Voter never had say, never will have way on BBI – Weekly Citizen

OFF-THE-CUFF: Walter Rodney in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, gives the story of a community of African slaves in the Caribbean that some whites were trying to convert to Christianity.

Prof Rodney says that after the white missionaries left the village, the blacks gathered to discuss the matter. All of them agreed that what the white man had just told them is very good indeed. The idea of heaven where everything is provided for and there was no disease, hunger and suffering particularly impressed them considering that that was their daily ordeal as slaves. All said and done, this Christianity thing sounded good.

The problem however they also agreed is that never would a white person know the existence of something good and tell about it to a black person. This Christianity thing and the heaven promised, they concluded, are a lie. No white would show an African the direction to such a nice place.

We could here say that, from the behaviour of our MPs whenever there’s an issue that touches on their welfare such as salary hike and allowances and want to see nothing of the voter near where they’re meeting, no politician would ever know of a good thing and tell about it to a voter.

Unless believing in the Christian God was going to serve the interests of the whites in which indeed it might as well have been designed to this evangelisation, for it would make the slaves meeker and seek to invest in heaven where their reward was waiting for them and so slave on unquestioningly, there can’t have been any other motive on face value for a slave.

It reminds one of American writer Mark Twain’s words: “If voting was as important as the leaders tell us it is, they wouldn’t allow us to vote.”

Mark Twain

The manner in which Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga are going out of their way to ensure that the BBI process is associated with the mwananchi betrays their motive. For there’s no way the two would push this referendum thing so determinedly if it was for the good of the people. Were they so concerned about the lot of the people as they are now supposing, wouldn’t Kenya be so good a place we wouldn’t now be talking of BBI bettering our lives?

It’s worth reminding the masses the words of Lenin who advised voters that when you see a politician give you a rope, it’s not so that you secure your cow, but for you to hang yourself with.

Since when did Uhuru and Raila have such a high regard for mwananchi as to ask him to show the way on the BBI debate?

Even on that ground alone, it’s enough for one to dismiss the Uhuraila push for a referendum as selfserving. Add to this the fact that people were told that report is the product of the views of the people as collected by the BBI taskforce and you’ll want declare the repeat process of returning the report to the people not only a waste of time and money, but want to call for an urgent mental test on the two.

They either cheated us that these were the views of mwananchi or they have a very short memory indeed if they can’t remember that it’s only last week that they received “views of the people”. It will be proof of the former if they keep on insisting that wananchi have their views heard again on the BBI and confirmation of the latter.

And if they meant so well for us as to want to force on the people this “good-for-the-people report”, why not fund the referendum from their own bottomless pockets instead of using wananchi’s shallow pockets?

You can be an enemy of the people if even the little they have you want to take it and use it for an unnecessary exercise that is more of a duplication of the expensive BBI taskforce exercise, and leave them with nothing.

We mean, this is not the first time we’re being taken through such an exercise on the promise that it will take us to a land of milk and honey. And it all turned out to be a land of stones and thorns we regretted that we had invested emotionally in it believing that we would be better off at the end of it.

As we speak, we regret why we invested financially in BBI process if that money is to go to waste. What but not wastage to do another exercise instead of making use of the one we carried out?

Because, on the face of it, it’s Raila who ought to be the most disatisfied with BBI report being as it is that it didn’t have the strong PM post that he had promised supporters, one would expect Raila, and not Uhuru, too, to have issues with the process.

Yet if Raila didn’t have a say on the final draft as it’s clear he didn’t going by the fact that the report wasn’t crafted to outrightly warrant referendum as Raila had wanted, why didn’t Uhuru, who, going by that, would have been the one in charge then, not order that his hatchet men led by Yusuf Hajji come up with report conc enough to warrant plebiscite? If so, then the report is what Kenyans told Hajji. If not, then these are games Uhuru and Raila are playing on us to buy time and as their families keep on eating on the fat of country while keeping us busy in pursuit of a mirage.

A mirage that Uhuru now tells us we’ll reach in January. Come January, he’ll say May, then August, then December.

Can they give us a break?

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