Those Pushing for the Secession of the Coastal Strip from Mainland Kenya are Wrong

It is very true that the recent general elections in Kenya was a very bad and deeply divisive moment. Current bitter feelings about it emanates from the manner in which the elections were carried out, especially presidential elections. It was so un-procedural that the state security agencies and electoral bodies evidently failed to be neutral, credible and fair. These has left the losers with bad imaginations. One of them is governor Ali Hasan Joho of Mombasa County, he has joined the seventeen members of parliament from the coastal region pushing for secession of coastal province from mainland Kenya. This is obviously a political reaction to the entrenched culture of electoral fraud in Kenya. Such reactions are deeply emotional, they are not right and thus must be shunned by the politicians.

It is true that Kenya has now receded into an abyss of political decay, but we need the right approaches in our struggle against such failures of electoral democracy. An attempt to balkanize Kenya will bring more suffering to the people of Kenya. The unfortunate part of those pushing for secession in their efforts to punish Jubilee government is that electoral fraud and politics of discrimination is not only experienced at national level, even local politics is perpetrating discrimination.

The idea of secession was adopted in Nigeria, Zanzibar, Pakistan, and Southern Sudan as well as in most of other parts of the world but it did not work well. In such postmodern era of African politics being focused on confederation of the states of Africa into economically viable blocks, the idea of secession cannot help. What is to be done must be driven from the collective understanding that Kenya has now been rendered captive to a financial oligarch, an oligarch thathas also he become a political oligarch, in order to overcome such forces of tyranny, the true patriots to the Kenya’s course of struggle for inclusive and genuine governance must unite and keep on fighting, it is not going to be easy, it will take time, however the struggle must continue.

Alexander Opicho.

From Lodwar, Kenya.