An Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu, Chair of the Electoral Commission of KenyaMr. Kivuitu,
We've never met. It's unlikely we ever will. But, like every other Kenyan, I will remember you for the rest of my life. The nausea I feel at the mention of your name may recede. The bitterness and grief will not.
You had a mandate, Mr. Kivuitu. To deliver a free, fair and transparent election to the people of Kenya. You and your commission had 5 years to prepare. You had a tremendous pool of resources, skills, technical support, to draw on, including the experience and advice of your peers in the field - leaders and experts in governance, human rights, electoral process and constitutional law. You had the trust of 37 million Kenyans.
We believed it was going to happen. On December 27th, a record 65% of registered Kenyan voters rose as early as 4am to vote. Stood in lines for up to 10 hours, in the sun, without food, drink, toilet facilities. As the results came in, we cheered when minister after powerful minister lost their parliamentary seats. When the voters of Rift Valley categorically rejected the three sons of Daniel Arap Moi, the despot who looted Kenya for 24 years. The country spoke through the ballot, en masse, against the mindblowing greed, corruption, human rights abuses, callous dismissal of Kenya's poor, that have characterised the Kibaki administration.
But Kibaki wasn't going to go. When it became clear that you were announcing vote tallies that differed from those counted and confirmed in the constituencies, there was a sudden power blackout at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, where the returns were being announced. Hundreds of GSU (General Service Unit) paramilitaries suddenly marched in. Ejected all media except the government mouthpiece Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
Fifteen minutes later, we watched, dumbfounded, as you declared Kibaki the winner. 30 minutes later, we watched in sickened disbelief and outrage, as you handed the announcement to Kibaki on the lawns of State House. Where the Chief Justice, strangely enough, had already arrived. Was waiting, fully robed, to hurriedly swear him in.
You betrayed us. Perhaps we'll never know when, or why, you made that decision. One rumor claims you were threatened with the execution of your entire family if you did not name Kibaki as presidential victor. When I heard it, I hoped it was true. Because at least then I could understand why you chose instead to plunge our country into civil war.
I don't believe that rumor any more. Not since you appeared on TV, looking tormented, sounding confused, contradicting yourself. Saying, among other things, that you did not resign because you "did not want the country to call me a coward", but you "cannot state with certainty that Kibaki won the election". Following that with the baffling statement "there are those around him [Kibaki] who should never have been born." The camera operator had a sense of irony - the camera shifted several times to the scroll on your wall that read: "Help Me, Jesus."
As the Kenya Chapter of the International Commission of Jurists rescinds the Jurist of the Year award they bestowed on you, as the Law Society of Kenya strikes you from their Roll of Honour and disbars you, I wonder what goes through your mind these days.
Do you think of the 300,000 Kenyans displaced from their homes, their lives? Of the thousands still trapped in police stations, churches, any refuge they can find, across the country? Without food, water, toilets, blankets? Of fields ready for harvest, razed to the ground? Of granaries filled with rotting grain, because no one can get to them? Of the Nairobi slum residents of Kibera, Mathare, Huruma, Dandora, ringed by GSU and police, denied exit, or access to medical treatment and emergency relief, for the crime of being poor in Kenya?
I bet you haven't made it to Jamhuri Park yet. But I'm sure you saw the news pictures of poor Americans, packed like battery chickens into their stadiums, when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Imagine that here in Nairobi, Mr. Kivuitu. 75,000 Kenyans, crammed into a giant makeshift refugee camp. Our own Hurricane Kivuitu-Kibaki, driven by fire, rather than floods. By organized militia rather than crumbling levees. But the same root cause - the deep, colossal contempt of a tiny ruling class for the rest of humanity. Over 60% of our internal refugees are children. The human collateral damage of your decision.
