Like the fish that first rots in the head, the Kenyan society started rotting from the lead- ership before the rot spread downward to ordinary people. The rot also starts from our minds before manifesting in our actions.
As Jesus said, “man does not live by bread alone,” man needs not just food but morality to survive. Like man, society without morality is dead. Kenyan society is morally dead. All the strange cases we hear and read about men and women having sex with beasts and chicken, wives and husbands killing their spouses and children whom they cannot feed, the mad behaviour of Kenyans motorists who lose their lives daily blocking and overtaking one another recklessly, driving at break-neck speeds, treating one another horribly in their offices and doing everything corruptly, are symptoms of the rot that is killing the nation today.
Long before Christianity and Islam, philosophers agued that so as not to die from corruption, societies must have ideals without which they would wither and die. Ideals may not be mastered a hundred per cent but are our guiding stars.
From the loss of what ideals is Kenya dying?
To begin with, society has lost the ideal of developing the mind to see the dire need for moral values. Without that vision from the mind, Kenyans cannot look for ideals to live by. They live by the jungle principle of survival of the fittest.
A man of ideals feels shame when he violates them. A man who will rape without shame is bereft of morality. Yet we see so many Kenyans who steal or lie and look people in the eye as if people are the culprit, not them. When a man loses shame, he is hardly human but a beast.
Have we become a nation of beasts?
We bear children without parental responsibility of rearing them. We promote discrimination, not equality. Leaders are masters and people slaves. We kill truth and promote falsehood. We get rich through thievery, not honesty. We prefer oppression to justice. We propagate ethnic hate, not love. We live more like beasts than human beings. For leaders we prefer lions, not sheep. We are our brother’s killer, not keeper. On the roads, instead of letting others go, we block them. We don’t assist, we put down. We don’t share, we scramble.
Instead of these moral ideals, Kenyan media is feeding people on sex and pornography on our TV screens. We complain but let some people in Mombasa and Nairobi open studios for pornography for local consumption and export, even as the government film commission previously and maybe currently, mandated to guard against porno trade, profit from it. Is it any wonder then that Kenyan men and women have sex with cows, donkeys, apes, dogs and other beasts?
When our politics say the end justifies the means, we license leaders to promote evil and violation of ideals to get power. We even jeer Jesus for his failure to enhance his political power by turning stone into bread, dropping himself into the arms of angels, inheriting half the world of Satan and beating back the soldiers that crucified him.
We feed our economic ambitions on appetite, desire, greed and corruption and when they succeed to make us rich, people admire, cheer and sing praise irrespective who we have ruined to make us wealthy.
Negative ethnicity is an immorality that our society, politics and religions promote to the extent of colouring almost everything that we say, do, feel or decide in regard to leadership and government. Consequently, negative ethnicity is a powerful terminator of political ideals like justice or sharing resources and power.
In our schools, education no longer teaches ethics to our children, to prepare them to live a life of harmony with other Kenyans when they leave school. Instead schools have become beehives of stealing, ethnic hating, fighting over food, negative competitions, never reaching out to help or being my brother’s keeper. In the race of life, no student will stop to pick another.
And what are the sources of our immoral values?
Parents teach their children to do whatever they must to get rich. Steal if they must as long as they do not get caught. They limit their children’s respect to themselves. They even teach children ethnic hate – not to visit, love or marry young persons from other communities.
Ethnic based politics and political parties teach no moral values at all to young people. They are all about wrestling and scrambling for power and resources against others.
Most media is held captive and managed by reporters, editors and owners who share moral bias against certain communities and believe in advancing interests of some against others. They promote equality, freedom, justice, exploitation, rights and love of some against others.
But the worst source of rot in our society today is the Christian church with many preachers hosting the gods of money and negative ethnicity. Worse than in the days of Martin Luther, professional and financial success, health, children and heaven are promised women who let them promote their seeds in them and all those who agree to plant money in their pastors.
Tragically, like the fish that first rots in the head, Kenyan society started rotting in our leaders before the rot spread downward to ordinary people. The rot also starts from our minds before manifesting in our actions.-
BY KOIGI WAMWERE
The Star
