FREEDOM IS AROUND THE CORNER

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in a Country like Kenya is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach.

The glow comes from watching people lose their fear and be willing to take enormous risks to assert, not a particular ideology, but the most human of emotions: the quest for dignity, justice and the right to shape one’s own future. I was skimming through the various social sites on Tuesday morning — just as the medical workers strike was gathering momentum. Despite the fact that medical services minister issued an ultimatum that all workers return to work. A simple rule: Whenever 120,000 people gather to rally for rights — and they don’t fear being sacked and rendered jobless — take it seriously.

The minister and govt. spokesman were predicting that only a small crowd would brave going against the grain. They were wrong, and it underscores something that a lot of cynics regarding these awakening movements and strikes just don’t get. They’re like earthquakes or volcanoes. They are totally natural phenomena, and they emerge from a very deep place in people’s souls. Those mounting them are not sitting around calculating the odds of success before they start. They just happen. Anyone who thinks that workers representatives could have cut a deal with the medical services ministry without consulting the workers is as delusional as anyone who thinks COTU is behind the workers protests against the Government. We’re all spectators, watching an authentic human wave.

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.

Take KBC (Kenya Broadcasting Corporation alias Kazi Bila Chakula). I have no doubt that many of the journalists mounting the uprising against the management — which is dominated by political appointees and demagogues — are propelled by a quest for an independent and pluralistic state broadcaster . But have no illusions: Some are also working at the behest of their political masters seeing this as their chance to have government machineries and parastatals at their machinations. Where win-win democratic and right aspirations stop in Kenya and rule-or-die sectarian fears begin is very hard to untangle.

With good reason. There is a lot of pent-up anger there. The Wealthy elite has run Kenya as a protectorate since pre-colonial at the behest of poor workers.

Does it have a future without them? Can this multi-sectarian population democratically rule itself, or does it crack apart? No one can predict. The kenyan workers are divided, by sects, by politics, by region, by insiders and outsiders. We need to support them, provided they come together on a pluralistic reform agenda. Political leaders owe that to the brave unions who have taken on the government bare-handed. The only chance of the government agreeing to some kind of meaningful remunerations, and not payment of peanuts, is if it is faced with a real united workers union. It’s also the only hope for stabilizing the weakening shilling and an economy sliding into recess.

This will be hard. You can’t have a country without workers , and you can’t have workers without trust — without trust that everyone will be treated with equality under the law, no matter who is in power, and without trust in a shared vision of what kind of society people are trying to build.

Kenya is not vis-à-vis to America; America has that kind of trust because the country started with a shared idea that attracted the people. The borders came later. In most of the African states awakening today, the borders came first, drawn by foreign powers, and now the people trapped within them are trying to find a shared set of ideas to live by and trust each other with as equal citizens.

Nigeria shows how hard it is to do that — the Christian-Muslim divide still cuts very deep — but Nigeria also shows that it is not impossible.

We often forget how unusual Kenya is as a self-governing, pluralistic society. We democratically removed a regime that had been in power for twenty four years then replaced it with one we had trust in, and now we are considering replacing it at a time when ethnic animosity is rife. Who in the world does that? Not many, especially in Africa. Yet, clearly, many people here now deeply long to be citizens — not all, but many. If the government has any hope of a stable future, we need to bet on them.