I am sick and tired of hearing Kenyan male politicians talk in public like fools and insult our morality, our dignity and our intelligence.
Last weekend, rather than intelligently address the admirable ruling by Speaker Kenneth Marende condemning President Kibaki's judiciary nominations, Uhuru Kenyatta chose to dig in at Raila to compensate for his anxiety about his upcoming trial at the Hague. He asked whether unnamed people thought that Hague is their mother, and whether opponents of the Kibaki nominations thought that the President was their kihii, an insult referring to uncircumcised males. While Uhuru was ranting about the condition of people's private parts, Raila was at the Coast, evoking the stereotype of Kikuyus as thieves and pointing to the alcoholism, unemployment and despair among young men in Central province which Kikuyu politicians blame for the declining population in certain areas.
The two men affirmed what I said almost two years ago in a rant about Kenyan masculinity, inspired by Prof. Amuka's observation, that in Kenya, "the struggle for power at the political level is thus largely a male affair replete with phallic symbolism...Other phallic symbols than the gun include arrows, spears, knives and pangas. But perhaps the most potent one is the male organ."
Despite the criticism I received, I am now glad that I wrote out of anger then. I suspect that the real issue was that as a woman, I showed my anger in public, but I refuse to believe that expressed anger should be the prerogative of men. More than that, I believe that these men are behaving like fools and do not deserve to be refuted soberly. They need to be told off.
Going for the president's privacy...is Uhuru insane? Why should what is below the president's belt be any of our business? If anything, it is Uhuru who is belittling the president if he can refer so crudely to what is below president's belt, more so because the president is older than him.
And that comment on the Hague being their mother's (home) is a contradiction of the culture of Mumbi and her daughters which Uhuru is evoking when he insults Raila. He should not be evoking our mothers in vain because of a simple a tiff between men.
As for Raila - he should know better than descend to the level of Central province's male bigots. He should be more intelligent to know that Mututho and Co. are barking up the wrong tree when they blame alcoholism for the declining population growth rate in some parts of Central province. As a former academician, Raila should know that Mututho has not used empirical data to determine that the Kikuyu population is indeed declining everywhere The latest population census showed that Kenya's population growth rate has not only increased, but is disproportionately higher than the growth in the country's resources. Let's be honest, the alcohol law was about the fear of decline in the number of Kikuyu voters and about the reduction of women to voter-producing machines.
The bigotry of Mututho & Co believes that men's sexual activity is the only determiner of population growth. Yet there is family planning, urban migration and women empowerment. And when men are destroying themselves in drink, isn't it logical for women to want fewer children because they will raise the children alone? If I was Raila's political strategist for 2012, I would advise him to go to those areas and speak hope to the young men who are drowning their joblessness and despair in alcohol; not make fun of the victims who are despairing because they cannot attain the rigid, flawed and arrogant Kikuyu aristocratic masculinity which Uhuru and his class dangle in front of poor young men.
Meanwhile Uhuru - and his cronies - should stop this obsession with Raila. Raila is not Kenya, and he is not the only one who opposed the nominations. There were court cases, street demonstrations, paid advertisements and comments in the papers and in cyber space from ordinary wananchi, all disagreeing with the judiciary nominations. It is an insult to our dignity and intelligence for Uhuru to reduce us to Raila. In fact, Raila's criticism was selfish - his issue was that he was not consulted. The rest of us cared little about consultation. For us, the issue was the dictatorial and imperialistic manner in which Kibaki did the nominations, in blatant contradiction of the spirit of the constitution, and in disregard for the fact that the post-election violence partly resulted from the lack of confidence in the judiciary. To adopt the mantra of the church's "no" campaign against the constitution, "No" yake (ya Raila) si "no" yetu.
The more Uhuru and his cohorts in Rift Valley and Central provinces obsess with Raila, the more I am convinced that his real issue is not with Raila - it is with the people. Uhuru, like his father, is afraid of a different social order in which the country does not belong to a few, in which leadership is by merit and not inheritance, in which people are more important than the leaders who represent them, and in which health, education and other social services are given to the vulnerable, and in which we do not callously tell people that they are poor because they are not "hardworking" or they lack "merit." It angers Uhuru that Raila - either by design or by coincidence - seems to be on the same side as the people. And the more he attacks Raila, the more he makes Raila a symbol of people power.
No wonder the feeling among many Kenyans that Uhuru treats Kenya like disposable property inherited from his father. One commentator named kokiorimba, responding to Macharia Gaitho's weak and apologetic comparison of Uhuru and Raila, captured this feeling in the ingenious statement that "Uhuru comes out as a Kikuyu first, and a Kenyan if need be."
Moreover, with Egypt and Tunisia on Kenyans' lips, Uhuru may have become more conscious of the possibility that his inheritance is not guaranteed. He would be wise and do like the President and be more humble in public, more accepting of the will of the people. He may think that he has Gaddaffi's option of crushing his people, or bulldozing his way through flawed elections like Kibaki did, and he may win; but only for a while. The people will eventually triumph.
It is the people who made Kibaki see sense and drop the nominations. It is the people writing to the papers, blogging and facebooking, calling the radio stations, demonstrating on the streets; it is the civil society and citizens paying lawyers to take the matter to court, who made Kibaki rescind his decision. Egypt has begun in Kenya, and it will only be a matter of time before we uproot from our political culture and public life the backward, sexist and crude behavior which Uhuru displayed this last week.
