Without leadership, hope and constructive non-violent engagement is more difficult

Apologies to my Sunday Standard readership. A tech breakdown stopped this article reaching the newsroom. The column resumes next week.

A week in South Africa with social justice activists ignited in me again the power of leadership and community action. Convened by the Social Change Initiative, we came from Cape Town, Gaborone, Dublin, Nairobi and New York and elsewhere to discuss how to deepen democracy, make policing safer and empower displaced populations. The discussions offer much for Kenya fresh out from the recent General Elections.

Any visitor to South Africa quickly feels the uncertainty of their impending General Elections in 2019. Later this month, President Jacob Zuma’s successor will probably be chosen in the 54th National Conference of the African National Congress. However, growing mass disillusionment with huge corruption scandals and nepotism around the Presidency and the Government’s inability to generate jobs and essential services present new openings for opposition parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters and Democratic Alliance. Drunk with power and unable to make a mid-course correction, the 105-year-old party of the late Nelson Mandela is more vulnerable than it has ever been. Smelling blood, the opposition circles in for the kill.

Like Kenya, the lungs of South African cities have always been its informal settlements. Khayelitsha (pronounced Kai-litsha) is the most famous in Cape Town. Its 400,000 residents earn just under Kshs 16,000 a month on average. Crime, gang warfare and gender-based violence are rife. Essential services like water and sanitation are inadequate. Desperate for a change, residents supported by the Social Justice Coalition have prosecuted the Police for not allocating enough resources to keeping the community safe. They argue more police resources can be found in the less populated and richer neighborhoods. Inequality is real and the ANC Government has not got it right yet.

The District 6 museum stands in the heart of Cape Town. Before it was declared a whites-only area in the sixties, District 6 was a relatively cosmopolitan neighborhood of Cape Malays, Xhosa, English and Afrikaans-speaking whites and Indians. By 1983, 60,000 men, women and children had been bull-dozed and forcibly evicted from District 6. Residents established a Museum and Foundation in 1994 and the Hands Off District 6 Committee mobilised to stop investment and re-development for whites only. In 2008, President Mandela handed keys to the first of the families to return to District 6. Collective action by community organisers and the state rectified a historical grievance.

Like South Africa, Kenya grapples with bad governance, corruption, inequalities and historical grievances. Our community leaders, like theirs, grow weary of a political economy that leaves millions excluded and deeply frustrated. As our youth become disillusioned with our public offices and insurrectionist, representative democracy matters less. Jay Naidoo’s recent observations that violent destruction has become a legitimate way of expressing grievance in South Africa applies equally to Kenya. Violence is seeping into both of our political cultures. In these circumstances, keeping hope alive and non-violent, constructive engagement becomes more difficult.

Reflecting on this and other challenges, Stephanie Leonard reminded me of Bayard Rustin. A gay civil rights activist, Rustin was Martin Luther King jr.’s mentor and strategist. It was Rustin’s strategic brilliance that crafted the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the famous march on Washington from where King Jr. would declare his famous “I have a dream” speech. He was known for simplifying complex civil rights issues into only three questions, what is the main problem, what change is needed and who has the power to make it happen?

Twenty-six years after he died, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rustin’s greatest example to us lies in the courage he took to be his authentic self when the world was not ready for his vision, values or choices. Today, he would probably argue, it is not our job to make those who discriminate, exclude or steal from the public comfortable. It is our responsibility to make them uncomfortable until the world we want, becomes a reality.

This month, your County Government seeks your guidance on how to spend your taxes. This moment only comes once every five years. The County Integrated Development Plans (CIDP) will frame your County Government’s investment in your family and community. Under investment and the denial of essential services leaves the communities of Khayelitsha with little dignity or rights. If you and your community do not speak up like District 6, how will the world you both want, show up? #ChoosePowerfully

December 3, 2017

Caught in a storm of fake news, inflammatory comments? Here’s what you could do

First published Sunday Standard, July 9, 2017. Kindly reproduced here with permission from Standard Group

Kenyans could borrow a lesson or two from the late Amilcar Cabral. The Guinea Bissau leader often rallied the independence movement with the phrase, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories”. Kenya is caught in a perfect storm of personal integrity, commercial and political interests. Fake-news, misinformation and disinformation leaps out at us from all outlets. With just under five weeks to go to the elections, it is difficult to know what is the truth about anything political. If this wasn’t bad enough, emotions are also high.

We have mastered the blood sport called “politricks” and become experts in the art of disinformation. In the last 90 days alone, we have discovered no less than five sensational stories were untrue. Our opinions are increasingly becoming untrustworthy. It seems to me that there are three reasons why this is happening.

