Rallies are constitutional, so why this frenzy of fear? - Comment
By L. Muthoni Wanyeki
Posted Saturday, July 5 2014 at 11:14
With the confirmation of the massive deployment of security personnel around Nairobi, it is clear that the Coalition for Reform and Democracy's Saba Saba rally is on.
The confirmation is a relief. Because political rallies only tend to degenerate into chaos, harassment of motorists and passers-by and looting of businesses — and, more worryingly, clashes at the community level of supporters and non-supporters — when the police move in to break up demonstrators with their batons, teargas and water cannon.
Or when organised supporters of the opposing side are allowed to disrupt rallies.
This is one fact that all those calling for calm — from the United Nations to the private sector to religious organisations — have ignored in their diagnosis of and predictions for the Saba Saba rally.
It is never the political rally that is the problem in and of itself. It is the reaction of the state security apparatus that is usually the problem. Together with unlawful attempts by supporters of the opposing side to disrupt the political rally.
In short, CORD is within its constitutional rights to hold the Saba Saba rally. It is as should be expected that the state and its security apparatus appreciate and uphold those constitutional rights.
That said, it is alarming to have witnessed the build-up to the rally. Flower farm and tea plantation workers who are not Gikuyu are streaming out of Naivasha and Kiambu.
There are unconfirmed reports of a Gikuyu mobilisation in Nairobi's low-income areas, as well as in Kiambu, Naivasha and Nakuru, evidenced in the circulation of leaflets warning Luo to leave.
Why? What is Gikuyu mobilisation for or against? How has it come to this? Here we come to the other fact that those calling for calm have also missed.
This is that the unrelenting belligerence, propaganda and shameless twisting of the facts by the Jubilant leadership and their supporters, including on social media, since the general election has achieved an alarming climax.
At the community level, many Gikuyu appear to believe that they have become the victims rather than the unwitting beneficiaries of our colonial and post-Independence systemic discrimination on ethnic grounds.
The script has been flipped. History has been erased. Together with any possibility of rational discussion on how to reverse the impacts of this systemic discrimination. Or on who the real beneficiaries have always been — the political leadership.
In relation to CORD's calls for national dialogue, the propaganda's purpose has been to portray it as seeking nothing short of a civilian coup. Is that what CORD is doing?
Does the Jubilant leadership believe its own propaganda? Or is it simply, through this propaganda — enthusiastically upheld by its supposed intellectuals — creating a buffer of support among its supporters? By whipping those supporters into a frenzy of fear?
By creating group-think in a manner that will, ultimately, ensure its predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people are afraid, they react, but not sensibly.
The country is unstable. It is so not because CORD is calling for national dialogue and holding rallies. It is so because the messaging from the Jubilant leadership — for a whole year — has been so over-the-top and way-out-there. It has to stop. At the community level, the costs are simply too high.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International's regional director for East Africa. This column is written in her personal capacity.
