Keep the Civil Servants Out of this!

By Lukoye Atwoli
Published in the Sunday Nation 15 February 2009, page 23

This past week, the Grand Coalition government continued in its bumbling ways. Despite the deafening silence over the issue of ‘constitutional office holders’ and MPs paying tax, the government has now moved to ask civil servants to ‘donate’ a tenth of their March salaries to a fund meant to alleviate the suffering of hungry Kenyans. The same fund is meant to create opportunities for jobless youth among other ‘brilliant’ government ideas!
As many commentators have already repeated ad nauseum, this government has completely lost the plot. Once again they are turning to the hapless civil servant who is carrying the huge burden of taking care of his or her own family as well as many other people who are either relatives or close friends. Apart from the huge tax burden placed upon the self-same civil servant, a further levy of ten percent will be imposed on them next month.
Once this practice is accepted, nobody knows where it will end. Next time the dykes of Budalang’i break and river Nzoia floods its basin, the government may turn once again to its loyal employees and impose some new tax in the form of a ‘contribution’ to help those affected. Soon any tragedy will result in some form of taxation to help deal with the crisis.
Indeed it should not come as a surprise when a national ‘benevolence fund’ is set up, quite apart from the regular tax regime, to provide funds to help finance national mourning in case some self-important potentate chokes on his sumptuous dinner and kicks the proverbial bucket!
It should not be lost on Kenyans that a number of ministers in this same government have refused to pay taxes, questioning why they should pour their money into a veritable bottomless pit whose use they are not sure of. Some even went as far as saying that they would only pay tax when they are sure the money will go back to their own constituencies! Turning back to Kenyans and assuming they have the memories of mosquitoes is the height of insensitivity on the part of our politicians.
These same Kenyans are now buying maize meal at prices that have never been seen in the history of this country as a result of outright theft by those charged with the responsibility of maintaining a strategic grain reserve. The same Kenyans are paying extortionate amounts of money for fuel and transport because the political class has colluded with thieving businessmen to steal oil and profit from the misery of the majority.
Law-abiding citizens are now expected to increase their tax ‘contribution’ to over forty percent, while their rulers philanthropically give a paltry ten percent of their hefty pay to the same cause. One politician even went as far as to suggest that his constituents were poor and miserable as a result of paying taxes, and he had no desire to join them in their poverty!
It does not take a tax specialist to calculate how much money would be raised every month were KRA allowed to tax the incomes of MPs and all those legally exempted from paying tax. This would be raised in perpetuity, and not just in one month. Notwithstanding the itchy fingers of our ruling class, it is a sure bet the money would go a long way in alleviating the suffering of millions of Kenyans perennially faced with starvation.
Kenyans should give considerable thought to boycotting this latest attempt at robbery in broad daylight, and continue channeling their philanthropy away from this kleptocratic regime, helping their starving relatives and neighbours as they have always done. As long as the ‘contribution’ remains voluntary, we should let the political class shoulder this burden all on their own.

Prayer and Begging Can't Be our Policy

Story By Dr Lukoye Atwoli

(Edited Version published Sunday Nation 08 February 2008, Page 20)

Last week, following the Sachang’wan fire disaster which came hot on the heels of the Nakumatt fire, the government came out guns blazing and declared that the survivors of these incidents would get the ‘best care available in the country’, in the words of the Prime Minister. Foreign medics were promised to help treat those with severe injuries. Five days of official mourning were quickly declared, and Kenyans were exhorted to pray and seek divine intervention in these trying times.

Later, the government set up a ‘fund’ to raise money for survivors of both incidents in a tacit recognition of the fact that there is no coherent policy to tackle the poverty that continues to spread remorselessly across the country.

These responses by the government betray a system tottering on the brink of collapse. Promising the ‘best available care’ to survivors of a disaster while the rest of the citizenry suffer under a system of healthcare that seems to function despite the best efforts of government is callous at best!

Going out to beg for money mostly from the tax-paying public to fund emergency health care is a terrible indictment of a government that has failed to provide for a system of universal health care that would have taken care of the majority of the citizenry in times of need. Noises are only made about such a system during the election cycle, but it is soon forgotten once the politicians are safely in power.

Instead of dealing with the real causes of the incidents, such as a failure to ensure public safety in the Nakumatt case, and complex interplay of road safety, greed, poverty and security failures in the Sachang’wan case, the government chose to play safe and ask Kenyans to mourn the dead and pray for the living!

Indeed those responsible for the failures that resulted in these incidents are sleeping soundly with no threat of litigation or public opprobrium in the unlikely event that their failures are exposed. It is a fair certainty that after all mea culpas and attendant rituals, nobody will be held responsible for any of the incidents.

