[kictanet] THE MESSIAH WITHIN,,Redeeming the Soul of Our Nation

[alice]

*From:* njonjo mue [mailto:njonjo at knchr.org]
*Subject:* THE MESSIAH WITHIN

 

 *THE MESSIAH WITHIN*

*Redeeming the Soul of Our Nation*

* *

*BY NJONJO MUE*

* *

[As Kenyans struggle to find meaning in the shenanigans surrounding 
their body politic, Njonjo Mue challenges the youth to join an army of 
ordinary people to fight the good fight; to defend our freedom, dignity, 
heritage and our children’s future, by engaging in brutal self-appraisal 
and refusing to aid decay. It is a call to arms - for men to leave the 
bars long enough to know what their children will eat for supper; for 
women to cease their escapism and confront the problems facing our 
communities; and for all of us to individually take responsibility for 
the future of our country.]

 

/An army of ordinary people/

/A kingdom where love is the key/

/A city, a light to the nations/

/Heirs to the promise are we/

/A people whose life is in Kenya/

/A nation together we stand/

/Truly by birth are we worthy/

/Inheritors of the land/

/ /

/A new dawn is coming/

/A new age has come/

/When the children of promise/

/Shall stand together as one/

/A truth long neglected/

/But the time has now come/

/When the children of promise/

/Must fight together as one./

/ /

/(Adapted from a hymn by Dave Bilbrough, © 1983, Kingsways Thankyou Music)/

/ /

*/ /*

*/Of being, belonging and identity…/*

 

What is Kenya and what makes you a Kenyan? Is it your ID card? Your blue 
passport? The fact that you were born here? Do you feel connected? Do 
you belong? Are you more or less Luo, Kamba, Kipsigis, Mijikenda, Asian, 
Caucasian or Arab than Kenyan? Are you more or less male or female that 
Kenyan? Are you more or less Christian, Muslim or Hindu that Kenyan? How 
do these multiple identities play themselves out in your psyche? Do you 
feel the need to run away from any one of them in order to embrace your 
/Kenyanness/?

 

In other words, what is your identity and what real connection do you 
have with Kenya? What makes you proud to be a Kenyan? If you had to 
choose from among all the multiple identities that you have, would you 
choose to retain or drop your Kenyan identity? Why or why not?

 

 

*/The ties that bind…/*

 

Our parents’ generation was born into 42 different nationalities. 
However, they became Kenyans as they united to fight the common enemy of 
colonial domination. Once that enemy was defeated, they then went about 
determining the terms of their social contract, in Lancaster House and 
at home, in commendable efforts to build a nation. Have they succeeded? 
How and where have they failed?

 

What about us? 45 years later, what common enemy do we face? On what 
basis shall we negotiate our new social contract? Will the glue that 
held our parents’ generation together remain strong enough to bind us?

 

The answer is clearly in the negative. For we can see all around us 
depressing and alarming evidence that the social compact that once 
defined Kenya is quickly coming apart. The demon of political tribalism 
rears its ugly head with reckless abandon, as politicians declare that 
it is their turn to eat and then form all sorts of diabolical alliances 
to prepare how they might divide the spoils, and as they look determined 
to fight it out to the end, grabbing for power without caring if the 
nation falls apart in the process.

 

The need for renegotiating the social contract has been acknowledged by 
all, but there is seemingly no committed leadership with the courage and 
vision to lead us in navigating through these uncharted waters. We 
wander aimlessly in the wilderness of our despair, longing for our Land 
of Promise, but not even the mirage of social cohesion appears on the 
horizon.

 

Yet we have no choice in this matter. We must hold a genuine national 
dialogue on how to define our new dispensation – and by this I do not 
mean merely discussing how to share power, for a society is more that 
the power structure to which it subscribes. The more we prevaricate on 
the need for national dialogue, the more certain quarters of our society 
continue to hold destructive monologues that push us ever closer to the 
brink.

 

We cannot leave things to run their own course. The train of liberty 
does not roll forward on the wheels of inevitability; it must be pushed, 
sometimes pulled; but always kept on track and moving towards the goal 
of social justice, national cohesion and the true and wholesome 
development of the human person.

 

The generation gone before us appears to have run out of ideas on how to 
do this. This is hardly surprising considering that those who call the 
shots have been on the scene forever – they are exhausted, old and 
without a real stake in the future of our country. It is now up to us to 
take a stand and impose an environment of order to eliminate the daily 
chaos in our midst. In so doing, we will start to define a new vision 
for this country and to march decisively towards our collective 
sustainable future.

 

*/ /*

*/ /*

*/Heart of the Country or Soul of the Nation?/*

*/ /*

Politicians pretend to care a great deal about the need for a new 
constitution, but we all know that for them, the process is little more 
than glorified power play. Although the Constitution is the heart of the 
country, from which the entire legal system gets its lifeblood, in the 
end, only a small number of people will dominate the constitution-making 
process. Further, even if they came up with the best document in the 
world, it would still only be half the job done.

