Before I go much further, I would like to assure you, my dear reader, that I am not currently considering ending my life, at least not this week.
However, even if I was dying slowly and painfully from a most horrible, incurable condition, and all the religious leaders, including the charlatans so beloved of our elected leadership, had come to my death bed and exhausted their prayers, the Kenya government would rather that nightmare continue than any form of euthanasia.
In fact, if the data I am reading is correct, Kenya is the only state on the African continent where you have absolutely no right to end your life.
If you try and fail, the government can jail you and ensure that your existence continues to be a miserable one for as long as possible.
In most African countries, active euthanasia is illegal, while passive euthanasia is not legislated or regulated.
In a few, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Namibia and South Africa, passive euthanasia is legal with regards to the refusal of treatment or withdrawal of life support.
Euthanasia is, as medical law writer Elizabeth Mbugua wrote in the Star back in 2019, “The action of putting a person to death painlessly as a way of avoiding further suffering caused by an incurable disease, or to put an end to an irreversible comatose condition.”
In her well-argued article describing active euthanasia, which involves an enabler such as a medical practitioner, and passive euthanasia, which involves withdrawal of treatment to facilitate death, Mbugua asked for a sober discussion of the topic.
I’ve always wondered if that ever happened.
That said, we all know that if it chooses, the government itself, through its various agents of state violence, such as the police and other armed forces, can and do decide fairly often to end the lives of Kenyans even just on a whim, or so it seems.
If you don’t believe me, ask the families and friends of the literally hundreds if not actually thousands of victims of extrajudicial police killings and state-sanctioned enforced disappearances.
So when I was scrolling through Twitter and came across someone asking, one presumes rhetorically, whether Kenya is a police state, I figured it was purely a rhetorical query.
However, for any of you who may be in doubt, here’s what Wikipedia says a police state is: “A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties.
“There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance.”
I must assure those readers who think this state of affairs is a recent development, that in fact, it is not, and Kenya has been a police state since the colonial era.
That said, there were periods when the police state gave the illusion of being absent, but you can rest assured that the police state never did anything more than stage a tactical withdrawal.
At the same time as being a police state, our country has also always been a nanny state.
If you are in any doubt as to what that means, let me help put you in the picture with the help of that indispensable truth-teller, the dictionary, which defines the nanny state thus: “A government regarded as overprotective or as interfering unduly with personal choice.”
If you stop and think for a moment, there are very few choices that you can make about your life from the womb to the tomb in which the government of Kenya does not have the last word, supported to the hilt by their acolytes from the various wannabe state religions.
The government (and religions) are in your bedroom, telling you that two consenting adults of the same sex cannot consummate their relationship. They are in your womb, telling you to keep the baby 'upende usipende'. And they are sitting on the edge of your death bed, cheering your suffering until you breathe your last. So much for freedom of choice.