It is all good and proper to pray and ask God for divine guidance, but this cannot become a national policy in the event of every problem we face. It is a practice that indicates a lack of planning and preparation for multiple eventualities. It exposes leaders who got into government expecting fun and games, and faced with unfavorable conditions, they discover they have no idea how to handle the situation.

A government whose idea of disaster intervention is to turn to prayer and declare several days of national mourning has no business governing. As a society, we set up government in order for it to deal with the difficult times and the disasters that we face from time to time. Most people would have absolutely no problem taking care of the good times.

It follows therefore that a government that does not know how to handle the tough times and crises needs to go back to the electorate, confess their ineptitude and allow the citizens to elect a new team to run the country.

It is time Kenyans faced up to the reality that most of the post-Moi era has been a wasted opportunity. The optimism that greeted the NARC government was misplaced, and the Grand Coalition extension of that mistake is even worse than its predecessor. It is tottering from crisis to crisis without a game plan, and perhaps it is time we ended this experiment and moved on to better things.

It is time for the emergence of a new crop of leaders who have a comprehensive vision of the sort of future they want for their children and grand-children. It is time we conceptualized a government devoid of these cognitively challenged Neanderthals and their cronies, and thought up a system where values matter, and parties stand for something. If it turns out to be too difficult for us to imagine this, let us then at least turn to individuals who actually believe in something, and who will take responsibility for their failures.

Let us move beyond ‘leaders’ who threaten the entire nation with disintegration whenever their names are mentioned in any way that reflects negatively on their character and record. We must also brush aside those whose only claim to leadership is the invocation of their ethnic pedigree.

It is said that true leaders are forged in times of crisis. Nature has handed us many crises, and unless we take advantage of them and shake up our system of governance, we are doomed to bequeath the next generation with worse leaders than the ones we have today.

Greed is the genesis of our national crises

By LUKOYE ATWOLI
Sunday Nation 25 January 2008, Opinion Page 10

Once again millions of Kenyans find themselves facing a food shortage and famine cutting right across the country.

At another time it will be floods we are grappling with, or urban gangsterism, grand corruption and so on and so forth.

The politicians we elected and fought for are the same fellows who have presided over national famines and other crises for most of our independence years, and they have had no new brilliant ideas in dealing with the current situation.

Rosy policies still populate the shelves of government ministries, and many more are gathering dust at our research institutes.

Indeed the Prime Minister recently intimated that another conference was planned in the next few weeks to come up with strategies for dealing with national crises without resorting to destructive behaviour.

IT SEEMS MANY IN GOVERNMENT BELIEVE that the reason we have many crises nationally is because of a lack of good ideas.

The country is facing a famine not because of lack of great ideas to prevent it. We do not have periodic ethno-political crises because of a lack of innovative solutions to disagreements.

We do not have outbreaks of urban gangsterism due to a lack of comprehensive policies to deal with the problems faced by urban youth.

These problems can almost certainly be traced to greed and lack of long-term vision and imagination on the part of key decision-makers and politicians.

Our ‘leaders’ do not have the capacity to imagine a future without them in positions of power and authority.

They lack the ability to think beyond their own satisfaction and that of their immediate relatives.

Every time they see some idle resources, they start fabricating plans to exploit them for personal gain.

For the avoidance of doubt, it should be clarified that these leaders are not aliens from some distant planet imposed upon us from on high. They are our own fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters.

Their values were forged in the same crucible as those of the majority of Kenyans. Their hopes and desires go hand in hand with those of their constituents.

That is the only way one can explain why election after election, even when the so-called ‘‘old guard’’ are replaced by young blood, their agenda remains the same —me-first, everything else later.

This reflects the mentality of most Kenyans, and the evidence is all around us — on the roads, in queues, in schools and in the media. Few are willing to follow laid-down procedures, and everyone is looking for a way to get ahead of the pack, even when it involves hurting many others in the process.

Applying this greedy mentality to all our endeavours means that we believe we can excel at everything without involving anyone else, including experts.

Thus all of us believe we can successfully engage in farming, carry out business (usually involving owning a neighborhood kiosk or a matatu), and manage real estate.

This has resulted in unsustainable small-scale farming and businesses that are subject to the vagaries of weather and the political climate.

ONE MUSICIAN DESCRIBED OUR COUNTRY as ‘nchi ya watu wadogo’ (a nation of ‘small’ people), and his words are borne out daily by our attitudes and behaviour.

It is time we stopped lashing out at others as the source of our trials and tribulations, and faced up to our own responsibilities. Before pointing fingers, we must first answer the question ‘‘do we really want change?’’

If indeed we are interested in changing our country, then there is no shortage of solutions developed by experts, ready to be implemented.

For instance, to deal with periodic famines, an agriculture policy that encourages specialisation and large-scale farming should be dusted up and implemented.

Not everyone can be a successful farmer, just like not everyone can be an engineer, lawyer or medical doctor!

