Martha Karua's recent launch of her presidential bid has got journalistic pens scribbling and male politicians in Central province scrambling (despite all that fuss about not being "ihii," i.e. uncircumcised). But what is more interesting is that in the midst of all the political shuffling and excitement, we continue to skirt around the tribalist elephant in the room by burying our heads in the Kenyan version of Sartre's "l'enfer, c'est les autres" (hell, is the others).
Our approach of "tribalism - is the others" in relation to Karua goes like this: an analyst begins by praising Karua for her intelligence, her courage and other qualities that have made her one of the most formidable Kenyan leaders today. Next, the analyst makes a patronizing declaration that Karua qualifies to be Kenya's next president. The more generous even say that she "could" win.
Next comes a purported analysis of Karua's prospects, in the form of mathematical calculations based on tribalist formulas. Kikuyus, we are told, will not vote for Karua because they prefer Uhuru, the King of the Kikuyu. Non-Kikuyu Kenyans would not vote her because she is Kikuyu, Kenyans in general will not vote her because she is a woman, and the Kenyan rural folk will not vote her because she is elitist. Chest-thumping men go a step further and spell doom for Karua's campaign, like Peter Kagwanja, the PNU strategist who made the utterly despicable remark that Karua is searching in vain for an Obama moment and dividing the Kikuyu vote. Others, in the name of being realistic, suggest that Karua has better chances of winning if she joins an ethnic alliance, amazingly unconscious of the fact that she actually has less chances of winning in an alliance between her any of the other declared and yet-to-be-declared male presidential aspirants.
In the midst of this distorted logic, the analysts will make an overt or implicit call for Kenyans not to vote on ethnocentric lines, but will, at the same time, lament that Kenyans are irredeemably tribalist. You can almost hear a sigh of self-righteous relief when the oblivious essayist puts down the final period of the essay and clicks "send" to dispatch the attached essay for publication.
And so continues Kenyan tragedy; we continue to pray for a shift in Kenya's political culture and lament the decadence of tribal alliances, all the while shutting down presidential campaigns like Karua's which present the potential of giving us a breather from our current political quagmire. Since the launch of Karua's presidential campaign, none of the op-ed articles or the newspaper headlines has discussed in detail Karua's platform or ideology. Instead, interviews are more interested in whether she has the political alliances or campaign finances to win, while others "reveal" that Karua has angered the crude Kikuyu aristocracy for failing to toe the line. A sad manifestation of this failure to think outside the box is evident in Prof Makau's latest op-ed that carries the cliché title that Karua "could" win. Makau's analysis is based on the usual ethnic formulas, only that he proposes that they can produce a different result - that of Martha winning as opposed to other calculations that conclude that she will lose.
Such analyses are manifestations of bad faith, for the simple reason that despite their more favorable predictions, they fail to consider Karua's - and other presidential aspirants' - campaigns in terms other than that of ethnicity. Yet the Kenya intelligentsia has no excuse for such failure to transcend the Kenyan tribalist logic in their reflections on the current political landscape. They know how Obama won the US presidency by convincing voters of all ethnic backgrounds; they talk of revolutions in France, quote political theories of European thinkers like Marx and Rousseau and praise the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. So how is it that when the MP for Gichugu aspires for the presidency, we abandon all the hope and sound thinking and degenerate into tribal mathematics? Do Kenyans not also deserve to be intellectually and ideologically engaged as much as we do with Western ideas?
And let us not argue that we are being realistic about the Kenyan political landscape. No one can definitively know how Kenyans will vote until election results are out. And even then, we will still not be able to tell where a certain individual put his or her mark on the ballot. That's why the ballot is called "secret." Sure, we can predict with some degree of accuracy that politicians will gain the most votes in their ethnic turfs, based on past election patterns. But we can never know if the same circumstances will be in place come August next year. Didn't people - especially Kenyans - fear that the opinion polls in favor of Obama would not translate into votes? If we have seen human beings scarred by a traumatizing history unite to put the one Barack Obama into the White House, why then are we so sure that Kenyans might not - or worse, cannot - find their moment of brilliance and vote with their minds and souls, rather than with their worst instincts?
But even if Kenyans do vote according to their worst instincts next year, may God strike Kenyan intellectuals dead if we sit back and say a resigned "I knew it" or "I told you so" after we have spent the run-down to elections predicting ethnocentric doom. We will have no moral right to gloat and say "I was right" when we never took the opportunity to use our intellectual resources to imagine and offer a different scenario of how Kenyans can vote differently and wisely. We will be engaged in self-fulfilling prophecy if, following the elections, we take pride in our articles in refereed journals explaining post-facto to the Western world why Kenyan elections were doomed to be ensnared by ethnocentrism, when we did not take the opportunity now to perform the simpler task of writing op-ed's and blogs that propose paradigms of analysis other than ethnic ones.
I believe that Kenya can vote differently than on tribal lines. I believe it because Kenyans ratified a constitution with the hope and desire to remove the polarizing political structures. I believe it because we are seeing a new crop of leaders like Karua and James ole Kiyiapi who are not appealing to tribal blocks. But I also believe that that new, sane and human political culture will not happen without Kenyans dreaming that it can, and without intellectuals articulating that dream and giving that dream a theoretical foundation. We can achieve that dream by doing away with the cynicism that makes us persist in analyzing Kenya's political landscape in ethnocentric terms, by embracing hope through focusing on what the presidential hopefuls stand for, instead of focusing on the money and political muscle that presidential hopefuls possess.