 

The other, more fundamentally half, is to reconstruct the soul of our 
nation. This is the responsibility of every citizen and cannot be left 
to politicians and their gate-keepers alone. It is an exercise which 
defines what the essence of being Kenyan is. What is the soul of our 
nation? What are the ties that bind? What are the criteria for 
belonging? In other words, what are the core values that make us who we 
are, above our diverse ethnic nationalities and beneath our common 
citizenship of the human family? As our favourite native son, Barack 
Obama, reminds us, the Constitution is not just a source of individual 
rights, but also a means of organizing a democratic conversation around 
our collective future.

 

And so it is vital to reach a consensus on the values we espouse as 
Kenyans, for we cannot move forward as a nation until we know and 
internalize what that nationhood entails. Until we each individually and 
voluntarily subscribe to a core set of beliefs. Once consensus on this 
is attained, then we can ascribe censure to those who choose to 
transgress our compact through mutually agreed coercion. This is the 
essence of a society governed by laws and not by men.

 

Currently, we only belong to Kenya largely by accident of birth. We 
largely identify with the State only in its coercive sense; in the sense 
that we see policemen telling us what to do on pain of punishment in 
accordance with a legal code we had little input in promulgating. We are 
also Kenyans by virtue of the fact that every June 30^th we have a date 
with KRA which comes knocking on our doors seeking to know how much 
income we earned the previous year and whether we have given unto Caesar 
what belongs to Caesar. We also think we belong because we demand rights 
that are hardly recognized or protected and services that the government 
is unwilling or unable to provide.

 

We understand the workings of government better today than we did ten 
years ago. However this has not made our lives better because, in spite 
of more transparency, there is no corresponding accountability on the 
part of the government or ourselves as citizens. We live in an age of 
lawlessness and impunity. Citizens feel no obligation to obey laws that 
do not bind those who make them. There is no sense of enlightened 
self-interest in making our systems work or in contributing to the 
public good. In addition, there are few role models left to follow, for 
we have allowed politicians to dominate our public space and to 
perpetually pollute our air with the stench of their incorrigibly bad 
manners.

 

Therefore, we need to find positive things that draw us to our 
/Kenyanness/, things that will make us assert confidently, ‘/We are 
Kenyans by choice!/’ We need to find a new focal point for our 
allegiance as citizens of Kenya.

 

*/ /*

*/What is Kenya and who are Kenyans?/*

*/ /*

At its most basic, Kenya is a juridical fact in international law. It is 
also a piece of real estate comprising 583,000 hectares of land occupied 
by some 37 million people who are as diverse as can be in ethnic 
belonging, religious affiliation, occupational persuasion, racial origin 
and social status.

 

In this dynamic mix, is there value in being called a Kenyan? I believe 
there is by all means. But we are yet to fully appreciate it. That is 
why many of us continue to retreat into our ethnic cocoons whenever 
crises arise. But we need to start defining that value and to clarify to 
ourselves what value we as a country and as a people add to the world 
around us.

 

All this cannot be done within a short period of time, for the search 
for nationhood is a long-term project. It is a conversation with 
ourselves that shall have no end, for what constitutes Kenya and Kenyans 
will continue to evolve as the world around us changes. But as 
globalization makes the world ever more homogenous, we need to identify 
and nurture our core values, those that make us uniquely Kenyan.

 

This exercise cannot be the preserve of any one person or group of 
people however defined. The endeavour to define these values has to be a 
national exercise involving all who bear the name of Kenya and reaching 
across all the strata of our nation. It will not be easy to arrive at 
consensus. Yet we must keep faithfully on this course until we are able 
to define ourselves and know and fully internalize who we really are.

 

For as long as we keep allowing others to define us – politicians and 
tribal chiefs, Western hegemonic geopolitical interests, the World Bank, 
the IMF, and a myriad other amorphous interests and agendas – we shall 
remain buffeted by winds of change, ones that make one demand of us one 
day and another the next. Instead of being the masters of our destiny, 
we shall forever react to the actions of others. Always waiting for them 
to tell us who we are and what we must do next to water out the fire of 
self-destruction in our own homes.

 

In other words, we shall be enslaved to the whims of others. Tossed 
hither by torrents of oppression and thither by waves of despair, all 
the while becoming the laughing stock of neighbours near and far; the 
subject of after-dinner conversations from South Korea to South Africa – 
whispers about a people who once seemed to be going somewhere but who 
got shipwrecked in the high seas of greed, economic collapse, 
socio-political confusion and moral decline.

