Dear Kenyan Law-makers Don’t Criminalize Poor People For Thinking About Their Poverty

History of politics charges parliamentary attitude towards human problems with ‘intellectual vulgarity’. This charge has not been false accusation; there is enough evidence all over the world showing ever present mediocrity in parliamentary decisions whenever it comes to upholding dignity of the poor through good governance. Currently, this tradition of parliamentary cretinism is now evident in the bill under debate before the parliament of Kenya seeking to criminalize Kenya’s poor people thinking about their poverty. In the bill, it is suggested that any person in Kenya speaking in public about the few rich and politically connected families are the chief supporters of bad social-cum-political policies responsible for putting bad governance in place and hence serial failure by successive governments to improve welfare of a common Kenyan. Technically, class consciousness is potentially criminalized in Kenya.

This bill is provoked by the specter of class conflict in the current Kenya’s public political discourse. The majority of Kenyans now want to vote by basing on their class, this majority class is composed of rural peasants and the lumpen jobless in the urban areas. These two economically powerless communities are now threatening to evolve into a spontaneous voting monster that will thin-out of power the traditionally powerful political class that have always enjoyed political power to perfect unfair accumulation of dirty riches. Kenya’s politically powerful class is threatened because it is only made up of just a dozen of families with dynastic tendencies which have unfairly piled heaps on other heaps of riches throughout five decades of formation of the Kenyan state. The handful of rich and politically connected families are nothing before the masses that have been held in poverty by bad governments, if the poor voters can realize their strength and then choose to vote as a political block then they will obviously thrash out this small class of blood-sucking patrimonial bourgeoise from power.

Even though Kenya has been famed for being a superlative economic power of East Africa, it is unfortunate that a portion of its economic prosperity is infamously in the hands of the state which operates like private property of the few politically advantaged and highly profiled financially glorified families, the rest of this prosperity again is held as private property of the politically correct, both in a historical and in a contemporary sense. Thus, Kenya’s economic exuberance is not a fact, technical reality contradicts the conventional information, the reality is that ninety percent of sixty million Kenyans wallow in urban poverty, rural squalor, rural landlessness, urban destitution and wretchedness in the wynds of slums, credit-unworthiness, ignobling jobs, rural malnutrition, urban pollution, insignificant education, teenage mother-hood, economic despair, induced drug addiction, miss-education, perennial joblessness, socially desperate choices expressed sex-working and commercial homosexuality, and all other sorts of social-economic powerlessness.

The above conditions in which wallow the poor of Kenya are socially challenging conditions, and it is psychologically obvious that any person living in such like challenging and hope fettering conditions will be overtly conscious about these conditions. This social-psychological phenomenon is known as class consciousness. It is this social-political phenomenon of class consciousness that is now dictating Kenya’s political discourse, a discourse which is predominantly reflecting volatile nature of mass emotions of those that have been politically alienated for decades. What was to be expected by those that have been alienating over forty million workers in Kenya? Nothing else other than the alienator coming face to face with sad reality that when you alienate forty million workers you convert them into forty million gravediggers, they will dig the grave for no one else but for you the alienator. And no kind of parliamentary law has ever been successful in muffling the grave diggers from realizing their natural right; still it can be projected or be extrapolated that no amount of parliamentary legislation in Kenya will stop the forty million plus grave diggers from realizing their natural right of digging the grave for a dozen families of that make the deep state, the system, the cartel or the patrimonial bourgeoisie in Kenya.

In spite of all the rudimentary and feasible evidence from active history in support of the above observations, Kenyan law-makers and parliamentarians are giving a euphorically unanimous support to this anti-class consciousness bill. They are doing so without reading the signs on the wall or even consulting with the people of Kenya to establish the human law that is currently lighting the political path of the people of Kenya. The Parliamentarians have ignored the people as if they are not aware that human law is natural, but parliamentary law is artificial-and always nature abhors the vacuum. So, let not those two hundred self-righteous parliamentarians in Kenya think that they are able to pin down the revolutionary energy of forty million workers that have become tired of being victims of economic alienation and political exploitation. The only law that can forestall this looming hobgoblin from the netherworld taking it is course in Kenya is the law that upholds genuine inclusivity, genuine economic mainstreaming, genuine empowerment and un-pretentious transfer of political power and economic enjoyment to the people through a constitutional mechanism.

Currently, the Parliamentarians in Kenya are not alive to this flip-side of the anti-class conscious bill because of their effortless service to ‘club norm’ of conditioned mental ‘tetheredness’ to bourgeoisie pressure. It is incidental bourgeoisie trapping that a cash-focused career parliamentarian treating politics as business cannot escape. In fact, history of parliamentary teaches that, it requires different political mindset and moral mettle to serve in a parliament that is a protégé of shrewdly calculating bourgeoisie machinations without succumbing to snobbery required to serve bourgeoisie trappings. The same shrewd and wily Bourgeoisie interests are the ones dictating party nominations Kenya , a process which has always given the people of Kenya morally punctured politicians that are out to be goons of tribal paramount chiefs, politicians that fight at the funeral gathering only to be kicked down in order to prove their policy or ideology; politicians who taste the texture of any social policy before them by using their tongues then stomachs but not by using their supposed glowing fire of the intellectual consciousness that light their political ideology; I mean bourgeoisie slyness gas given Kenya five-decades of parliamentary politicians that make Kenya’s parliament to be a perfect specimen of Marx’s social diagnosis that ‘a parliament is an instrument of the politically powerful to oppress the powerless workers by relying on the mutton-headed persiflage and anent blabbering by its leather-tongued members living in constant fear that maybe their mandibles have of-late lost germ needed to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie capitalists as ‘mouths for hire’.

Those Kenyan politicians sought to be criminalized by the criminal law that will come from the anti-class consciousness bill are innocent, they have been innocent, and they are pre-emptively innocent when it comes to establishing political culpability to pre-emptive crime of being class-conscious crusaders of the rights of the workers. Their political history has no record of them being class-consciousness political leaders; they have been purely class-insouciant money making ethnic based politicians. The only criminal charges they qualify to face are; thievery of state resources, land-grabbing, crime against humanity, murder of Newspaper editor, murder of business competitor, murder of election officer, election fraud and accomplice to murder of human rights activists. But they cannot be charged with these crimes because they often mutate like HIV virus-from political correctness to political enmity and then back to political correctness.

And even if there was a befitting law with which to criminally charge the accused Kenyan politicians for committing crime of perpetrating class-conscious politics, still this law would be prosecuting wrong people given that ever since Kenya has never had a class conscious politician. The present political speeches about hustlers competing with dynasties for presidency don’t amount to any class-conscious or revolutionary conscious politics, these are only little Machiavellian tricks to achieve parochial intentions of dissembling and perfecting dissolubility to exploit or take advantage of the already prevailing volatile relation between the few that superbly own and the non-owning masses at pain with their history of being economically abused. This prevailing volatility is a naturally occurring phenomenon known as class-conflict. It is not a philosophy of any politician, or malicious afore-thought or mens rea-inner evil intentions of some politicians. It is a natural phenomenon which dictates that; with or without a politician, the end to bourgeoisie exploitation of the poor workers is always a class based conflagration that has the poor masses ejecting violently the few oppressive bourgeoisies from political power.

Alexander Opicho writes from, Lodwar, Kenya [email protected]