And now, imagine grief, Mr. Kivuitu. Grief so fierce, so deep, it shreds the muscle fibres of your heart. Violation so terrible, it grinds down the very organs of your body, forces the remnants through your kidneys, for you to piss out in red water. Multiply that feeling by every Kenyan who has watched a loved one slashed to death in the past week. Every parent whose child lies, killed by police bullets, in the mortuaries of Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret. Everyone who has run sobbing from a burning home or church, hearing the screams of those left behind. Every woman, girl, gang-raped.
Do you sleep well these days, Mr. Kivuitu? I don't. I have nightmares. I wake with my heart pounding, slow tears trickling from the corners of my eyes, random phrases running through my head:
Remember how we felt in 2002? It's all gone.
(Muthoni Wanyeki, ED of Kenya Human Rights Commission, on the night of December 30th, 2007, after Kibaki was illegally sworn in as president).
There is a crime here that goes beyond recrimination. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolise. (John Steinbeck, American writer, on the betrayal of internally displaced Americans, in The Grapes of Wrath)
Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi....kila siku tuwe na shukrani ("Justice be our shield and defender....every day filled with thanksgiving" Lines from Kenya's national anthem)
I soothe myself back to patchy sleep with my mantra in these days, as our country burns and disintegrates around us:
Courage.
Courage comes.
Courage comes from cultivating.
Courage comes from cultivating the habit.
Courage comes from cultivating the habit of refusing.
Courage comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions. (Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner).
I wake with a sense of unbearable sadness.
Please let it not be true.....Meanwhile, the man you named President cowers in the State House, surrounded by a cabal of rapacious power brokers, and a bevy of sycophantic unseated Ministers and MPs, who jostle for position and succession. Who fuel the fires by any means they can, to keep themselves important, powerful, necessary. The smoke continues to rise from the torched swathes of Rift Valley, the gutted city of Kisumu, the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa. The Red Cross warns of an imminent cholera epidemic in Nyanza and Western Kenya, deprived for days now of electricity and water. Containers pile up at the Port of Mombasa, as ships, unable to unload cargo, leave still loaded. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Sudan, the DRC, all dependent on Kenyan transit for fuel and vital supplies, grind to a halt.
A repressive regime rolls out its panoply of oppression against legitimate dissent. Who knew our police force had so many sleek, muscled, excellently-trained horses, to mow down protestors? Who guessed that in a city of perennial water shortages, we had high-powered water cannons to terrorize Kenyans off the streets?
I am among the most fortunate of the fortunate. Not only am I still whole, alive, healthy, mobile; not only do I have food, shelter, transport, the safety of those I love; I have the gift of work. I have the privilege to be in the company of the
most brilliant, principled, brave, resilient Kenyans of my generation. To contribute whatever I can as we organize, analyse, strategize, mobilize, draw on everything we know and can do, to save our country. I marvel at the sheer collective volume of trained intelligence, of skill, expertise, experience, in our meetings. At the ability to rise above personal tragedy - families still hostage in war zones, friends killed, homes overflowing with displaced relatives - to focus on the larger picture and envisage a solution.
I listen to lawyers, social scientists, economists, youth activists, humanitarians; experts on conflict, human rights, governance, disaster relief; to Kenyans across every sector and ethnicity, and I think:
Is this what we have trained all our lives for? To confront this epic catastrophe, caused by a group of old men who have already sucked everything they possibly can out of Kenya, yet will cling until they die to their absolute power? You know these people too, Mr. Kivuitu. The
principled, brave, resilient, brilliant Kenyans. The idealists who took seriously the words we sang as schoolchildren, about building the nation. Some of them worked closely with you, right through the election. Some called you friend. You don't even have the excuse that Kibaki, or his henchmen, might offer - that of inhabiting a world so removed from ours that they cannot fathom the reality of ordinary Kenyans. You know of the decades of struggle, bloodshed, faith and suffering that went into creating this fragile beautiful thing we called the "democratic space in Kenya." So you can imagine the ways in which we engage with the unimaginable. We coin new similes:
lie low like a 16A (the electoral tally form returned by each constituency, many of which were altered or missing in the final count)
We joke about
the Kivuitu effect - which turns internationalists, pan-Africanists, fervent advocates for the dissolution of borders, into nationalists who cry at the first verse of the national anthem:
Ee Mungu nguvu yetu
Ilete baraka kwetu
Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi
Natukae na undugu
Amani na uhuru
Raha tupate na ustawi.
