On December 12, Kenya marked 60 years of Independence from Britain. Our Independence heroes and heroines fought for not only the restitution of then-settler-held land to Africans but also self-rule, which the founding fathers hoped would then focus on the alleviation of poverty, ignorance and disease.
Unlike in neighbouring Tanzania, though, the pioneers of the post-colonial state in Kenya failed to establish – and encourage the continual promotion of – social compact and justice as the doctrinal predicate of our societal founding.
They soon grew insular and predatory and, as a result, tribal predominance of government became – and has been, for the longest time – the sole goal and motive for political and electoral contests.
Consequently, Kenya is, for the most part, ethnicity riven, institutionally pliant, sleaze-ridden and, though development-hungry, long in the maw of misgovernance.
In a volte-face from the ideology-based and idea-rich politics that informed the lodestar around the formation of political parties in the 1960s and '70s, later generations of leaders in Kenya have come to mainstream political ethnocentrism. Electoral contests are "organised" around ethnic arithmetic and our political parties are nothing more than a political euphemism for ethno-regional nationalism.
We "naturally" support the activities and electoral aims of the political parties associated with "one of our own". And our presidential election outcomes, especially, are a bad commentary on our relational strength as a country and people.
We countenance corruption and whitewash the corrupt in high places because they are from the same ethno-regional enclaves as us. When "one of our own" takes over the presidency, we ethnicise appointment to state positions because "it's our tribe's turn and, by implication, right, to eat".
We are antagonistic towards calls for greater national integration because that would threaten our tribespeople's predominance of national political power. And we are indifferent to the damage our alienation of others from the bosom of national consanguinity does to our oneness as people of one country.
We gloss over – and skirt discussion around – report after report on representational imbalance in the ethnic composition of staff membership at our state offices and agencies. And we seem not to ever learn from the cyclical, ethnicity fuelled election time violence that sees many innocent lives lost.
There's urgent need for us to retrace our steps back to where we first wandered off the path that our founding fathers envisaged and dared to lead us down sixty years ago. The present generation of political leaders owes it to us and posterity to pivot from the ethnicity riven politics of the last 60 years back to our founders' vision of one, united and prosperous country.
For the last about 250 years, the United States of America has been at work on the perfection of, not only its union, but also racial integration. Its leaders realised as far back as 1865 that the racial domination of one by another was an unsustainable enterprise.
And so slavery had to end and the enjoyment of certain fundamental rights and freedoms by members of all races made possible and an important hallmark of the American national life.
Kenya needs to urgently begin a similar journey towards de-tribalisation of its national life if it is to unlock its full developmental potential. Such a journey must be particularly aimed at the conceptualisation and promotion of perceptional egalitarianism as a moral motif in the longitudinal social and relational re-ordering of society.
Writer and historian based in Nairobi
