In his book Africa Must Unite, the great Pan-Africanist and founding president of Ghana Dr Kwame Nkrumah made this point:
“Without genuine African unity, our continent will remain at the mercy of imperialist domination and exploitation … Africa is extremely wealthy! In fact, it is the wealthiest landmass on the face of the earth”
Nkrumah did not only dream of political unity. Rather he saw political unity as the key to economic development for all of Africa.
And it's sad to think that it was not until 50 years after his death in 1972, that the African Continental Free Trade Area finally took off and started the process towards the actualisation of Dr Nkrumah’s dream.
So, when I say “The Coast Must Unite” I know that I have a distinguished predecessor whose footsteps we can follow.
For coastal unity, however elusive it has proved to be, is not an end in itself. It is the key to our economic liberation as a region within Kenya.
I hear you ask: Why is coastal unity so important?
As free people within a free country, why do you feel any need for regional unity?
To explain, I will give two examples from recent newspaper headlines.
First was the headline about President Uhuru Kenyatta summoning One Kenya Alliance principals to State House Mombasa where he spent several days earlier this month.
Did you see a single Coastal leader there?
At this forum where the future of the nation was being discussed, was any prominent political personality from the Coast present?
I find it hard to believe that if the President had been at the State Lodge in Kisumu inspecting his lakeside legacy projects, he would have found time to meet with leaders from other parts of Kenya but not those from Kisumu.
This is what we mean when we speak of coastal marginalisation. It seems that we, the coastal people, and our local interests are always an afterthought.
We are regarded as a swing vote region, which is only considered after the so-called Big Tribes have already shared the National Cake. And yet the total voting power of a united coastal region is equivalent to that of any of these big tribes.
So, if we were united, we too would have had a regional spokesman at that table in State House.
We would not just be reading about it in newspapers.
We would be briefed about these meetings by one of our own and be informed on the progress on coalition building as well as on the President’s legacy projects in the coastal region, by one of our own.
But such marginalisation and being taken for granted is not even the worst part of it.
Far worse is the historical injustices we have suffered, and which will never be addressed without coastal political unity.
Once again let me refer you to a newspaper headline. This is from last week, and it appeared in all the newspapers.
Over 2,000 families had been evicted from their farms in the village of Nayeni Kilifi county.
Let us consider the facts. The people of Northern Kenya, which was formerly known as Northeastern province, and before that as the Northern Frontier District, are yet another group that has been in recent years agitating for an end to their marginalisation.
And they definitely had a point.
As their leaders have so often pointed out, not until the 2010 Constitution and devolution, did the hospitals in that region acquire the equipment that made it possible for them to begin to conduct the kind of surgeries that doctors in other parts of Kenya had been conducting even in colonial times.
Some of the larger towns in that region saw their first tarmac roads only after devolution.
But all the same, consider this: Have you ever read of 2,000 families in Northern Kenya being evicted from their ancestral land because a complete stranger had turned up with a title deed obtained from Nairobi, which allegedly gave them a right to that same parcel of land?
Have their houses, schools, burial grounds, churches and mosques been crushed by bulldozers sent in by the alleged new owners of that land?
Yet at the Coast, such scenes occur almost every other month. That is why we feel that the levels of historical injustices we face are far greater than those of any other region.
I am not saying there have been no evictions in other parts of the country.
Just the other day there were evictions in Isiolo. But these cannot be compared to the frequency and brutality of the coastal evictions, or with the sheer numbers of people routinely evicted within the coastal region.
We, therefore, need unity as a matter of great urgency. First to put an end to the decades of marginalisation. And second to help resolve in a peaceful manner the historical injustices we have faced all these years.
Naomi Cidi is the secretary-general of the Umoja Summit Party
