Why Kenya must clean house before America’s November elections

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America’s rising star and possible next president of United States is a direct descendant of Kenya, the country well known for its flora and fauna, for many decades, the holiday destination for millions of western nationals. But Kenya also recently caught the world’s global media attention for presidential election thieving.

Ugly television images of once neighbors hacking each other with machetes in broad day light circulated round the world and thanks to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and American State Secretary Condoleeza Rice together with European Union and many other world leaders including our neighbor Tanzania with President Kikwete and his predecessor both personally involved, Kenya is slowly getting back to its track.

We could go on thanking everybody involved in solving Kenya’s crisis, but the real heroes are those who perished in the hit of the conflict, no matter on which side they stood, they’re our heroes because essentially they died for their country, Kenya. Those who lost limbs or are permanently physically or psychologically damaged must now be our collective responsibility because they’re the scar of our wounds. We cannot afford to look away from them. Kenya must take care of its burden. Even those families who lost their loved ones should be compensated without looking at which side of the divide they stand and the cause of the tragic moment that removed our nation’s name from countries of honor must be addressed fairly and fully.

Then those displaced must be resettled back or elsewhere but that’s not all, Kenya has two generations of silently displaced citizens. Two generations of elite economic theft has come to light in full blast, two generation of political arrogance and two generations of silent slide into anarchy. In a sense, Kenya has two generations of cheated citizens, something that needs to be put right, before America’s November Presidential elections that looks more and more likely to be won by Obama’s Democrats.

Lifting up the boat stuck at the bottom.
Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his ODM party has given hope to Kenya’s citizens and if anything is to go by, the reception he got during his first visit to his political bedrock Kisumu as Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya showed how much Kenya needed change. Many other towns and provinces will echo Kisumu’s sentiments for change.

Raila promised to see a working economy and economic prosperity that will trickle down to the common man and this is what all Kenyans want and we deserve it because the country has adequate human and capital resources to turn around our collective yet individual family economies. With good policies in place and good leadership, we can lift up the boat stuck at the bottom.

Kenya cannot afford to isolate Central Province.
Unlike Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki who isolated Nyanza Province from the corridors of power and secretly or sometimes openly used bad economical policies to stranglehold the lake region province because of what they perceived as opposition views, its evident today that the politics of division and isolations have no future in Kenya. For two generations now, evidence has it that a few rich old men and their concubines have held Central Kenya hostage for personal political and economical ambitions. The same colonial code has gone through our people for two generations unnoticed. Those who dared to be different or even chose a different political or economical path have many times been killed.

So time has come for Kenya to clean up its act. This does not mean Raila and Kibaki attending rallies together every weekend but the village people empowered to decide on how their tax money is spent. We want local leadership to have a say in how prisons are run, how schools are run and how hospitals are run. We don’t want all decisions to come from some aliens sitting in beautiful offices in Nairobi to make all policies for our villages.

Then there must be interchange of youth groups, elders and entrepreneurs from every district exchanging ideas on what being Kenyan means. This is how to form a national fabric.

In any case, Kenya should not wait to be caught unawares in the event that Barack Obama becomes president of the most powerful country on earth. The number of Americans coming to Kenya will quadripple. Many of them will be coming to pay homage to Obama’s ancestral country and all provinces and districts must be prepared to cash on this, not only Alego Kogelo in Siaya. Every Kenyan should be prepared to cash in Barack Obama’s victory and we can not successfully do this if we are a divided nation.