 

If things appear desperate for us today, it is because they are. The 
road to our Land of Promise has been long and treacherous and there is 
no end in sight. One’s heart has to bleed as one looks around our 
country. Low intensity warfare and conflict violently and routinely 
disrupt the lives of innocents in urban and rural areas while Mungiki 
and other criminal gangs terrorize the populace with impunity and with 
the tacit support of the political class; all this while trigger-happy 
policemen gun down perceived criminals and answer to no one but themselves.

 

Poverty, inequality and underdevelopment are the defining feature of our 
age. Famine is the order of the day in many communities, hunger a 
constant companion to children across the land. AIDS continues to wipe 
us out indiscriminately, ravaging our fragile economy, leaving orphans 
to fend for themselves and frail grandmothers to look after helpless 
grandchildren. Crime and corruption are eating away at the soul of our 
nation, and responsible political leadership is a concept that has 
altogether eluded us. We have touched the nadir of despair, and darkness 
has fallen across the land.

 

We have become exiles from and refugees in our own country. IDPs 
continue to endure life in desolate ‘transit’ camps; our children find 
solace in the streets where drugs or regular sniffs of glue help them to 
accept the morbidity of their daily existence; our men have taken refuge 
in bars to consume large quantities of liquor to dull the gnawing pain 
of helplessness and the silent pangs of despair; and our women have 
found shelter in religious crusades to be fed generous doses of the 
sweet by-and-by to enable them to endure the nasty now-and-now!

 

The rest of us have become so impoverished and bereft of ideas and 
morality that we have lost our way altogether and become ourselves 
predators. We have no qualms about robbing the poor and exploiting the 
weak in our midst. We have sadly fulfilled Mwalimu Nyerere’s prophecy 
about Kenya being a man-eat-man society.

 

Amidst all this confusion, we have pushed politics to the centre of our 
existence. We continually engage in a strange conversation where all do 
the talking while no one is really listening. We conspire against the 
poor when they cry out for real solutions to real problems by forming 
endless commissions, task forces and committees that only end up 
creating jobs for ourselves for which the poor are forced to pay us 
astronomical salaries and benefits while producing no real results for 
the country.

 

Our politics is a politics of the stomach – of greed and exploitation. 
Having presided over the wholesale dismantling of our collective hope, 
the political class can now set the rules, rules that revolve around 
money – stolen money! And so this cycle of poverty goes round and round. 
I steal money today which I use to bribe you to send me to Parliament or 
the Local Council tomorrow with the single aim of stealing more money to 
purchase my seat the next round and make a handsome profit in the process.

 

When shall we stop this cycle of madness?

 

I say NOW!! Now is the time to draw a line in the sand! Now is the time 
to say to anyone who subscribes to this madness, ‘ENOUGH!’Now is the 
time to take a stand against these predators! Now is the time to reclaim 
our human dignity! Now is the time to start our long march to our true 
Land of Promise!

 

What we do now will determine what kind of country our children will 
inherit. Let no one fool you that it does not matter what we do. The 
choices we make today shall have irreversible consequences for 
generations to come. We are the people who shall save or lose Kenya. We 
are not perfect and we will make our mistakes, but the greatest mistake 
we can make now is to do nothing.

 

/So, do something!/

/ /

But first we must first do away with the futile search for a messiah who 
will come and fix everything for us. For the messiah we look for is to 
be found inside each one of us. We must each take personal 
responsibility in defining and enforcing our new social contract. We 
must say ‘No’ to any person who would seek to exploit us and use us as 
stepping stones to the corridors of the abuse of power. We must find the 
courage to believe in ourselves again and say ‘No’ to their destructive 
‘favours’ and demeaning patronage for which we have hitherto sold our 
birth right. It is time to impose a new set of rules: a paradigm that 
puts country above personal comfort, our children’s inheritance and 
collective security above individual gain.

 

*Fighting the good fight*

* *

Kenya is at war. And this is a fact whether it is acknowledged or not. 
We may not see tanks and troops on the streets and we may not go to bed 
with the sound of gunfire ringing in our ears. But we are at war.

 

The enemies we face are more dangerous than a conventional army. They 
may not destroy our infrastructure or kill our mortal bodies, but they 
have stealthily found their way through our defenses and are slowly 
eating away at the soul of our nation. We boast a form of civilization, 
but it is an empty shell and it is a matter of time before the whole 
edifice comes tumbling down. The cost of that eventuality is too ghastly 
to contemplate.

 

But unlike the politicians, I do not dangle the threat of cataclysmic 
implosion before your eyes in order to paralyze us into doing nothing, 
but in order to galvanize us into action. We must urgently retake 
control of our destiny and our country and start rebuilding the walls 
around our nationhood. It is not too late to reconstruct the soul of our 
nation, but the work must start now. Every moment of delay pushes us 
ever closer to the brink!

