BUILDING KENYA REQUIRES THE COMMITMENT, NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM OF ALL.

 

Democracy, wrote Donald Kagan in 1991, relies on free, autonomous and self-reliant citizens and extraordinary leadership to flourish, even to survive. These kinds of citizens aren’t born, they don’t come in nature; they can only be taught. These kinds of citizens need to be educated and not just for its sake but so that they know how to be different from what they are in the way that they take to be the best; so that they can commit themselves to fundamentally including others; so that they are better engaged in service of common good.

And so a democracy, if that is the path a people of a nation decide to follow, cannot long flourish if the citizen is not knowledgeable or is only superficially knowledgeable about her place in the society, about her society, and about her rights and role in the society. Critical in molding the educated citizen is instruction in dialogue and commitment to dialogue as a means of building a healthy happy prosperous polity.

Five decades after independence from colonial rule, Kenya is in some and not other respects a rarity in the Eastern Africa region. Its people are freer, more economically empowered and more politically conscious than the citizens of its neighbors.

What is more, side by side the most liberal Constitution yet in her history, March 4 swept into power, the youngest and most ambitious crop of leaders Kenya has ever had since its independence. Although it is too early to tell, early signs indicate, going by the pronouncements it has made and continues to make, that the Kenyatta Administration intend to transform this country into the image of the Constitution, economically, socially and culturally. And as the President has acknowledged on numerous occasions when he has called upon Kenyans to join him in the task ahead, the task of developing the nation is insurmountable if the citizen will not play her role. The citizen cannot play her role unless she is an educated citizen.

Whether the tasks are as simple as keeping one’s environment clean or honesty in food business dealings or obedience to the highway code or participation in community policing or respect for the rights of other culturally different citizens or whether the task is as lively as holding, directly or indirectly, elected representatives, state and public officers accountable, everywhere you go, wherever place you find yourself be it in the Court room or restaurants or matatus or banking halls or supermarkets or in Facebook, it is not uncommon to be left with the feeling that Kenyans are constantly warring against civility, against progress; that Kenyans are not yet fully engaged in the healthy task of building their society together. Instead, the dialogues, if any, are full of accusatory and at times bitter speech against this person or these people or this or that Government all for no good reason. We fail to realize that building a Nation requires the commitment, nationalism and patriotism of all.

To paraphrase Barack Obama ‘we still conform to ancient maps of identities’-the tribe, a predilection that has sapped crucial energies that could have been directed at intensive nation building. Not only that, we sadly have also failed at dialogue with ourselves and amongst ourselves, in some instances because of the toxic atmosphere of ethnicity and in other instances because the citizen is simply not an educated citizen. This perhaps is the biggest stumbling block to realizing the aspirations of the Kenyan Constitution.

It is crucial for the Kenyatta Administration to articulate to the citizens, even as it educates it, in language that is believable and dependable as it is simple and lucid, what being Kenyan means in the light of the new Constitution. That would be a good place to start the dialogue.