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One of the most difficult things to do in analysing this week’s momentous events, is to evaluate any outcome in terms of winners and losers.
It does seem, to loosely cite Shakespeare, that in this sorrowful aftermath, a plague afflicted both our houses.
As you will recall, the magisterial Prince Escalus performed the daunting task of surpassing the superlative elegance of the verse in which the lines of the drama were rendered, while delivering himself of assessments that served to underline and anchor the thematic thrust of Romeo and Juliet.
At the beginning of the play, he characterises the bloody mayhem in the city of Verona, as a ‘civil brawl’, bred of an ‘airy word’, between the antagonistic clans have ‘disturbed the quiet of our streets’, causing its stubbornly peace-loving citizens to take up weapons in order to pacify the stubbornly bloodthirsty protagonists.
For our post-independence political history, which epochs are analogous to the three civil brawls? Arguably the struggle for restoration of multi-party democracy would be one, as would the agitation for a new constitution.
The third is definitely going to be the Gen-Z campaign, as long as it manages to define itself as a righteous crusade to revisit our social contract and align taxation with efficient government guided by servant-leadership and a citizen-centered ethos, and not pandemonium for its own sake, to indulgence the subversive id of reflexive anarchists.
Gen-Z disenchantment
The climax of the struggle for the restoration of democracy was a long bloody decade, beginning in 1982 and ending about 1992, while the fight for a new constitution culminated in the catastrophic ignition of intersecting historic, systemic, structural socioeconomic and political accelerants that for decades had been distilled by a dystopian dispensation wrought by a disastrously mutated constitution.
There is no telling for sure for now, yet at the same time, it appears that the Gen-Z revolt is likewise a culmination of disenchantment patiently voiced for long and resolutely ignored, voices that have struggled to be heard with great determination, yet thwarted and marginalised with equal persistence, and grievances relentlessly canvassed, which have been cruelly denied.
A view that has been projected by national consensus is directed at the dissonance between the government’s current drive to enhance domestic revenue mobilisation through more robust tax measures as well as the enforcement of austerity measures, and tawdry displays of opulence by its political luminaries.
It is generally felt that such spectacular extravagance as has been exhibited by an elite clique of politicians, is not only contemptuous of the government’s stated position on austerity and frugality with the public purse, it also constitutes gratuitous mockery of the majority of citizens struggling daily to get by on meagre yet hard-won provisions.
Most pertinently, the protests have amplified the critique that only rampant corruption and wanton impunity could have made it possible for public officials to afford the ostentatious endowment implied by their indulgence in Kenya’s VIP culture.
In a land where the wealthiest people are generally associated with politics and the civil service and not innovation and enterpreneurship, a highly informed and increasingly assertive public is not only skeptical about their leaders’ commitment to a governance that caters for the well-being of all, and not opportunities for a well-connected few.
Wastage and corruption
Most concerningly, what this means in the broader context is that the president’s consistent pledges to be vigilant against wastage and corruption, and to conduct government as a responsible steward of public resources, have not only been severely undermined by the vulgarity of his putative associates who congregate every weekend to stage coordinated mockery of a commitment that is foundational to the credibility of his agenda.
The Gen-Z agitation, therefore, highlighted the power of issue-based protest, and the potential of well-organised citizenry to deploy public participation in furtherance of developmental aspirations.
It is certainly tragic that in this moment, there lay, and still lies, a very real danger of malevolent agencies abusing the bona fides of protesters in order to foment subversion and catastrophic descent of well-meaning demonstrations or even angry but peacable revolt, into horrible bedlam.
Protest is legitimate, and a fundamental component of democratic expression. There must be a formula for disentangling peaceful protest from the sinister machinations of seditious felons, and the praedacious enterprises of ruffians. In order for protest to retain both its legitimacy and effectiveness, it must be sanitised.
As matters stand, many Kenyans who have been maimed and molested, or looted and robbed to bankruptcy will remain disenchanted with the very idea of peaceful protest, even when they entirely sympathise with its stated goals. We must find this formula, it is morally inadmissible for protesters to be as rapacious as those they claim to condemn.
To use Escalus’ epilogue:
“A gloomimg peace this morning with it brings,/ The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head,/ Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things,/ Some shall be pardoned, and some punished,/ For never was a story of more woe,/ Than this…”
The writer is an Advocate of the High Court
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Publish date : 2024-06-28 21:04:00
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Author : africa-news
Publish date : 2024-06-28 22:58:04
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.