 

This is therefore a call-up notice:

 

/All Kenyan men and women are requested to enroll into the Army of 
Ordinary People. Our sole objective is to defend our heritage from 
enemies within and without, to reconstruct the soul of our nation, and 
to lay a firm foundation for our new Republic./

 

And these are our rules of engagement:

 

The primary theatre of action shall be within ourselves, for ‘there is 
only one small corner of the world that we can truly change and that is 
ourselves’. We cannot impose rules on others that we are ourselves 
unwilling to live by. And so we must start by changing our own behavior, 
attitudes and mindset. /We must become the change that we seek. /

/ /

The next theatre of action is the world around us – our homes, our 
schools and colleges, our workplace, our communities and on the road as 
we drive and commute. We must politely but firmly point out whenever 
someone transgresses the human dignity of others or of ourselves – all 
the time being careful not to demand of others higher standards than we 
ourselves faithfully subscribe to. We must seek to faithfully influence 
our colleagues to act in the best interests of Kenya. In everything we 
do, we must constantly ask, /‘will it contribute to the reconstruction 
of the soul of our nation?’/

/ /

/What weapons shall our army wield?/

 

Our conviction, our minds and our bodies. We shall scale the citadels of 
oppression to proclaim our humanity to those who have forgotten what it 
is to be human. We shall shun violence in all its forms – violence of 
thought, language and action. We shall engage in non-violent direct 
action when necessary to draw attention to our concerns and to bring 
about positive change. In everything we do, we shall conduct our 
struggle on the high plane of integrity and honour. Not seeking to 
conquer our opponents, but to convert them, for our fight is not against 
persons, but against injustice, against indignity and against oppression.

 

/Counting the cost: What risks do we face?/

 

The forces pitted against us are many, varied and vicious, and before we 
engage, we must count the cost. It will cost us – all of us – our very 
lives. The cause for which we fight will be here long after we have all 
passed the baton to a new generation. But some of us may have to go 
before others, for the entrenched forces we oppose are not benign. 
Therefore, like any other army, the army of ordinary people requires you 
to prepare to pay the supreme price for your convictions. You and I 
could die. This is a reality we must be prepared to come to terms with 
before signing up.

 

But if we wage our struggle with honour and discipline, and if we raise 
our cause above ourselves, then, even if we die in the struggle, death 
becomes redemptive. For hundreds and thousands will rise up to take our 
place; and our blood shall water the tree of freedom and invigorate our 
nation. /Soon, our nation shall be truly free!/

 

We could go to prison. But this should not perturb us unduly because for 
countless people who endure life in the slums or live under the specter 
of urban insecurity or rural poverty, there is a sense in which our 
country is one large prison today. And should we end up behind bars, we 
should take solace in the fact that in those very prisons are men and 
women, both jailers and jailed, who need to hear our message of hope. We 
will go to prison willingly and shall ‘transform our jailhouses from 
dungeons of despair into havens of freedom’. /Soon, both prisoner and 
prison warder shall be free!/

 

We could get physically injured. But what else is new? We are already 
bleeding from a thousand wounds. We suffer the daily indignities of 
hunger, oppression and disease. The thing to do is to regard every blow 
that lands upon my unarmed body as the blow of a hammer and chisel that 
will shape the stones that wound us into the forms of people. So that we 
might liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor and forever throw 
off the shackles of fear and brutishness from around the neck of our 
nation. /Soon both the oppressor and the oppressed shall be free!/

/ /

/And what is in it for us?/

*/ /*

I can promise you only hardship and persecution. These are the only 
guarantees. Our country did not get to the dark place where we find 
ourselves today overnight, nor will we get out overnight. It will get 
worse before it gets better. But I also promise you destiny. We were 
born for such a time as this. Future generations shall be beholden to 
the army of ordinary people – young men and women who had the courage of 
their convictions.

 

I call upon you to give up the material comforts of today to build a 
nation for tomorrow. I dare you to cross the line of the familiar and 
into the unknown in pursuit of a vision for another country, a better 
homeland. I challenge you to sow the seeds of a tree you may never 
personally sit under, that another generation may reap the fruit of 
dignity, security and prosperity for all. And I call upon you to invest 
in a future we may both never see that your children and mine might 
never again be called the children of a lesser god.

 

And may I remind you, my brothers and sisters, that Kenya was the first 
country in black Africa where the colonial master was not just asked to 
leave, but was pushed out of our country by our young men and women who 
risked their all to wrest our country back from those who had stolen our 
land.

 

A generation has since passed. Our parents can at least claim to have 
gained that formal independence. What about us? Do we want to leave 
behind a legacy of having let our country disintegrate during our watch?

 

*/Amkeni ndugu zetu!/*

*/ /*

*/ /*

*Njonjo Mue.*

www.uhurugeneration.blogspot.com <http://www.uhurugeneration.blogspot.com>

 

*Nairobi*

*11^th May 2009*