TRIBAL CURE: SIMPLE WAYS OF ENDING NEGATIVE ETHNICITY.

Tribes is now the predominant form of identification anywhere in Kenya. Before someone asks your name he/she will ask where you come from and your tribe. The same culture is rife in Maseno and the biggest tragedy of our time is us taking this as a normal part of our being and not doing anything about it, negative ethnicity affects us all, so we need a deep reflection on our context as students and the place of tribal antics in the years to come. Our socialization has corrupted our thinking; imposed on us a story that is one sided, making us not to see each other as brothers. Let us rewrite this, redefine our biased values and engage our mental processes and be a part of the solution. Its time we draw a few lessons to tone down this culture: let us make the following part of our lives comrades of Maseno.

Let’s rid ourselves of ethnic badges and identify people with their personal traits and attributes. This culture of identifying people with their tribes, yule kijana mluhya, yule mjaluo, yule mworiah robs us of our identities as individuals and ties us to an ethnic group. We can instead use identification that are not ethnically based or prejudicing such as: that third year dude, the tall guy who lives here instead of yule mjaka huishi hapa. This will help us see each other as a people who share a common purpose, unified and not divided along ethnic lines. This will in turn tone down the negative culture of ethnicity within maseno.

Social stereotypes and myths such as all Luo’s having pride or unproportionally high egos and all kikuyus loving money or worse still every Somali being a “fala” robs one of their dignity, dispossess people of their personal identities and divides us further, we need to purge ourselves of such traditional notions.

We need to embrace a culture of free thinking individuals, “group think” robs us of a lot of rational reasoning and a keen observation will show you that as individuals we all regard each other as brothers but once people from the same ethnic groups come together then our tribal woes begin. Think independently comrades. 

Lets practice tolerance of people’s opinions at all times, when an individual speaks he or she speaks out of his/her own will and no person has the audacity to speak for a whole tribe. Our diversity should be the source of our unity, of our progress and a heritage that talks of success.

Grouping and regrouping especially along tribal lines creates an illusion of progress, we need to get rid of tribal clubs and groups, lets join clubs and organizations that are issue based, universal and progressive, if at all the groups we have within Maseno are progressive then why is its membership confined only to some regions and communities? 

The schools administration should also institute some strong punitive measures to those student leaders who mobilize students along their ethnic cocoons, ban the KKK alliance and all such other alliances.

Before you regard this as a very idealistic article, JUST THINK AGAIN. It’s only from the ideal that we can shape the reality of our time. If only we tried as individuals and made this part of our lives then we might realize that ending tribalism amongst us is after all not beyond our capabilities. We are human first; Kenyans second, why resort to tribalism?

THE STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR SINGLE STORY: S.O.M.U

This post was published on equator weekly, but i post it here that those who did not read it might get a chance to get some insight into how STUDENT ORGANIZATION in Kenya operate with particular reference to STUDENT ORGANIZATION of MASENO UNIVERSITY (S.O.M.U).

Contempt and criticisms characterize all kind of political and elective positions anywhere in the world. Some of these criticisms are warranted while others are mere pejoratives of prejudiced minds. S.O.M.U has had a fair share of criticisms and all who have served in SOMU have not been spared, they all have been demonized as incompetent ingrates only motivated to “kukula pesa zetu”. Some SOMU officials are evidently very mediocre and deserve to be criticized. But it’s not justified to condemn and criticize just for the sake of criticism and condemnation as it is evident that many are hell-bent in portraying SOMU as unresponsive, unproductive and a near useless organization. This is the single story that most have of SOMU/SGC. Misallocation of student funds, underperformance, unfulfilled promises, unresponsive members are some of the allegations making up this single story of SOMU, some of this might be true but making it the definitive story of SOMU is not okay!

This single story of SOMU demoralizes the truly committed leaders; this single story will rob some of them from the credits they deserve and their dignity, this single story denies many the opportunity to participate in SOMU activities or even running for a given post as recently experienced where only single contestants showed up for the post of Editor and the Organizing secretary respectively. This single story will make many blind to any kind of achievement by SOMU. How can SOMU be vocal in the national politics if it does not have the support of the students because of the contempt it is held?

SOMU comprises of not only the Student Governing Council(SGC), which everyone seems to criticize but it also comprises affiliate bodies like MUABS, MUACU, RED CROSS, MUCSA thus the criticisms do not spare such well meaning organizations as well.

SOMU’s duties is simply to act as the link between the student body and the administration, to be the mouth piece of the student body and air their grievances, to work for the students and with the administration, to follow up in making enquiries and propose new ideas and bring down the administration to be student friendly and responsive to their needs. SOMU ensures that all semester activities are conducted on time and successfully and many sacrifice both their time and energy towards this end.

The expectations that we have of SOMU is an unrealistic one, we expect SOMU to do things magically, to fix that blown inflorescent tube in your room almost immediately (and you have not reported to anyone), to make sure transcripts don’t have re-sits on them, to make the queues at the mess be shorter, to make sure that the library is fully stocked, to make sure that there is a television in every hostel. When they don’t meet this expectations the “robin hood” style, all you get is very cruel accusations against it. 

The roles of Maseno university administration and that of SOMU is not the same, SOMU might not do some things because it is out of their mandate. We should all strive to recognize the correct boundaries to prevent both the exaggerated disdain, contempt for and help restore the confidence that we should have in this organization.

Limited resources, falling confidence in, lack of support from student’s body and the bottleneck of bureaucracy in addressing student’s grievances and even raising funds for their activities are some problems that affects the performance of SOMU immensely.

SOMU members on the other hand should strive to embrace ethics, integrity and serve with diligence, rid themselves of tribal alliances, corruption and the culture of mediocrity which greatly hinders their performance and till they do that it is no doubt that the criticism and mistrust will always be directed to their activities.