Firstly, we don’t verify and own the information we are passing on to each other. Once we type the magical words “sent as received” we then proceed to share dozens of sensational half-truths, innuendos and downright lies. We get some laughs at the expense of our targets but in so doing, we cheapen our own credibility. The greater cost is we also distract each other from what is really going on.

Secondly, fake news and websites are being generated by e-hustlers in search of advertising and communications contracts and media outlets in search of sales. All they care is that you click on the links, forward their posts and buy their news. They then sell that to the advertising companies for contracts worth hundreds of thousands of shillings. The national vice here is lie sensationally, it pays.

Thirdly, the politricians and their communications teams want you to get mad, literally. Mad enough to come out, campaign and vote against their opponents. The formula is simple. Watch your opponent very closely. Ignore the issues, just focus on their identity. Find something that undermines their personal credibility, exaggerate it into a major character flaw and pull them down in full view of the public. The practice is literally assassinating characters on all sides and scorching the political landscape.

In fact, it has got so inhuman that humans are not really needed anymore. Just before Christmas, I noticed 300 new twitter followers. Most accounts had no photos, had never tweeted and had roughly the same number of people they followed and followers. My ego told me to ignore them, the more followers the better. My soul argued otherwise. Even cockroaches in our kitchens are a sick form of flattery. Keeping them would turn out bad, my sixth sense argued. They were all deleted.

I had discovered web based robots or bots as they are called. Oddly enough, these software applications resemble the botfly. The larva of a botfly is a parasite that lives in animal stomachs. These algorithm created bot accounts on the other hand, are artificially created to parasitically flood your timeline and falsely boost your followers. There are companies that specialize in this. Politricians globally have also discovered that lying on a mass scale is not that expensive. Last year, over 60% of North Americans believed made up news about their elections. It’s got so bad, that two months ago, the inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee warned the world about its dangers.

Neither autocratic state control or citizens tuning out and leaving groups will be effective in this context. We can all do better by looking more closely at the authors, sources and dates of stories, reading beyond the headlines, reviewing our own biases and verifying the stories with authoritative individuals or agencies.

Stopping a human or technological bot in your community is easy. Reflect on all the people in your life that are regularly posting inflammatory, divisive and misleading comments. We all have one or two in our lives now. Take a pen now and write down their names. Challenge them by simply saying, “Lies or half-truths are no longer acceptable my presence.”

The wise ones will tell us, real blindness is in the mind, not in the absence or presence of our eyes. Protect your sight people.

Doubt it no more, triggers of political violence are known

First published Sunday Standard, June 11, 2017. Kindly reproduced here with permission from Standard Group

If we are not careful, the past creeps up and creates our future. Last week we tragically buried 17 GSU officers and 3 young boys from the Ratemo family. Violent extremism claimed the lives of the 20. It also has robbed the families and constituents of Churo Amaiya MCA Thomas Minito, Loyamorok MCA Kibet Cheretei, Tiaty parliamentary aspirant Pepee Kitambaa and several citizens.

Intense competition and preoccupation with the capacity of the IEBC to manage our August elections almost hid their tragic deaths from the public view. Yet, their passing offers us a wake up call that the 2008 electoral narrative of justice or peace offers us little clarity for a new way of handling the upcoming elections.

The two opposing narratives “No, justice no peace” and “Peace at all costs” were born in the aftermath of the controversial 2007 elections and the trauma of the Post-Election-Violence. This all-or-none thinking has pervaded the thinking of those vested in the 2017 elections up until now.

Ahead of the IEBC national conference on elections this week, a mental truce has been called. Thankfully, credible and peaceful elections is the new and important narrative. Free and fair elections will create the conditions for peace. In turn, peace will create an enabling environment for us all to go out and elect our leaders.

The joint call for credible and peaceful elections is an important shift in our national consciousness. It is consistent with the constitutional promise contained in Article 81 of elections that are free from violence, intimidation, undue influence and corruption. To achieve it we must expose the nature of violence and the role it plays in undermining our constitutional ambition.

Powerful politicians both in control of the state and the opposition have been guilty of creating pre-electoral uncertainty, fear and violence in the past. Preventing communities from coming out to register and vote has been their simple goal. It is the less violent equivalent of bribing voters to transfer their votes. Both undermine our democracy.

Worrying signs of extremism attacks on our uniformed officers and citizens in Garissa, Mandera and Wajir must be condemned. We must watch carefully the populous counties of Mombasa and the coast also, lest we see the resurgence of separatist and violent groups.

The triggers of violence are known and they have been used by those who control or don’t control state power. A falsified electoral register, campaigns based on public resources, biased or compromised electoral and security officers and results manipulation are also forms of violence. Using excessive state force to crush legitimate public protest is another. They are in turn, triggers for more violence. If this is not complicated enough, our devolved 47+1 states now make this a more complex and dangerous tool for any of us to exercise.

