The forthcoming NYC/Youth Agenda- Why we may not achieve much!

On Tuesday, 17th November, 2009 more than 600 young people from across the country will be congregating in Nairobi for the national youth convention meeting. The conference will be hosted by the Youth Agenda, NYC among other stakeholders. Reliable information has it that among the subjects that will be discussed will be issues of empowerment of young people, political leadership and ethnicity, Corruption and Impunity.

I think what is most important to note is not that young people will be meeting to deliberate on the best ways of tackling these vices that have continued to hang on us like a dark nimbus cloud. The important thing to me is that it will not be the first time the youth are meeting for such a mission. From as early as 1997, young people have been holding conferences and workshops in Nairobi and other parts of the country and beautiful resolutions have always come out of these initiatives. The questions that we must ask ourselves are about why several of these resolutions have never been implemented.

Last night I received a call from someone who said he knew me and that he had visited my website and read a few articles about the place of violence in the struggle against bad governance, impunity, corruption and statelessness. He said he had read with a lot of nostalgia claiming that the articles reminded him of the old heroic stories told to him by his old grandfather about the Mau Mau war. I will not tell you more.

The reason I am bringing this debate to this level is because we find ourselves in an awkward situation. When I was a second year student at the University my Political Economy Professor told us that the tragedy of Africa is not in the fact that it is a poor continent but in the fact that it is trapped for ever in the international capitalistic markets as an underdog under the working science of dependency. Under dependency, countries are not only underdeveloped but also have their citizens psychologically alienated due to ages of subjugation and subservience. Psychological alienation is a phenomenon where certain people feel that them they were born to be poor and servants of others and believe that under no circumstance can they be better than their rulers. That is what the white man managed to do against the black man during colonialism.

When we breakdown this theory to Kenya, I honestly believe that that is the condition we have found ourselves in. The leaders have treated us with no respect, they have robbed from us everything that we once owned, they have deliberately and unnecessarily lengthened the period young people are supposed to be in school and gone ahead to deny them jobs, they have robbed us of our precious land, they have thrown food to dogs even after knowing more than 10 million Kenyans are dying of hunger pangs. They have bought Cessna air crafts amidst the worst drought in decades. They have literally impoverished the nation and its people and reduced to beggars at their mercy. What this has done to us is the same thing the colonialists did to Africans in those days. Telling us that when our M.P has eaten, we all have eaten. That when one or two ministers are about to be arrested and taken to the Hague then Kenya as a country will fall. That the people who died after the 2007 PEV were not so many to constitute the urgency to set up a special tribunal to try the suspected crafters of the vice. When graduates spend about twenty years looking for a Degree, they tell us the Degree nowadays is not enough, you need a Masters Degree. And of course they take their children to other systems of education in other countries and before we know it the children are back and are made Permanent Secretaries and us who went to Kenyan Universities and took Degrees are asked to be Chiefs and Sub Chiefs. These are the things that have psychologically alienated us from the processes of development in our country. The lives we lead are degrading and inhuman. Life without clean and safe water, life without security, life without a decent meal even for a whole day, life where even university graduates cannot afford lunch. That is the kind of life we now lead. And that is the kind of life we must ask ourselves whether we want to say no to or whether we wish to continue leading it. It is not surprising to find some of us saying they do not see any problem with such kind of life. I will not be surprised because that is exactly what psychological alienation does to intelligent people. Tell them that even under the worst of all conditions do not rebel against the establishments of society because after all this world is not our home!

I have said and I will repeat. The reason why Kenyans have been treated to agonies of corruption, impunity and bad governance is not because they have not been complaining about the issues but because in fact they have complained for too long a time without any form of acting. Kenyans are too obedient to the law. Kenyans are too good a citizenry to question certain excesses against them. Kenyans are too humble a people to demand certain bare minimums from their leaders. Kenyans are too fearful to query certain government directives even when such directives touch on their survival. No! Let me put it this way Kenyans love their lives so much that they cannot risk police buttons on the streets demanding for the trial of PEV suspects.

And so as we wait for the NYC/ Youth Agenda conference in Nairobi on Tuesday, we must ask ourselves what we really need as young people. We must interrogate the methodologies that we have used before and ask ourselves why they have been failing. We always shout that there must be no violence but time has come for us to ask the question, ''Why not if it can deliver?'' Even though I am a human rightists I still strongly believe that there is a price to pay. Violence has never been as bad as we are told. When the Israelites were under Theocracy God himself sanctioned violence against anyone who disobeyed his commandments and especially against the people who were opposed to his chosen people of Israel. Violence has worked in America, in Britain, in France, in India and Pakistan, in South Africa and in deed in colonial Kenya. Let us remember that Mahtma Gandhi called on all Indians not only to be patriotic to their cultures and morals of their societies but also to be responsible enough as to disobey any laws that were repressive and those that did not boarder on the moral fabrics of the Indian traditions. It is time we considered the radical measures of violently disobeying unequal and unfair repressive tax regimes. Unequal representation in the governance processes and blatant practices that perpetuate the afferent of impunity.

I end by observing religiously that if we do not take drastic measures above and outside workshops and conferences ours shall remain frosty noises of frogs that will never scare cows away from a water pool!