We must also stop trashing expert opinions in favour of populist edicts if we want to get out of this cycle of mostly self-inflicted calamities.

Weather experts predicted the current drought months ago, but nobody took them seriously at the time and planned for it.

In much the same way experts have pointed at questionable quality second-hand car spare parts as the cause of most of our road accidents, but they are castigated in the interests of populism and political expediency.

IF WE ARE REALLY INTERESTED IN CHANGE, we must take matters into our own hands and become the change we want to see in our country.

We must be ready to make difficult decisions that may not benefit us directly, but will make the future brighter for the coming generations.

Dr Lukoye Atwoli is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Lecturer at Moi University’s School of Medicine in Eldoret Lukoye@gmail.com

If we forget our past, we are bound to repeat it

By Lukoye Atwoli

Daily Nation Tuesday 30 December 2008, Page 11

One year ago this month, Kenya went to the polls with the hope that we would begin the new year with a new set of occupants in Parliament brimming with new ideas and plans for the nation.

Instead, as the year closed, reports of widespread killings, looting and breakdown of law and order flooded the local and international media.

Kenyans spent New Year’s eve huddled in their homes digesting the import of the latest rumour doing the rounds via mobile phone text messages and FM radio stations, and woke up on the first day of 2008 to reports of mass murder and arson in the North Rift, with churches and schools not being spared.

Many believed the end had come, and those that could, escaped to the relative safety of neighbouring countries. Others ran to the nearest police stations and churches to seek succour, while young men banded together to defend whatever was left of their families and property.

Although ethno-political flare-ups have been common in Kenya’s election cycle during this pluralist era, January to February 2008 must rank up there with the worst periods in our history.

It would, therefore, be the height of folly for us to move into the next year without pausing for a moment to remember what happened after our elections.

Though this collective amnesia would just be a continuation of our national character of “forgive and forget” when we are fearful of confronting the unpleasant realities of our past, this time, we must gather the courage to face this particular demon and say to its face: “Never Again!”

We must remember what happened last year to begin the process of exorcising this curse of so-called political violence that repeatedly rears its ugly head every time there is some sort of political contest in this country.

As the philosopher Santayana says, ‘‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and Kenyans should not delude themselves that they can move to build a future without interrogating their past.

Commemoration of tragic events in a nation’s past is one way of reducing the chances of their recurrence. It would therefore be a double tragedy for this country if after so much death and destruction we also learn nothing from the conflagrations of January.

It is necessary that the agencies involved in the humanitarian response to the post-election violence come up with a way for us to keep it in our memory for as long as it takes to ensure that a repeat is practically impossible.

The Government must designate a day when we remember the long dark night of terror that Kenya endured.

A date in late December or early January should be designated the Day of Remembrance for all those who lost their lives, limbs or property.

If this is not done urgently, it is a guarantee that as soon as the politicians engineer some other crisis to distract the citizenry, the lessons of the 2007 election will be forgotten.

Commemoration will also remind those that are still struggling to rebuild their lives that the nation has not forgotten, and that we have collectively vowed never to go down that road again.

Our children will begin to develop a new morality, where it is not acceptable to hack your neighbour to death and burn his house just because you happen to have different political views or surnames.

If our political establishment is reluctant to remember this period for obvious reasons, then civil society organisations must take it upon themselves to maintain it on our national consciousness.

A day of peaceful processions and messages of peace would be a fitting reminder of what we went through.

Celebration of our diversity would also be a useful way to keep us focused on the project of nation-building that began when we acquired a national political consciousness and resolved to eject the colonial government and replace it with majority rule.

Dr Lukoye Atwoli is a consultant psychiatrist and lecturer, Moi University School of Medicine, Eldoret

Petition for Kenyan MPs to Pay Tax

Dear Kenyans,
The time is coming when EVERYONE will have to take a stand on issues of national importance. I don't know about you, but for me the time arrived when our presumably progressive government decided that it was an offence to wear a black T-shirt with inscription exhorting our MPs to pay tax, and asking for implementation of the Waki report on Post-election violence.
As a first step in dealing with this slide into authoritarianism and collusion between most of the important organs of government- the Executive, the Legislature (and maybe even the judiciary- judges too do not pay tax!), I think it is important for all Kenyans to demonstrate solidarity with on Michael Otieno who has filed a suit in the High court against the Kenya Revenue Authority asking that MPs' salaries and allowances be taxed to the fullest extent of the applicable tax laws.
You can get involved by going to www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?PETN756&251 and getting enjoined in the suit.
You can also get a black T-shirt and stand ready for a Million-Person Black T-shirt March on Parliament, State House and the High Court whenever the opportunity presents itself.
You can also contact me with your ideas on what you think needs to be done on lukoye@gmail.com.
Let us 'Be the Change we want to see in our country'!