquish your native land for another. It certainly involves more thought than becoming a citizen through an accident of birth. And I never imagined I’d be ashamed of being Kenyan. But boy, have I felt shame lately! Shame and deep sadness.<\/p>\n

That shame covers a whole range of incidents but it can be boiled down to this. Life in Kenya has become coarse and crude. People have no respect for national institutions, no respect for each other, and, it appears, none for themselves either. And the day I woke up to the page one newspaper headline ‘We are not gay, say Mutunga and Baraza’, I thought we had hit rock-bottom.<\/p>\n

I won’t thoroughly rehearse all the arguments – the amnesia about African men having worn earrings for centuries, the archaic attitudes that stereotype some earring-wearers as gay, the discrimination against anyone for being gay, the hypocrisy of churchmen who preach la-la land but hide vipers in their bosom, the constitutional clauses barring discrimination for personal choices, the sanctimonious MPs and other leaders banging on about family values.<\/p>\n

Family values? MPs? I’ve known a lot of them and hardly one who has not had a string of mistresses. I drove back to Nairobi from a ’90s by-election with a later-to-be cabinet minister and one of his, I’ve listened to a young woman bemoaning how a cabinet minister won’t leave his wife for her, and in one of the apartments near where I live there is a pretty gal who is the current squeeze of a married assistant minister. (She used to ‘belong’ to one of his colleagues but that relationship hit the buffers and this second chap kindly stepped into the breach and took over. I don’t know who bought the Mercedes.)<\/p>\n

That’s just a few random examples among many. Whoever wrote about goings-on at Continental House was not wrong. I’m far from being a prude but when it comes to people piously pontificating as if they are as clean as cotton, it’s all rather sickening. If MPs were thinned out by the same means that some tried to use in calling Willy Mutunga to account, we would have virtually none left.<\/p>\n

I am all for openness and rigorous scrutiny, and part of me has thoroughly enjoyed watching the judicial sinners squirm, but I thought Paul Muite had it right when he commented that, while we want the substance of these revelations, we might not agree with the style of eliciting them.<\/p>\n

In fact, watching Ahmednasir Abdulahi, I thought I might have strayed into Tusker Project Fame by mistake, and he was the ‘bad guy’ judge. While this might be fine entertainment in a musical talent contest, it did not look very professional in a senior judicial setting. It was, if you like, a rather upmarket kind of mob justice.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with the demeanour of judge Ekaterina Trendafilova of the ICC, as she addressed men who might be responsible for rape, murder and the displacement of thousands. She also has to find out the truth, or her court does. But she was unfailingly polite.<\/p>\n

Can you imagine the reaction if Ekaterina had asked one of the suspects, William Ruto, when he stood up and spoke out of turn in her court, “Which planet are you on?” There would rightly have been an outpouring of protest. But this is what Ahmednasir said to one of the judges being interviewed. It is not the kind of question that reveals anything useful. It is rude, crude and pure showing-off, at someone else’s expense.<\/p>\n

I respect a maxim that says you shouldn’t speak to anyone in a way that their situation prevents their speaking to you. It’s a maxim I think future interviewing panels would do well to bear in mind. Social change does not come through humiliation. It is a bad example to others. And if panellists can’t elicit the desired answers in a more appropriate manner, that only lays bare their own inadequacies.<\/p>\n

Lack of empathy and decent care for another human being was also evident in a sad picture in the press – of late athlete Samuel Wanjiru’s mother, Hannah, backed up against a car with a stone in her hand. She looked like a hunted and cornered animal.<\/p>\n

As a recently bereaved mother myself, I know the agony that Hannah is going through. I know the heartbreak – the feeling that your heart might literally break. I know the indescribable pain of loss, of the words ‘never again’, of knowing your beautiful child has gone forever, has been cheated of their fair crack at life, and that your grandchildren will never ever again know their mother or father’s love and touch.<\/p>\n

While husbands and wives might eventually find new partners, a child can never be replaced. I have not seen a word of compassion for Samuel Wanjiru’s mother as, in the midst of her grief, she has tried to do the best last thing she could think of for her child. She has only been ridiculed and hounded.<\/p>\n

Then there was the picture of children left orphaned by the recent Turkana massacre. Has anyone done anything to help them, as they bear the terrible sadness and fear and confusion they must feel at the loss of their parents – the worst thing that can happen to any child? These pictures speak so eloquently of who we are. And it is deeply disturbing.<\/p>\n

The saddest thing of all is the plight of the starving people in our northern and eastern arid lands. Shameful! I am sick, sick, sick of hearing the word ‘billions’. A billion is a thousand million – and have you noticed, nothing costs less than billions these days?<\/p>\n

I am not unrealistic. But I believe there are smaller, more local solutions to many problems. The starving people’s situation is desperate. They are dying. Why, at this critical time of drought, can’t the government beg, borrow or hire teams of trucks and water bowsers to be stationed at the nearest points of adequate water for these communities, to run in relays to them with food and water, for as long as this acute situation lasts and as long as it takes to find a more permanent solution?<\/p>\n

How much would it actually cost, when you compare the huge imperative of saving lives with the absolute non-imperative of Kalonzo Musyoka’s errands on behalf of the Ocampo 6? How much … when you compare it with all the funded projects in last year’s budget that appear to have vanished, never to be heard of again? In fact, can you put a price on people’s lives?<\/p>\n

Why can’t we do something practical on a more modest scale, alongside the grandiose statements about billions being allocated for food production and irrigation projects? What use is that to people who are starving to death today? Some so-called people’s representatives have boasted they can raise shs.10 billion for their election campaigns. And for starving people?<\/p>\n

And what the heck use are MPs like Aden Duale, shouting crudely about how his community, like Keriako Tobiko’s he says, is discriminated against in not getting big government positions? No, Mr Duale, your community, with shs.24 million of Dujis CDF money “wasted, missing or unaccounted for”, according to the 2009 National Taxpayers’ Association report, is suffering and dying because of people who are only interested in all the wrong things.<\/p>\n

Have violence and destruction and theft and rape and murder and burning and shooting and looting and killing and dying left us with no humanity at all? Are we now immune to all this? This is a dangerous place for a nation to be.<\/p>\n

We have to acknowledge a responsibility to and relationship with others in the community. We have to look for mutual respect, and find compassion in our hearts for other human beings, or we are done for. 2012 looms. And the ghost of 2008 still hovers.<\/p>\n

The writer is a freelance journalist<\/em><\/p>\n

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\nLife in this Country Has Become Too Crude<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nairobi Star (Nairobi) Sarah Elderkin 16 June 2011 opinion I wasn’t born in Kenya, nor was I here during colonial times. 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