Delivering non-violent, objective and fair elections in August is not beyond our grasp. It will take removing one million of our ancestors off the elections register, contingency planning training for all party and electoral body staff, strengthening our complaints processes and establishing stronger inter-party liaison committees. It is not too late for civic educators to explain burning down your neighbor’s house or the nearest kiosk are not effective ways of responding to elections offences and rigging.

Weak politicians without leadership vision or skills need to divide and militarize us. How else would the voters not see they have no new ideas for our safety, employment or to live free of corruption and impunity?

All-or-none thinking is present across all the political class and us, the voters. As the National IEBC Conference on Elections opens tomorrow, party leaders will be asked to sign credibility and peace pledges. The fog of a violent and controversial past may still be lurking in the back of their minds. I call on them to sign with the clarity that violence and rigging ride together to stalk our upcoming elections.

The only way we can keep Kenyans safe and enfranchised is to leave our elections management and security forces independent and free of undue influence before, during and after the elections. To do otherwise is to risk all.

Three days later after this article, NASA and Jubilee Party Presidential aspirants Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta pledged to run peaceful campaigns

 

What is the significance of the Wagalla Massacre for us today?

First published Sunday Standard, February 12, 2017. Kindly reproduced here with permission from Standard Group 

Thirty-three years ago today marks one of our darkest moments in history. On an isolated and abandoned airstrip in a marginalised district, 1,000s of Degodia Somali men were stripped naked, tortured, burnt and killed. Women were sexually violated, raped and killed. Nur Daqane Abdi remembers that time, “Every man was beaten. I stood up three times and asked the police officer to shoot me in the head. He told me I was not worth the Government’s bullets. I didn’t think I would get out of there alive.” He survived those four days. More than 1,000 men and women did not.

Kenya has experienced 2,500 violent conflicts since the Wagalla massacre in 1984. Intense competition for scarce natural resources, poverty and intolerance have driven these conflicts. As we approach the 2017 General Elections, we need to remember every election for the last twenty years has been a potential trigger for displacement, destruction and death. Modern violence is as Kenyan sadly, as the red in our beloved national flag.

To see our past and impending future only through the lens of violence is to miss the full picture. In each one of the 2,500 moments, men and women overcame fear and prejudice to stop the violence. This is the most enduring story of Wagalla for me. Countless men and women like the young muslim nurse Mohamed Elmi, Wajir East Member of Parliament Ahmed Khalif and Italian catholic doctor Annalena Tonelli moved quietly in the shadows to gather pieces of humanity together until it was safe to speak out. They are the primary reason why each year around this time I fast.

Their story is repeated in the personal narratives of Kenyans during post-election violence in 2008. The women of Burnt Forest who hid, fed and protected neighbors from their own families. The teachers who consciously earned the anger of some parents by re-opening schools for all children. Security officers who ignored shoot to kill orders and chose to dialogue with angry communities in Nairobi.

More recently, there are men like Salah Farah who placed themselves in front a bullet meant for a Christian. He chose to give his life than have his religion Islam soiled by violence. Young men and women like Noordin Tube, Maryam Hassan and the 50 Hope walkers who walked from Mandera to Garissa fearing both al Shabaab and the Kenyan army. We can also draw inspiration from those who interrupt violent extremism or expose unlawful police killings in the coast, north eastern and Nairobi.

Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah called them the healers and they can be found globally. They were there in the Rwanda of 1994, Darfur in 2010 and today’s Burundi. The recent film Hacksaw Ridge captures the real story of American soldier Desmond Doss during world war II. Ross was a Seventh-Day Adventist Christian. He willingly joined the army but refused to carry a firearm or any weapon of any kind. Unarmed, he saved over seventy people and became the first conscientious objector to be awarded the US Medal of Honor. His tradition continues with the thousands that gathered recently at America’s airports to protest anti-Islamic immigration policies.

Kenyans, the season that tears us apart is upon us again. We shall have to be brave. Should you see the darkness rise around you, be still. Look carefully for those who quietly move to gather up the pieces of our nation. They walk with those that have healed this nation countless times. Now ancestral, courageous women like Rose Barmasai, Dekha Ibrahim and Doreen Ruto.

Our resilience as a nation rests on what Paul Lederach calls exercising a “moral imagination”. The belief that even one’s enemies are still part of our community is critical for this. We must remain curious in your understanding of them. This is critical to transforming them. Lastly, we all have the power within us to act. Not others, us.

A word of caution for the healers. Stopping violence on top of legitimate grievances and impunity is like an elastoplast on an open wound. It has no real power to remove the divisions that caused the violence. So we must be active against injustice before the violence erupts. Only by building communities around our homes, farms, places of worship and work-spaces will we have the safety and security we all want.