‘Things Fall Apart’

My maternal grandmother has been an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) since 1997, immediately after the December elections and the subsequent ethnic clashes that ensued. My maternal grandfather and his second family followed the same path 10 years later after the now infamous post-election violence of 2007/2008 after the very heavily disputed general elections that left close to 1500 people dead and approximately 800,000 IDP’s in its wake.

To be clear, this article will not examine the cause of the violence nor of the displacement. I do not have the strength to do it now plus I firmly believe that for the last 20 years and especially the last 5, this country has been on a permanent analysis and discussion mode concerning the same. The Rift Valley, where my grandparents come from has had ethnic land clashes during every election year from 1992 with the exception being 2002 when Kenyans managed to peacefully overthrow a 24 year old dictatorship through a ballot revolution. We elected reformers, those that had been detained by the previous government, many had endured torture, forced into exile and many more had witnessed comrades die in the struggle. We were proud at Uhuru Park, Kenya’s equivalent of Tahrir Square, as the new President was sworn in and beamed with joy at the swearing in of the new Cabinet and Members of Parliament. They were reformers, light had finally prevailed over darkness, or so we thought.

Little did we know that 5 years later, this country would be more polarized along ethnic lines than it had ever been during the 24 years of dictatorship and that blood and tears like never before would be shed by the people as a selfish status quo on all sides of the political divide, lions in sheep’s skin; pitted brother against sister, neighbor against neighbor so as to retain their grip on power. It became evident that although we had changed the forest in 2002, surprisingly and sadly, the monkeys remained unchanged, it actually seems that all along they had been fighting the oppressors because they secretly admired them and wanted to be like them.

The story begins for me 4 years ago, immediately after ‘calm and peace’ had been restored to the country at my aunt’s burial, on the 2 acre piece of land that my grandmother, her mother, had been forced to abandon 11 years earlier as she fled for safety during the clashes. The particular ridge in an area called ‘Mwariki’, in the heart of the Rift Valley province that my grandmother and her neighbors had once occupied was completely deserted. Acres and acres of very green and fertile land in a province which is the breadbasket of the country lay empty, and had been so for 11 solid years, with people too scared to go back home after the violence they had witnessed.

In that same year, Kenya experienced one of the worst famines in its history, 10 Million people risked starvation and I watched as our President and members of the cabinet held a press conference begging, yes, BEGGING for urgent humanitarian assistance for those affected or were likely to get affected. The anger that I felt at that moment was explosive, the disgust too much too bear, but not at the government, but myself and my fellow Kenyans.

As we lay my aunt to rest, I couldn’t help but think of the irony of the situation, that my grandmother’s fertile land was only good for burying the dead, nothing more and nothing less. 10 Million People were facing starvation, hundreds of thousands were languishing in IDP camps, and still are, yet they could not go back to their land to farm and make up for the huge deficit in food stocks that Kenya was currently experiencing and so what was sadly left was for the government to expose our shame to the international community as we were turned into beggars yet resources have never been our problem.

This country has never quite recovered from the 3 months of chaos that we witnessed in 2007/2008, at least not our economy and especially the agricultural sector. I watched painfully as my mother and her friends who were engaged in the poultry business slowly began to make losses and finally close their businesses because it became too expensive to not only purchase one day old chicks that they would rear for six weeks and then sell to fast-food joints. It also became next to impossible to afford food for the chicks, when it could be found, as it had also become a rare commodity.

I do not think we have realized just how much the violence has cost this country. At the present it is estimated that 300,000 people are still languishing in IDP camps all over the country and most of them concentrated in the Rift Valley and Central Kenya. Can you imagine what is has cost us as a nation to essentially make hundreds of thousands redundant economically, socially and politically? Just imagine if all the IDP’s had the same amount of land that my grandparents had, all that land lying idle somewhere, its owners too afraid to return while this country continually exports food and constantly has to deal with famine.

As Kenyans we have to acknowledge the fact that things are not okay. Not when our government refurbishes a chamber of Parliament at a cost of $ 12 Million yet most of the country is having a serious problem in meeting the basics and thousands sleeping in paper tents, no food, no sanitation and generally being stripped of all of their dignity. To add on to these shenanigans, this country has not yet passed even a single bill concerning the welfare of IDP’s, there is one in Parliament, but clearly is not a top priority. Also, we have not started the process of ratification and domestication of the Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Africa, commonly referred to as the Kampala Convention. It is the first legally binding regional instrument in the world to impose on states the obligation to protect and assist IDPs.

The National Accord signed by the two sides of the political divide in 2008 under the brokerage of UN’s former Secretary General Koffi Annan seems to have only succeeded in tackling two of its agendas, the first being; the immediate action to stop violence and to restore fundamental rights (debatable) and liberties and undertaking constitutional and legal reform. What happened to some of the other agendas; to take measures to address the humanitarian crisis, promote reconciliation, healing and restoration and most importantly undertaking land reform?

We owe it to ourselves as Kenyans to first and foremost and with immediate effect sort out the IDP crisis. How can any other thing be more important than them? Have we no shame that thousands of children cannot go to school, are dying of pneumonia and malaria and have been resigned to one meal per day? Do we realize the indignity that their parents face all because they cannot provide for them, not because they do not want to but CANNOT? How is it that we know full well that billions are being squandered by the political class yet we still allow them to polarize us, spew hate and vitriol against one other on social media platforms, even go to the extent of burning effigies of those we consider enemies of our political demagogues, those that caused such misery for the IDP’s but have never gone back to Uhuru Park to DEMAND that unless solutions are found quickly for them, business will NOT be the same in this country?

The fact that we have Kenyans languishing in camps close to 5 years after the elections is an indictment on the people of Kenya and casts serious aspersions on our character and I dare say our social values and not on the political class as we like to think. We have been talking about how we will have a ballot revolution come the next elections, but I dare say that the revolution that is most urgent is that of our mindsets as the people of Kenya. How do we change wisely change a government when we have not changed in the last 5 years? If we really had changed, we would not stomach even a quarter of the rubbish that we witness being handed down to us by the political class.

The fallacy that changing leaders will be a magic wand is rubbish that I have no stomach for. We did that in 2002 and look where it brought us? Lying to ourselves also that the amazing new constitution that we have is all we need has been proven to be wrong considering how this parliament has been massacring the document to suit their needs and most times we have let them, and why, because we are apparently waiting for the next elections to vote them out.

Change will come to Kenya the day we realize that it is today, it is this minute, this second that we need to be making things right. Unfortunately the reasoning for most of us is that the IDP’s have to wait for 7 more months till the next elections to have their issues sorted out? How philanthropic of us! We need to ask ourselves serious questions as individuals for the truth is that in as much as we blame those we elected, the mirror effect theory states clearly that the mirror never lies, only reflecting back the image displayed.

The quality of leaders in a country will never rise beyond the quality of the character of the people. That sounds harsh, and it is and I hang my head in absolute shame at the mess that we all as Kenyans have contributed to making in our country. May God help us all that the injustice we have witnessed being meted upon the IDP’s does not soon become our potion for those of us who have sat silently and done nothing about it.