By Phillip Ochieng
In what way can our State House retaliate against the District of Columbia’s White House?
What can Mwai Kibaki do to force reforms in the way that Barack Obama is governing his country?
But, judging from the content of our debate on this subject, mine is probably a false question.
Why? Because — we read between the lines — the American system needs no reform. It is the world’s template.
It is the ideal that all other governments must emulate.
It is above reproach. Indeed, only from such a moral premise can that country’s president nominate himself as the chief inspector of all world governments.
That is what amuses me about the suggestion that Kibaki should retaliate by denying visas to officials of the Obama government.
If the Obama government is perfection personified — if no official is corrupt or sabotaging his reform efforts — on what criterion can Kibaki base any visa ban?
Obama has clear criteria for all his actions against Kenya.
What’s more, he gets off his armchair (at least through envoys) to study the target country thoroughly.
Nairobi teems with spooky characters — either imported or hired locally — whose job is to collect sordid facts and figures about official Kenya.
I will bet you my bottom shilling that Hillary Clinton, Johnnie Carson and Michael Ranneberger know a hundred times more about what is going on in our corridors of power than do all our MPs, lawyers, editors, priests and academics put together.
All these are long on critical opinion but incredibly short on real information.
To be sure, we also have a foreign minister and probably a North America desk in his ministry (the equivalent of Mr Carson’s outfit).
We also have an ambassador in Washington.
We spend billions on these and dozens of other foreign service officials in the US capital.
The question is: What job description have we given these high-living officials?
How often — if ever — do they brief President Kibaki, Premier Odinga and VP Musyoka on the lowdown collected on the US military, police, governors, industrial chiefs, churches, educational system, etc?
How many of our envoys can write a book such as Kevin Phillips’ The American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the politics of deceit in the House of Bush or Amy Goodman’s The exception to the rulers: exposing oily politicians, war profiteers and the media that love them or, on this side, William Attwood’s contemptuous The Reds and the Blacks or Smith Hempstone’s libellous Rogue Ambassador?
We — who are merely amateur information seekers — know a great deal about the quadrangular traffic of corruption between the US administration, industry, security forces and atomic agencies.
Yet this corporate decomposition – the oily rulers and the media who adore them — is what sits in daily and damning judgment of the rest of admittedly erring mankind.
The question is: How much do our diplomats in DC and New York City really know about what is going on in the White House, in the State Department, in the Pentagon, in the Trade Department, in the Treasury, at the CIA’s Langley headquarters and a million other vital establishments?
One barrier standing in our envoys’ way, as impassable as the Elephant of Ignorance of which Okot p’Bitek speaks in his Song of Lawino — is, the absence of curiosity — the remarkable intellectual indolence — which characterises the educated consumer classes of all Third World countries.
Yet it would be unfair to blame our envoys absolutely.
Western disrespect for Third World opinion was one of the points that Moustapha Masmoudi of Tunisia raised when he acted as the chief spokesman during the official Third World demand through Unesco of a New International Information Order.
According to the custodians of the reigning world information structure, it is simply improper for the envoy of a Third World government to subject the Western capital to which he is accredited to daily sermons about democracy, human rights and accountability.
Yet in the US itself there are daily reports on venal official links with industry, police rapacity, graft, brutality and racism, similar practices in the judiciary, a Congress permanently held to ransom by the lobby system, human-rights abuse — both at home and abroad (especially in Latin America and the Middle East), and so on.
On all these things and many more, Kenya is a child compared with all the so-called established democracies, especially the Anglo-Saxon ones.
Kenya’s case may look more spectacular only in the crudity and shamelessness with which officials steal from the poor, commit tribalism, etc.
As Amy Goodman points out, the corporate media in London, Paris, DC and other Western capitals simply dote on their oil and nuclear dynasts.
They would reduce to a laughing stock any Third World envoy who formed the habit of fulminating every day against the government to which he is accredited.
He would be the subject of ribald, often racist comment and a figure of ridicule.
Where Mr Ranneberger is the darling of our own so-called civil society movements, Kenya’s envoy in Washington would face a total boycott by civil society organisations if he turned himself to daily “diplomatic activism.”
That is why President Kibaki is not in the same situation as President Obama.
Our leader would raise at least one embarrassing question — and face at least one insuperable problem — if tomorrow he decided to slap visa bans on certain officials of President Obama’s government.
The question is this: Given our diplomatic laziness, who would supply him with the vital information on the individuals in Obama’s government who are engaged both in corruption and in trying to block the US president’s attempts to drastically reform, for instance, the health care system?
The problem is: The Western transnational media not only share with Western industry and government an identical corporate interest but also are world-encompassing. Consider the lopsidedness of the propaganda war that would ensue if Kibaki started banning officials of a major Western state.
It would be the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation ranged against Voice of America, CNN, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, the BBC, The Economist, and so on.
It would be the KBC’s crude and laughable propaganda methods versus the brilliance of the Western transnational media in weaving deep self-interests into a “news” item so that the “news” looks completely objective.
It is obvious who would win such a propaganda battle in the court of world opinion.
In short, as usual in our world, power, not righteousness, would win.
That is why, even if we leave social morality out of it — even if we say nothing about the interests of the Kenyan masses — the Kibaki-Odinga government must take drastic reform measures.
Source: The East African
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