Let the people decide fate of village elders

The annual pilgrimage back to the villages to witness the resurrection of Jesus is back on this weekend. Unlike the previous years, the weatherman has warned those coming to the Western reaches of Kenya to travel heavy on warm wear and light on sinful intention, as the whole country waits for the guy who opened the taps in heaven to find the padlocks to the floodgates.

You’ve got to look no further in your quest to understand why Kenyans waste no time jumping onto the next available jalopy back to the villages. The village is where the human mind comes alive. You get attuned to nature, the atmosphere is calm. Even when a neighbour’s dog overcomes its leash and visits yours for consultation, you can see the chemistry on display unlike the physics among canines separated by fortified perimeter walls in the concrete jungles in mother cities.

Dogs are a man’s best friend, and the surest way to measure the deterioration of human relationships is to study how dogs living around a common neighbourhood relate with each other. Village dogs still have the olfactory sense to sniff inside rabbit holes and flush out fresh game meat – usually after a brief dustup with queen ants manning the door. They also hunt in packs, are amenable to an unannounced change of strategy, bark only when danger is within touching distance, and can return to base without the aid of a tracking compass. 

Villages, therefore, are the perfect breeding grounds for grit and mettle – for both man and machine. You’re closer to nature, in tune with fresh air, can walk to work, and observe a nutritionally diverse diet on a budget. The lower cost of living in the villages has been attributed to reduced stress levels which ultimately leads to a higher quality of life. If I’m painting a rosy picture about life down in the greenery, it’s because I’m currently sitting under a tree experiencing it firsthand.

If life in the rural hamlets is this tranquil and heavenly, then why is the government of Kenya currently rummaging the villages with loudspeakers asking us to avail ourselves at the chief’s camp to advise them on how best they can make the work of village elders easier – you may ask?

Gatekeeping role

Ordinarily, our villages should be your quintessential egalitarian society where community members view each other as equals and treat each other as such – they share intrinsic values and beliefs about fairness, social justice and a strong sense of community. Whenever problems arise in societies like these, solutions are found among the panel of the wise – gatekeepers of culture.

However, this homeostatic balance has always made problems in the villages appear smaller than they actually are. The Ministry of Interior says it’s the reason they’re on a mission to review the welfare of village elders to bring honour and dignity back to the gatekeeping role.

The number of those in disagreement with the need to dignify the living conditions of village elders diminishes with every kilometer you cover as you get your dog out of its prison cage in the city for the freedom of the village this Easter; and if you’re one of those who twitch their noses at the sight of villagers who do not match the class of your lifestyle, woe unto you if your dog trespasses into a neighbour’s compound to relieve itself due to lack of pet sanitary facilities in your village house that last saw water during the Mau Mau uprising.

Village squabbles can be downright petty and arrantly dangerous to those living in a bubble and cannot communicate in rudimentary mother tongue to save their lives. Your answer to a simple inquisition like, “why did your exotic dog discharge urea on my doormat” could either end up with a bloodied nose or a broken jaw depending on your proximity to a safe house.

This is where the village elder comes in to save the Law Society of Kenya from writing demand letters. The Ministry of Interior says village elders have been the first line of defense for victims of social injustice, often times at ungodly hours, without fair compensation for the inconvenience. You would be of unsound mind to argue with that. 

Village Elders Policy

For as long as I can remember, village elders have been the respected conservators of community life – entrusted with interpretation of cultural norms, guiding intergenerational moral conduct, and holding families together with elderly wisdom, mutual respect, and selfless sense of patriotic duty. Yet this thankless service has for a long time been taken for granted, gone unrecognized, remained invisible and uncompensated, and excluded from mainstream government bureaucracy. The Village Elders Policy – currently the talk of the town in the village – seeks to change all that, albeit sixty years late.

In there are a raft of far-reaching proposals the government believes will formalise the working arrangement between village elders and the communities they serve and recognise villages as units of national governance. If the policy is adopted in-toto, all villages shall undergo fresh mapping and gazettement each with an official database for effective planning of and intervention by government programmes.

The government is promising to facilitate village elders in their daily discharge of official duty, motivate them to take care of their communities with love, respect and cohesion; build their capacity to explore alternative dispute resolution mechanisms that foster good neighbourliness and peaceful coexistence in line with Kenyan laws, and periodically sensitive the elders on government programmes to encourage community buy-in, monitoring and evaluation.

On their part, the policy puts the burden of identification, vetting and recommendation of elders on the shoulders of the respective communities, who will conduct this exercise through a public participation process at a community site accessible to all. The communities will also be expected to hold the village elders accountable.

When the drafters of the Constitution 2010 began the preamble by acknowledging the people of Kenya as the body supreme without whom the government of Kenya would cease to exist, placing the responsibility to decide their relationship with the elders back to the community is a sure step at buttressing this supremacy of the people, and taking the power away from the mandarins in Nairobi and back in their hands. By doing so, the Ministry has attempted to meet the people halfway in the quest to determine how they’d desire to relate with government. This is exactly what the late Kenneth Matiba intended, when he famously remarked, “let the people decide.”