Thread by @wmnjoya

The argument an MP gave on Citizen TV for BBI is the same argument kumirans gave for voting for the ICC suspects in 2013: we're traumatized and tired of dying. We'll do anything for "peace" and "development."

"And anyone who tries to say that we can't keep on letting politicians lynch us is an insensitive ethnic supremacist who doesn't know what suffering is."
Surely, what kind of a conversation is that, where we are comparing not ideas and dignity, but whose wounds are more painful?

This Kenya is just toxic. Politicians are a lynch mob who hang us every 5 years precisely so that we can say "Stop! Do no more harm." When do we end this cycle of violence, and blackmailing each other with our trauma?

In 2017, when we were waiting for the decision on the petition against the presidential election, I said on Citizen TV that we need to acknowledge and mourn our trauma. A Kenyan said that that is refusing to accept and move on.

But we haven't moved on if we have never demanded for justice for victims of state violence during elections since 1957. We're letting politicians increase their demands, like mutilating our constitution, by accepting the very toxic argument that "we don't want to die any more."

In fact, the tangatanga argument is the same as the #BBIreport. People dont want bloodshed, but instead of the streets of Kisumu it's in the shambas of Rift Valley.
Surely, what kind of a conversation is this, where we compare not ideas and dignity, but our wounds?

Every time we repeat that argument, we're justifying more violence against ourselves. Every election, every alliance, every deal, is justified by not wanting to die any more. What kind of people are we to accept that as politics?

BBI will not stop the lynching. In fact, it will have proved to politicians that they need to kill us to get what they want. They'll kill us in 2022, then someone else will handshake and we'll be told that the problem is devolution or something else.

We'll keep widening that door until we get a Hitler who will promise Kenyans that the problem is certain people who need to be eliminated.

We have to mourn our victims stop allowing political deals that exploit our unaddressed trauma.
m.soundcloud.com/wmnjoya/strang…

We also have to stop repeating the racist lie loved by the American and the British governments that Kenyans kill each other over elections.

We don't kill each other. Kenya politicians kill us so that the world can accept the rigged election results as better than war.

We have cannibals for politicians.

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1307274523805392896?s=19