Lessons from the Arab street

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his family beat a hasty retreat to Riyadh in the face of an unstoppable force of Tunisians tired of the tired, old, authoritarian regime that he and his wife and their family led. The Jasmine Revolution has inspired similar protests in Cairo and Sana'a, but very few political pundits expect that Hosni Mubarak or Ali Abdullah Saleh will find themselves on the next flight to Saudi Arabia, seeing as the dollars from Uncle Sam keep them in power. Kenya can learn a few lessons from the events that are rocking the Arab world, and take steps to forestall what could be a violent revolution.

President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga, the heroes of the Second Liberation, are wrong to believe that the revolution that brought down the KANU hegemony is the end of the matter or that the new Constitution will paper over the cracks that are appearing between the governed and the ruling classes. The two are presiding over the dying days of the First Republic and they have the opportunity to midwife the birth of a New Kenya or face the masses in violent protest at the slow pace of change. All authoritarian regimes attempt to 'manage' the pace of change when faced with an intractable populace. After the violence that rocked this country in 2007 and 2008 abated, many assumed that we had seen the abyss and that we would not allow the country to come so close to the brink again. They were, and continue to be, wrong.

When the former Tunisian strongman was faced with the inevitable collapse of his regime, he sacked his Cabinet in the hope that its members could act as sacrificial lambs to assuage the hurt of the people. President Mubarak has, for the first time since he seized power in 1981, appointed a Vice-President. None of these attempts at mollifying the populace has worked. In Egypt, the crowds are still calling for the end of the Mubarak regime. If President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga think that a new Constitution and new appointees to the Supreme Court, the Attorney-General's Chambers or the Director of Public Prosecutions are the salve that this country needed after the horrors of 2007, they are truly blind to the changes that this country has undergone since those dark days.

2007 and 2008 exposed the fact that hundreds of thousands of Kenyan youth are desperate for employment, any employment. It exposed the fact that thousands of Kenyans graduate from Universities and polytechnics into a world where jobs are hard to come by, where the rich keep getting richer, while the poor suffer the humiliation of begging for food or a place to sleep. The deals that have been struck since 2008 between the President and the PM have exposed the lie that the political class has the interests of the people at heart. 

It is near impossible today to secure employment in the public service without a 'tall brother'. It is just as hard for one to secure employment in the private sector or the NGO world without meeting some ethnic or gender qualification that is not in the advertisement pages of the newspapers. And even after one manages to secure employment, the cost of living keeps rising so one finds himself in need of a second and a third job just to make ends meet. The state of the nation is dire, and the President and PM are fiddling while the nation simmers like a cauldron on a fire.

These two men sit atop a pyramid of resentment and anger. If they do not do something drastic in the near future, their dreams of a legacy founded on the memory of the Second Liberation or the new Constitution will be covered in the ashes of the violence that is to come. Questions of equity must be addressed urgently. Government cannot deny the hard-working children of the poor the right to attend state-sponsored national schools simply because they attended private 'academies'. While I may disagree with the position taken by the Standard Group and other profiteers, the government cannot simply decide to raze property worth billions of dollars without just cause. 

Newly expanded roads and toll stations are not just causes. New mothers cannot be held hostage in public hospitals after giving birth simply because they cannot afford the cost of giving birth in the first place. It is shocking and shameful that some new mothers spend the first formative years of their new-born children in the clutches of hospital administrators. It is inequitable that hundreds of thousands of young men and women are unable to provide fully for themselves and their families while a few hundred political fat-cats earn millions in salaries and allowances without much to show for their consumption of national treasure while swanning around in chauffeur-driven, tax-paid limousines and living in the leafiest of leafy suburbs.

We may be becalmed at the moment but we are not at peace with ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters live in squalor in tented shanty towns while those who swore to alleviate their plight live it up, jet-setting to foreign capitals to deny them their day in court. Day after day brings new stories of security agents executing suspected violent offenders without the due process of law and the state taking a blase approach to the whole matter, announcing that it will not 'negotiate' with criminals. Since when has it been OK to condemn young men unheard? The humiliations endured by Kenyans, and the frustrations they face daily, and the anger that informs their inter-personal, inter-community relations will come to a head and Kenya will burn once more. Only this time, just possibly, that anger will be turned on our overmighty state and then none of us will ever know peace again.