O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity
Peace and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.
Rarely do we allow ourselves pauses, to absorb the enormity of our country shattered, in 7 days. We cry, I think, in private. At least I do. In public, we mourn through irony, persistent humor, and action. Through the exercise of patience, stamina, fortitude, generosity, that humble me to witness. Through the fierce relentless focus of our best energies towards challenges of stomach-churning magnitude.
We tell the stories that aren't making it into the press. The retired general in Rift Valley sheltering 200 displaced families on his farm. The Muslim Medical Professionals offering free treatment to anyone injured in political protest. We challenge, over and over again, with increasing weariness, the international media coverage that presents this as "tribal warfare", "ethnic conflict", for an audience that visualises Africa through Hollywood: Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond.
I wish you'd thought of those people, when you made the choice to betray them. I wish you'd drawn on their courage, their integrity, their clarity, when your own failed you. I wish you'd had the imagination to enter into the lives, the dreams, of 37 million Kenyans.
But, as you've probably guessed by now, Mr. Kivuitu, this isn't really a letter to you at all. This is an attempt to put words to what cannot be expressed in words. To mourn what is too immense to mourn. A clumsy groping for something beyond the word 'heartbreak'. A futile attempt to communicate what can only be lived, moment by moment. This is a howl of anguish and rage. This is a love letter to a nation. This is a long low keening for my country.
Shailja Patel
11 Comments:
Kenya and indeed the world at large, in particular the rogues who have usurped power and wealth in the largest democracies like the United States, or banana dictatorships like Burma and a host of those oil rich emirs of the middle East, must wake up to the new realities of the 21st century where communication and technology have given the ordinarily oppressed individuals the ability to express themselves and share their grief and anguish. In the process they have found not only peaceful ways to give vent to their suppression but violent ways in which to change them when they are ignored and abused sometimes for decades; as in Palestine. The rich and powerful ignore this at their peril. When their comfortable and affluent world comes crashing down they must not look at the ones on the front line who pulled the trigger as in the schools and malls or the one who pushes a button to take with him a multitude in the market place; they must recount all the tyranny and injustice that finally brought about that collateral damage........There is no Terrorism without Tyranny
Hallo Shailja
I really feel so sorry about what is happening in Kenya.All of us in Africa are always faced with this possibility when elections occur.
Michelle
Thanks Shailja for the beatiful letter of concern to this Man who has realy brought a mess in this country. I hope that he will get it and apologise to the whole nation.
I think Kambas had calculated move.. look at what Kalonzo is doing total Greed taking the appointment even before the country is healed. Remember Kivuitu Said that he was pressured form ODM K and now we can only say that they wanted the big appointments!!!
God help us.
Once again thank you very much I wish you could do another to Kalonzo as well he also contributed to this. Perharps if he had stuck with either Kibaki or Raila there would be no confusion on the votes his would have been a block to the person he supported but we see him now as the project of PNU. Shame on Him
God bless you
Kerenoh Okwako
I felt so good when i read this letter we should have more of these sent to our leaders who seem not to be on the same page as we.
Thankyou
Hi Shailja,
I am happy with you articulated exaxctly what my heart feels about this rose called Kenya that has been trumbled on the ground by selfish people. You are a true Kenyan, the real daughter of Kenya, our mother land.However, although I am relieved because of our psychic unity about the problem, I am suddened by the fact that the problem still remains unresolved and that even the respected religious leaders, who should be rectifieres have also been consumed in the satanic anti-Kenyan fire. May the God of mercy be with Kenya and the sailors in the boat of psychic unity exhibited by your letter to Kivuitu.
kennedywanjala@yahoo.com
your words are heavy,full of anger, i know exactly how u feel because i feel the same way.Betrayed.
