Why I wrote “End the propaganda, Jubilee!”

By +Betty Njoroge Twitter @BettyWaitherero 

It started with 11 girls and a dog from Mombasa, and then a man and a Cow from Kiambu County and then a man and a dog, a man with a donkey, a man with another cow, a man with a chicken and then two men with goats.

The Kenyan mainstream Media which only weeks ago were broadcasting somewhat relevant news, albeit heavily bent on politics had now degraded itself to lewd stories of alleged bestiality. All of this was triggered by a “cup of tea” meeting at Statehouse.

I am just an ordinary Kenyan, broke, out of regular work and Kikuyu. I watched in 2007/08 while ordinary Kenyans like me were slaughtered by militia in the post election violence. This wasn’t the first time there was politically instigated violence in this country; in fact, every single county in Kenya periodically runs violent whenever some politician wants to exert or gain power.

We live in a country that is called an “Island of peace” in a conflict region, but the truth is Kenya is NOT peaceful. We don’t live in peace. Us, the ordinary, broke, out of work Kenyans.

I started getting this boiling sensation in my gut when the campaigns for presidency began. Note that the campaigns for the other electoral posts were never as bitter, hateful or malicious. My stomach churned every time a candidate would make utterances that were ethnically divisive, hateful and derogatory against an entire ethnic community simply because his rival came from that community.

Firstly, I believe that going to elections in a country that is so divided is endorsing a farce. Secondly, I believe that the electorate as a whole should have rejected the ballot because of the divisive people on that ballot. Lastly, when 93% of Kenyans voted ethnically, for their own ethnic representatives, that was NOT democracy.

This is a nation fragmented to its very core; the politics are of hatred, ethno-centrism and bigotry. It doesn’t matter what your ethnicity is, you voted like a bigot when you choose not who you knew was the best suited person but the person who was from your tribe, or allied to your tribe. There is no democracy in Kenya because the political parties have no ideologies and no system of inclusiveness and the legal system via its laws encourage extreme division by allowing coalitions.

You would have imagined that allowing coalitions would bring people together, right? But actually what the coalitions or alliances allowed was parties that were inherently ethnic and certainly not national to join forces with other ethnic parties and present a façade of being national in nature. In the past one year we have seen the very depths of hell displayed by some MPs hopping from political party to political party all in the hope of using that to engineer their return to power.

In 2007, 60% of the MPs voted into parliament were new i.e. they were not part of the previous parliament. By 2011, 100% of these MPs had passed legislations to allow themselves more perks, allowances, privileges and the chance to hop from party to party as they wished.

It’s already August 2013. The presidential campaign period is over. Barely one month after being sworn in MPs demanded that they receive the same pay as the previous parliament even though this was a new constitution and a new government and system in transition.  Majority of these MPs represent the Jubilee coalition and indeed Jubilee constitutes the current government even though at the moment of this uttermost betrayal, all MPs were united in their greed and perversion.

6 months after the elections, the Jubilee government has nothing to show in terms of actual results. They can’t sustain their campaign promises of free laptops or free maternity, or jobs for the youth. They are not interested in fulfilling promises, that much is clear. So instead of trying to pretend they are working, they try to distract the nation, by luring the media and telling us lecherous tales of bestial sex.

In all this, to add to the tactic of diverting attention, the Government Spokesman chooses to take what appears to be a personal and emotive stand against Raila Odinga to the next level. “Raila Odinga’s politics are arrogant, chest thumping, hateful and toxic.”

Toxic. We have a nation where 50% of the population did NOT vote for the president. In an exam if a child gets 50% that is a mere C. Why should a government with a C grade brag or abuse others? Where does the government spokesman get off insulting the opposition when he is NOT an elected official? How can a government representative address the whole nation in this manner?

Yet we are divided, we are not united. Even if we are all poor, half of us are smug bigots and the other half are silently resentful bigots. My country Kenya is a country in political conflict, and in many parts of the country this political conflict explodes in perennial violence.

Toxic. The propaganda and absolute drivel spewing out of Jubilee government is TOXIC, HATEFUL, CHEST THUMPING and ARROGANT.

I love my country. Very much so, I had to do something to switch of the flow of toxicity bursting out of the mouths of undeserving, childish and deviant people. To tell the country, I love you and I will stand up to these sewer rats. 

And so, that’s why I wrote the article.