Kenya: Values Are the Basis for Lasting Peace

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allAfrica
June 29th, 2012

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By: Washington Akumu

As Kenya prepares for perhaps its most crucial election since independence, the national discourse on peace has taken on a new urgency and dynamism. While nothing seems to be cast in iron yet, it is widely accepted that Kenya will have to go to the polls sometime in the next 10 months, regardless of which constitutional permutation comes to pass.

During the recent burial ceremonies for the country’s top homeland security honchos (Minister Professor George Saitoti and his deputy Orwa Ojode), who perished in a June 10 helicopter accident, the country’s political leadership was united, not just by the palpable sense of loss and collective vulnerability, but by the unanimous exhortation of Kenyans to shun divisive tendencies and seek lasting peace.

It is easy to understand the motivation behind such words. The last time Kenyans went to the polls, the country was hopelessly divided along ethnic fault-lines. A bungled presidential poll provided the perfect recipe for a hellish two months during which the very concept of Kenya as a united state endured perhaps its severest test yet since the British colonial masters left town in 1963.

With help from our brothers from the rest of the continent, led by Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan, the fabric of the nation survived that conflagration. A détente of sorts was declared but the scars live on. Thousands of lives were lost, families were rendered destitute, and if this year’s fiscal statement by Finance Minister Njeru Githae is any guide, we have yet to re-settle the last batch of IDPs. Given that morbid background, the pursuit of a sustainable peace should be a national priority, an active engagement that should exercise the minds of all Kenyans.

While there is no shortage of initiatives towards elevating the discourse of peace in our nation, I find one particularly refreshing. According to World Relief, a Christian relief and development agency that works in community with local churches to serve the most vulnerable, peace can only be sustainable if it is framed as a by-product of one’s lifestyle and value system.

In other words, one cannot effectively legislate on peace. Neither can a pax Kenya be hoisted through promulgation by the President or the rest of our political class. Significantly, peace here must not be defined as the absence of body bags and mass graves.

To the contrary, peace must be seen as a pervasive and communal mental and, as World Relief suggests, spiritual condition that does not dispose us to take up machetes, stones and poisoned arrows every time we disagree with our neighbors, a candidate for political office, a certain way of doing things or even election results.

As a nation, we must aspire to a higher operational plane where we shall not kill our neighbor just because we fear a life sentence at Kamiti, a trial at The Hague, or international pariah status, but because it is the right thing to do. At a June 6 conference hosted in Nairobi by World Relief, leaders from the Church, private sector, and youth influences came together to discuss “Values for Violence: What it Takes to Destroy a Nation and Ways to Avoid it”.

“We must develop a critical mass of people who care about faith-driven values. We do not want to microwave peace. People should want to do the right thing because their values come from within,” says Jean Paul Ndagijimana, Country Director for World Relief in Kenya and one of the leaders of the initiative.

To their credit, promoters of the initiative are the first ones to acknowledge that their approach can be deemed altruistic, even romantic and removed from reality. But as members of the faith community, they believe they must play a key role in a peaceful and prosperous Kenya where clergy, professionals, and youth are all critical in engaging Kenya towards a better spiritual, social, and economic future.

For us to cultivate real and sustainable peace, it has to be based on a certain higher morality or value system. This is out of the realization that, despite all the constitutional and institutional safeguards, there will always be situations that can potentially “incite” us to violence. It is only through the deliberate construction of a bankable national value system that we can develop a peace that is unwavering despite place, time, season, and political candidate.

Story originally appeared at: allAfrica