Carson should have hit harder

Johnnie Carson’s ban on a senior Kenyan official is both timely and effective. The official has been stopped from visiting America. The US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs’ threat to 15 prominent Kenyans in September to ban them from visiting the US unless they stopped their systematic opposition to political reforms in Kenya, has now started to work. Since then the 15 have gone underground and don’t want to talk about the issue in public. They feel like lepers isolated from the rest of the community.

The Carson tactic could work wonders. When African politicians are stopped from traveling to Europe or America they feel completely disoriented and absolutely insulted. What good is money if it can’t buy all the goodies to be found in Western capitals? That is why many of them send their children to America and Western Europe for both secondary and university education though Kenya has more universities today than at any other time in history. A lot of our leaders have no trust in the country they lead. That is why many of them have their real bank accounts in either America and or in Western Europe.

Carson should therefore not only have banned a nameless influential individual Kenyan official, but he should also have named all the other 15 he had written to a month ago. And what is more he should have frozen all their bank accounts which contains money they have looted from the people of Kenya. Furthermore he should have announced that the children and other relatives of the named people now living in America were going to be deported back to Kenya. That is the language our leaders understand.

More than anyone else, Carson, who has served his country as the Ambassador in Nairobi, understands all the tricks in subterfuge that Kenyan leaders engage in while dealing with the international community. He knows, for example, when Kofi Annan visited the country recently, attempts were made to mislead him and make him believe the country was really serious in implementing Agenda Four reforms. Carson knows Annan found a lot of rotten skeletons in Kenyan leaders’ cupboards.

The visit by Kafi Annan to review reform progress, Carson knows, exposed Kenyan leaders as the most hypocritical people who can go as far as spending public funds to cheat and hoodwink wananchi into believing that the coalition Government was serious about Agenda Four. On October 4th when the former UN Secretary General landed on Kenya, the Government chose to shamelessly tell the people a complete lie through an advertisement in all the national newspapers by the Government spokesman, Dr. Alfred Mutua, who must obviously be underestimating the intelligence of the people of Kenya.

As if he was addressing primary school kids, Mutua imprudently told Kenyans that the Government had achieved what he called a “reform performance” Grade “A” or 90 per cent. The very thought of coming up with such a wicked propaganda, and in such thoughtless format, proved that the Government spokesman, and the people he speaks for, live in a completely different world from that in which the wananchi of this country dwell.

It took Kofi Annan a very short time to realize that the so called leaders of Kenya were planning for yet another bloodbath in the Rift Valley where Kikuyu Mungiki hooligans and Kalenjin militias are collecting dangerous military guns in preparation for another confrontation between them in 2012. Depending on a South Consulting report the former UN Secretary General warned that serious crimes in Kenya were going up and that warlords, who have always won elections in Kenya through threats and bloodshed, hadn’t gone to sleep, but were indeed still preparing to kill more Kenyans in three year’s time.

The South Consulting October report says although post-election violence ended with the signing of the National Accord in February 2008, new forms of crime have arisen in different parts of the country. In areas affected by post election violence, threats against certain communities perceived as ‘outsiders’ persist. Kenyans must be wondering why it took Kofi Annan to come all the way from Europe to expose a heinous plot by our leaders to remain in power through mass murders.

Carson is also aware that on October 6th Raila and Kibaki tried to sanitize Mutua’s dirty propaganda by paying for full page advertisements in all the national papers, and telling the people a story closer to the truth regarding the progress Kenya was making in achieving Agenda Four reforms. But up and above Agenda Four, Carson is likely to raise the issue of insecurity in the country, with the two principals. It is amazing that neither President Kibaki nor Prime Minister Odinga has come up with convincing truth about the security situation in the country. None of them has come up with a clear condemnation on the preparation for war between Kikuyus and Kalenjins in the Rift Valley.

While in Kenya, Carson will most certainly raise the issue with the two principals and demand that the two become more open to the people about the dangerous issue. He must have read the South Consulting October report which says there is a continuation of old illegal armed groups and the emergence of new ones. According to the report some of the new ones have mutated from the old groups. Further, the report says, the groups are emboldened by the failure to successfully prosecute members suspected to have taken part in criminal activities in the past. As reported in the past reports, says the report, lack of policy guidelines on how to deal with organized crime and the fact that some groups enjoy the backing of powerful political leaders have combined to limit actions that would eliminate these groups. This notwithstanding, adds the report, criminal groups have no support among Kenyans -- many people prefer the police to these groups.

The news about constant meetings among Kalenjin Leaders must be extremely worrying. They claim to be meeting about “social and cultural issues”. If that is the case then why are the agendas of these meetings not made public? Why are journalists not invited to the meetings? Another group of leaders engaged in clandestine meetings is that from the Central Province. They claim to be planning “one man one vote” in the next general election. The relationship between the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus has been disturbingly cool ever since the last general election when the two ethnic groups were virtually engaged in a civil war. What is the Government doing to harmonize the relationship between these vital ethnic groups in the country? When Kofi Annan warns of planned conflict in 2012 whom exactly did he have in mind? And why do journalists not write exposes on these national stories? What has happened to investigative journalism in this country?