Luo villages used to enjoy the naivety of human innocence and for a long time acted as the sanctuary for those running away from the vagaries of rapacious capitalism – not anymore. Thanks to new-age reporting tools and a free community media devoid of censorship, the age-old myth that those who spill blood among the Luo were cursed on sight and would die in ignominy is slowly getting busted. We’re sailing in uncharted waters, and the horizon is looking gloomy.
Deep in our villages, thuggery is increasingly getting normalised in every facet of human life, even security agencies hitherto enjoying the monopoly of violence have begun standing on their toes each time they preside over a social gathering of more than two where God is absent in their midst. These days, it’s not uncommon to witness families burying their kin in Luoland extracting budgetary concessions for hiring extra security especially for soft-life kin on the main tent who risk blinking twice and finding themselves halfway around the world in a makeshift stretchers fighting for their lives.
In truth, violence is not the fortified diet Luo foremothers weaned their children on those days when the earth was flat and honesty was still the best policy. The book of virtues currently used to socialise the Luo child has since undergone considerable revision and in it has come the erosion of a cultural identity that was forged in blood and built to last. Wealth at all costs is now the fuel that drives our automobiles, with the end justifying the means the road upon which we travel.
Sir Charles Ong’ondo Were is dead in circumstances that has attracted public disagreement and split political sentiment. The people of Kasipul might feel obligated to apologise for the gory narratives painting them as a volatile clan in headless chaos, but in a country increasingly getting inundated by endemic pestilence and ethnic hatred, the arc of the moral universe might be long but it looks unlikely to bend towards justice in the near future.
You have to fear for parents raising their children in this environment of normalised bloodshed where leadership no longer attracts mass reverence and life has since left the realm of the sacred. It’s not that Kenya is new to the manner in which Sir Charles has exited the worldly scene – far from it. Assassination of the Kenyan political elite has always targeted the crème of the political crop and met with unanimous public disapproval. Sir Charles had no ambitions beyond Homa Bay County – at the time of his exit – and posed no meaningful political threat to the barons inside the engine room where the 2027 political permutations are currently being run.
When the following day’s newspapers ran headlines showing Kenyans’ lack of empathy for his death and attributing the lack of remorse to a breakdown in humanity in our body politic, anyone reading from outside the country quickly comes to the conclusion that our collective humanity is slowly undergoing moral decay and a time is coming when everyone will be on their own.
We shouldn’t have arrived here in the first place. Even in failed states where citizens carry their hearts in their hands on a daily, there’s still a flash of hope that, with collective effort and political goodwill, they could return their hearts back to their chest for sustainable safekeeping.
We have to keep working at mending our social fabric however torn it may have become. Social cohesion might be an unpopular narrative to drive at a time nerve endings are constantly getting frayed and our politics has started heating up, but when the shedding of blood is no longer sufficient to jumpstart our collective conscience and the death of a leader is a cause for a party, you know the needle is halting towards diabolism and that’s precisely where those who do not have anything to lose would love us to settle at.
It has to start at the point where someone puts a stop to the mayhem by placing a higher price for every drop of blood that stains a shirt. It’s not easy bringing down the tower of Babel, especially in a country where those sitting on top of the pyramid are the ones who’d suffer the greatest pain in the aftermath of the crackdown.
Kenya might have been modelled around the comfort of the ruling class steeped in oppressing the poor but there comes a time when it will not matter who was right and who was wrong if we’re left with ashes in the name of a country.
You cannot play by the rules and come out with the short end of the stick; and still aspire to make gains using the same old unsuccessful trick. It used to work well those days when leaders were anointed by God and countries were sincerely driven by human welfare and protection of life and property as a bare minimum. The game’s changed (for the worse), and whoever is stuck with the morality rulebook as their guiding compass increasingly becomes endangered as a collective group, suffering unintended consequences that come with artless innocence.
There are two options as a way out. One, attain a successful conversion rate necessary to turn the country into a devilish outfit where everyone carries arms and swings them in-situ. Or two, reverse the malevolent gains in the nation’s conscience back to the centre where vice balances out with virtue. Those who love shortcuts will choose option one, while those who were born for sacrifice and utilitarianism will opt for the road less travelled in two.
As we gear up for the autopsy on Sir Charles next week and preparing for the backlash immediately afterwards, let it be said that there was a time the citizens of Kenya stood upright and reminded its leadership of the need to go back to their calling and become moral exemplars in esteem to the high offices they held in public trust.
Let this assassination provide a sobering reminder to those running for office that an appeaser is the one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.
