CHANGE AND WAR ARE SIEMENS SISTERS!

A few days ago, I argued elsewhere that war is a necessary evil if at all this great country is to experience real change. You should have seen the kind of responsible I attracted!

Let us begin by observing the following: That it is obvious to excite such kind of reaction especially from the Civil Society Organizations, NGOs, CBOs and FBOs just as you would expect the Western Donor community to react. The western donor community and their cahoots thrive on the apathy of the third world countries. So to them finding a genuine solution to African problems is like asking them to sign their exit certificates, and that naturally demands that they dig in. I will explain how.

You will bear me witness that today in all the elitist workshops you attend, you will hear people in verbally romanticized polemic articulating how our country can attain the change it so desires via non violent means. I admit that before I interrogated myself and compared notes with many of my friends, I also used to subscribe to this self negating school of thought. In fact on several occasions I quoted Mahatma Karamchandras Mahandras Gandhi; he of the much famed active non-violence. I also quoted several of Martin King memorable verses, I quoted Barrack Obama and Tom Mboya alike.

Many happenings in the world, past and present have, however, taught me a serious lesson which I beg to share with you. It is folded in one of my best disciplines-History. And since History is not a cup of coffee for everyone I beg that you accompany me along this short journey as I share with you these facts. I promise it will be short and precise.

In 1776, the Americans declared their independence from the Britons and in their creed they espoused what has come to be the underpinning line of the concept of human rights. That all men are born equal and free before the eyes of their creator and that at birth all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights among which is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It took the Americans about 200 years to embrace the same creed that had created their country. That was in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King. Between 1856 to 1865 America was entangled in a civil war that, if the Northern states had not won, then the USA as we know it today would not be existing. The war was a war of morality. Whether or not to emancipate. They emancipated the slave man!

In Europe things were even worse. Between 1870 and 1873 there were two major wars in Europe- The Anglo-Prussian war and the Franco- Prussian war. But it was the latter that gave results worth talking of here. The end result of the war between Britain and Germany was the legislation in Britain that outlawed Slave Trade and Slavery in total leading to a series of events that saw our grandfathers escape the noose across the Atlantic Ocean. In France, fed up with dictatorial tendencies of the Monarch, General Napoleon Bonaparte in 1789 took up arms and led a revolution that left indelible marks in the History of France. France has never been the same.

But perhaps it was the two world wars in the 20th Century that to me, left a mark that no one can deny will never be erased from the History mankind. The second world war in particular resulted in the creation of such institutions as the U.N.O and the Bretton Woods Institutions i.e. the World Bank and The I.M.F. The UN has since 1945 led to a series of other institutions such UNDP, UNICEF, UNEP among others. In fact we cannot imagine the world without these institutions. In 1948 as a result of the ww2 the UNO general assembly convened to pass what came to be known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All member states adopted it with Kenya ratifying in 1976. Several other treaties have since been crafted including the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights-ICCPR, International Convention on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights- ICCECOSOC, International Convention on Elimination of All forms of Torture and Discrimination Against Women and the list is long. I promised you the History will not be long. We might ignite a debate of what role these institutions have played in remedying the ills committed against humanity since time but that I suggest should be a debate for another day. What I can say for now is that like it or not the post ww2 institutions are the ones setting the standards of good governance for us today. Talk of the International Criminals Court-ICC led by Moreno Ocampo as Chief Prosecutor or any other institution and I will assure you it has its roots in the ww2.

My argument today is that without war nothing good can come out of any deliberation. In Kenya, events of 2007 post election violence led to a series of changes that we now see. Even though you may not fully agree, some of the Agenda four stuff including police reforms, judicial reforms, electoral reforms and land reforms may be taking long but I can swear to you that none of those would be under the pipeline had people not taken up arms in 2008! Allow me to submit that it is my strongest belief that had the international community not interfered in that war then unlike what many believe Kenya would not have gone to the dogs because in factual sense the war was a chance for this country to institute reforms for a better nation. But unfortunately the western world, the Donor Community, the NGOs and CSOs sensing that they would be rendered irrelevant with Kenya becoming a reformed and truly transformed nation they jumped hither and tither held press conferences and desperately shouted for intervention from their blue-eyed boys and girls. As a result of the intervention Kenya's rebirth process was miscarried and what resulted was an abortion of what would otherwise have been a natural birth of a nation transformed from its erstwhile collection of tribal groupings!

And where are we now? We are back to the woods. We are still carrying for reforms, we are crying for eradication of corruption, we are crying for elaborate judicial reforms and we are still lamenting that we need a new Constitution to arrest the runaway phenomenon of impunity! 46 years after independence Kenya cannot feed its people, Kenya cannot enact into law a constitution that can convict even a petty thief in court, Kenya cannot harvest rain water, Kenya cannot employ its thousands of University graduates! The list is long. In short, our country is quickly drifting into a sweltering morass of political quagmire and eons of socio-economic dormancy. It remains to be seen who shall be the redeemer.

From my argument above I am forced to believe that the only way through which we can get the true change we have long yearned for is through violent means! That is the language humanity understands. If through the wars I have mentioned such beautiful change could have acquired then why not try that path? I know there is a price to pay but remember even those who preached non violence had to pay the price of violence- Gandhi, Mboya, Luther and the list is again long. In other words change and war are like the inseparable siemens sisters, you separate them they all die!
Let me hear you!