Not only am i disgusted at how shamless the electrol commision has carried it self, i slap my face, pinch myself is all this a never ending nightmare? How can anyone mock the inteligence of the International community, the kenyan's who voted and me Nelly.
A 22 year old girl who doesn't understand the word democracy anymore
I'm feeling what you feel, tears rolling, at what Mr. Kivuitu brought to our beautiful country. These days, I wake up with no anticipation, when I see the suffering wrought by his sheer carelessness, cowardice and perpetuation of the old-guard. Every minute, I think about my first cousin, chopped to death on his sick bed, chopped like meat by mungiki. Meat is nolonger a delicacy for me! The innocent faces of his berieved children who know not what crime their dad committed. Perhaps, his only crime was his sickness, bedridden at the time of meeting with his executioners. This is the kind of crime, nobody is talking about, the violence meted in Eastlands of Nairobi and elsewhere, by mungiki, after Mr. Kivuitu's pronouncement. I call it the night of terror, when mungiki went on rampage with machethes and guns, taunting, burning and breaking, death in their wake. Taunting and meting out violence on communities that were thought to have voted oppisition. Of course, we did receive the SMSes, about the game plan - announce and cause mayhem then blame! I wonder, my soul cries and my heart goes out to the women and children, raped in their thousands and I'm terrified of the consequences, in this era of HIV. The beloved nation I once told my classmates (in 2000) that I was in no hurry leaving for greener pastures elsewhere wasted in one week, overcast with the dark shadow of death and gloom. Children, have lost the will to leave, men and women with no place to call home. We nolonger can look forward with eagerness for another sun to rise. The untold suffering.....our country a lost hope.Once beautiful cities, thriving, now lying in waste, burnt and ruined. Our ethnic affiliations more apparent like never before - today I overheard a sales executive with a bank telling his colleague that they can nolonger sell loans freely; customers keep asking what tribes they are, promptly cancelling their appointments. Sad indeed!
But thanks, thanks for this letter it truly captures my feelings as well and the feelings of other Kenyans. You know, its not about what positions Kibaki will dole out to Raila. Its not about enthinicity, its about Kenyans feeling cheated. They dread the arrogance, flippant statements and callousness, and the person we call the president - in a daze and amazed, completely out of touch. Truly, God should save Kenya. God Bless Kenya.
ECK...CHAIRMAN IS A HERO TO ME BALANCE IN OPNION AND CAN'T BE INTIMATED BY SO CALLED PENTAGON....THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE SO POPULAR...A GOOD LESSON FOR THEM AND COME 2012 THEY WILL FEEL IT MORE.
dont you think its time to have another French or Russian revolution? A lot of these corrupt dictators in Africa could do with the guillotine that would set an example for the rest. Barbaric?? Ask your self which is the barbaric......what is happening now or to put a stop to it once and for all!
Shame there is no oil in the country or else these two bullies would have been there in no time trying to sort your problems out.
My heart bleeds for you............thats about it.
WAKE UP KENYA.
Salim
Hey thought I was on your email list. Please make it happen that way do not hear you on KISS and have no idea what you are on about. Yes you captured the feeling of betrayal. But time is for people to do something that expresses how they feel without supporting any of the protagonists.
Heart Felt Feelings of the Kenyans put in words in real time We are proud of such Kenyan Patriot.
Kivuitus shameless & Blatant Arrogance - Can he walk the streets of Nairobi Alone Like we all do or People who keep sayn @Go to Court' I bet they will be Shreded {Raruaed} into pieces.
I Sympathize with the Kambas & the So Called Vice - President - 'Mr. Ajabu'
a pure Opportunist & selfish character trying to Usurp Power using the TRibal Card.
I Wonder how the Vatican conferred the position on that Tribally Tainted Cardinal with so much Allegiance to the Criminal elements.
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