Dear Mr President, pronounce yourself on the real ownership of Sondu town

Mr. President. Despite my umbilical cord being buried in Jimo village, West Seme Ward in Seme Constituency, I spent the larger part of my childhood growing up in the Miwani sugar belt, along the volatile inter-ethnic border of Muhoroni and Aldai Constituencies that delimits Kisumu and Nandi Counties, where my father worked as a Customs & Excise Officer at the Miwani Sugar Company.

It is here in 1992, when I was barely nine years old, that I first saw a poisoned arrow stuck in someone’s back.

Yet 1992 was supposed to be the year Kenyans were meant to celebrate their first ever elections where Kanu was not the only political party monopolising the ballot paper.

President Daniel Arap Moi, in his wisdom or lack of it, ostensibly under the immense pressure by influential foreign powers, had repealed the Section in our old Constitution that gave Kanu the patent rights over the political affairs of our country for almost 30 years after Kenya’s hard-fought independence from the suffocating chokehold of British colonial rule.

However, the hysterical euphoria that greeted the return of multiparty democracy in 1992 was not matched by political goodwill in parts of the country where the Moi voting machine was up against real political threat.

President Moi might have opened up the political space to ease up palpable tension between his struggling government and the stringent conditions imposed by the gritty donor community, alright, but that was the furthest he was going to cede his political ground in his desperate quest to maintain his iron-grip around the tightening neck of the collapsing political state.

Offering a level-playing field in the general elections that year, considering the country’s ecstatic mood, was definitely not in his favour and totally out of the equation.

Mr President. The lifelong trauma picked up from watching a bloody inter-ethnic scuffle is not the image you may want to hand over to a nine-year-old village boy growing up in Sondu, about a country you desire them to grow up loving and be patriotic about.

Since your Deputy prides your government as being composed of truthful men and prayerful women, it’s important that we address you in a language your government is fluent in: the language of brutal truth and honest feedback.

Mr President. Those of us who grew up watching our parents take cover under a hail of poisoned arrows amid desperate screams for help from the disinterested government administration that were complicit in the inter-ethnic mayhem, will tell you that the surest way to radicalise those perceived not to be in good books with the resident government is for your police and national government administrators to helplessly watch as our lives and property go up in flames under the cover of pitch darkness.

Mr President. The goodies you’re coming to dish out to the residents of Luo Nyanza during this weekend’s presidential tour will count for nothing if our hearts are still bleeding from the predictable violence unleashed on the residents of Sondu town prior to your state visit across the four Counties, times without number.

Unless you’ve given up on your Constitutional obligation on national cohesion and ethnic integration, the constant flare-ups in Sondu town and its sketchy environs poses a grave danger to your fragile image as a rising unifier of all ethnic Africans wherever they are found in the whole wide world.

Mr President. I have chosen to address you directly on this column this week, in a candid and forthright manner, because there is a general feeling among my people down in the villages of Luo Kavirondo, that those whom you entrusted with our community’s vision have not been looking you straight in the eye, partly because you’re rumoured to be a brick wall to divergent opinion and partly because our supposed vision-bearers in your circle are being motivated by other factors not related to servant leadership.

Mr President. The Luo Nyanza prefecture is awash with gallant sons and daughters who are immune to government oppression and have no qualms getting back into prison in defence of the common good. Let not the bipartisan talks currently going on at Bomas blur your vision, because the public discontent currently brewing down in the villages after watching the gory images coming from Sondu should be enough to cause you sleepless nights.

Mr President.

Since you started fronting yourself to the international community as the foremost protector of the African pride lands, the humble hustlers in Sondu have, at very least, been expecting that your humanitarian charity to the suffering people of Haiti could have begun at home in Sondu. However, your persistent silence is loud enough to all who have ears that you’ve left the people of Sondu at the humanitarian mercy of God as you evacuate your best trained police officers to please the international community in Haiti.

Mr President. Since you’re the only one who was given the sword on inauguration day, we have no option but to bend to your desire to leave the people of Sondu to their own devises, only that we have one last request, that you kindly take advantage of this latest Luo Nyanza trip to pronounce yourself, clearly and unequivocally, once and for all, on this perennial wound that has been festering in the bleeding hearts of Sondu residents for far too long.

If you feel Sondu is in Kericho County and the Luo of Nyakach should start relocating to higher grounds with immediate effect, you have the full executive authority to put a seal on it with a public pronouncement deep in your Nyanza tour and let the chips fall wherever they may.

The people of Kenya have never known you to be a stuttering coward when it comes to speaking your mind, and you’re not about to start being one today. Please, Mr President, open your heart on this Sondu matter during this Luo Nyanza tour, and let my people go.

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