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Let us remember Wangari Maathai and Saro-Wiwa, who acted as our conscience

Monday September 26 2016

African governments hate civil society organisations. Before the advent of democracy, even if in its nascent form, civil society was sternly circumscribed by draconian laws, and its leaders constantly harassed by police. Many were arrested, while others were tortured, exiled or killed.

The experiences of two individuals – Wangari Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwo – symbolise the extreme nature of government hostility towards civil society.

Maathai and Saro-Wiwo chose to challenge the rapacious dictatorships of Daniel arap Moi and Sani Abacha of Kenya and Nigeria respectively. Maathai would be arrested and beaten by police several times, once barely escaping with her life. Ken Saro-Wiwo would suffer a much grimmer fate. He was murdered by the regime! And all because they dared speak truth to power.

Maathai spoke out against the endemic grabbing of public land by individuals connected to the regime. Ken Saro-Wiwo spoke out against the impoverishment of the Ogoni people despite being inhabitants of the oil rich Niger Delta.

While civil society activists put their livelihoods and lives at risk, the rest of us, for one reason or another, choose to continue with our increasingly anxious lives. Some of us might have sympathised with the activists but were too scared to join them. Some of us flocked to church, desperate to forget the world and its attendant strife in fervent prayer. Like Jim Reeves, we saw the angels beckoning us from heaven’s open door and we didn’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Others, dehumanised by poverty, just swallowed the excuses and bought into the scapegoating offered by those we had put in charge of our welfare.

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Many of us felt that the clamour of the activists would get in the way of our ambitions to join the thin ranks of the middle class. What this last group did not see was that the edifice that supports the middle class is crumbling.

The middle class itself, desperate to hang on by any means, found ways around the crumbling edifice. No one better describes the frenzied existence of the Kenyan middle class than Daily Nation columnist Rasna Warah:

“When the public school system went to the dogs, they built their own exclusive private schools.
When the police proved to be too corrupt or incompetent, they hired private security companies and personal bodyguards. When the local authority failed to collect garbage, they recruited the services of private firms. When the streets became too dirty and unsafe, they built giant malls. When drug lords and thieves became politicians, they convinced themselves that it had nothing to do with the future of their children.”

And so it is that when activists demonstrate against the grabbing of school fields, including most infamously Lang’ata Primary school where police lobbed teargas to disperse seven-year old kids who were protesting the theft, the middle class sits wringing its hands behind fortified homes.

When the garbage outside our gates becomes small hills, those of us who choose to leave everything to the Lord turn away our noses and hurry to any one of the multitudes of churches in our neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, as poverty brought on by corruption and mismanagement bites deeper, the masses flock to political rallies adorned in the colours of their tribal political parties and cheer as thieves and tribalists give simplistic answers to complex problems.

Nothing could capture this last phenomenon in more dramatic and tragic fashion than the recent situation at the Moi University where we saw multitudes cheering wildly as their governors made small tribal arguments against the appointment of a vice chancellor who does not belong to their tribe.

When activists triumph, we all benefit from their triumph. They were fighting for all us, including, paradoxically, even for those in power.

Today, we all enjoy the benefits of Wangari Maathai’s triumph. Today, we now remember in gratitude those who agitated for a return to democracy.

So now again, as activists agitate against the return of mega-corruption, as they question the source of the money that underpinned the filthy display of money power in a poor country such as Kenya at the launch of the Jubilee Party, as they demand a proper accounting of the Eurobond billions, as they demonstrate against extrajudicial killings, as they ask why we want to build a railway line through the Nairobi National Park, we would do well to remember that they are doing it on behalf of all of us.

Civil society is our conscience.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based social and political commentator. E-mail: [email protected]

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