Celebrating Barack Obama's win

The euphoria with which Barack Obama’s presidential victory in the 2012 US elections was met with in Kenya got me thinking. Here we were in Kenya and like millions around the world,  excited and ecstatic about the goings on thousands of miles away in the USA. Is it because we have seen that someone from a minority with great oratorical skills, a political novice at that, can be the president of the only remaining super power in the world today? Probably, but it is more likely that he has galvanized us by his organizational skills, his focus on the changes he intends to bring to the US economy and his agenda for the American people and probably the fact that he comes across as one of us who values the family unit and has no skeletons in his closet having revealed all way before his historic victory in 2008. Barack is also a scion of one of us with Kenyan ties and Kenyan bloodlines and deserves to be celebrated if for no other reason than this.

We are also about to embark on our own elections in 2013 in our own little enclave called Kenya though serious campaigning has been going on for months now. Would we react with the same deliriousness if Ruto or Uhuru won next year’s presidential election? Knowing that the duo are gung ho on being on the ballot paper come election day in 2013 while they are suspects with crimes against humanity charges awaiting their trail at the Hague gives me goose bumps if any of them were to win.

What would we be celebrating if any of them were to win?  We would be celebrating a hollow victory, a win for impunity and a win for a lame duck president already a pariah in the eyes of the international community. We would be announcing to the world just how short sighted and petty we Kenyans can be allowing a criminal suspect to masquerade as a leader of a country and at its very pinnacle as a president. We would be saying that we prefer that the rule of the jungle overrides the very constitution that we fought so hard for since 1990 and that our President then swore to defend before a multitude of Kenyans and the world at large in 2010.

We would be the nation talked about as being the most hopeful in 2002 but the most hopeless in 2013 having extinguished our hopes and dreams at the pyre of self-interest and intense tribal emotions. Where the lure of the filthy lucre ‘cash’ and ‘greed’ infected all of us and imbued in us an uncanny penchant to act foolishly and disingenuously, begging to be the laughing stock of the world our past achievements rendered irrelevant.

From our world beating sports men and women, to MPESA that has revolutionalized money payment systems internationally, to James Mwangi who has led Equity Bank to the pinnacle of success and won international accolades for his visionary style of running a business, to Wangari Maathai a winner of the Nobel Prize (may god rest her soul in peace), to an economy at the brink of super expansion with recent discoveries of vast quantities of oil and other valuable minerals, to our world beating free Primary Education among other achievements, everything would count for nothing.

Future generations would accuse us of selling our souls to the devil for 30 pieces of silver and our history would be most tainted with tome upon tome written of a corrupt and inept populace that believed in the rhetoric that of the many unblemished presidential candidates in 2013 our choice was restricted to one of two that had a pending case of crimes against humanity at the international criminal court and whom we sanitized through the ballot box by electing him the president to rule over us from the Hague!

We would be thumbing our noses at our business and development partners telling them to get lost and stay out of our internal matters and shouting from the roof tops about our sovereignty and the right to govern ourselves away from the prying eyes of 'foreigners' and other ‘tourists’.

With our celebration of a presidential win by either of the duo we would be wiping away any meaningful legacy that we would have bequeathed to future generations of Kenyans and be consigning ourselves to the eternal hell and damnation that would be Kenya, since local and international crooks would find a safe haven to perpetrate their dastardly deeds secure in the knowledge that impunity and corruption have found a willing house mate and the rule of law has been effectively thrown out of the window!

Many do not like to hear the truth but I hang my head in shame when I think that this could well be what awaits Kenyans  after the 2013 elections.

I pray that the lords of impunity including their hangers on and allied associates get a resounding trouncing at the ballot box for even imagining that they will rule over us!