By Jerry Okungu
Nairobi, Kenya
October 7, 2010
Oh, God of all creations, ours is a humble prayer as we wait to get our new county. Although the date is still two years away, forgive us for burdening you with our request early in the day.
You God of Israel, Abraham, Isaac and all the prophets of old; you the reader of the hearts of all men and women; the owner of our past, present and future. We beseech you to guide our paths lest we hit our toes on thorns and pebbles as we move to 2012.
Lord of all creations, in the past, due to our transgressions, fickleness, at times our greed for earthly things and foolishness, we have succumbed to momentary temptations, taken bribes and voted for thieves, murderers and fraudsters. Every five years, these deviants have come to us with tongues coated in sugar; the same wolves have approached us dressed in sheep’s clothes and conned us out of our national entitlement. The same should not happen to us this time round.
Our Father who art in heaven, you know how long we have struggled for forty years in the political wilderness to get a constitution that would free us from the bondage of our own brothers. Being the all knowing God, you will remember that when we took arms against white occupation force, the struggle was as much for our ancestral lands our freedoms that had been taken away from us. However, when we finally attained our independence after so much suffering and bloodshed, the situation remained very much the same. We ended up exchanging white exploiters for black oppressors; our very own brothers. And for the last fifty years, they have sat on us, exploited and milked us to death.
Our Father who comes to rescue of the feeble, widowed and orphans, you saw us vote overwhelmingly in August in order to have a new set of laws that would free us from bondage. The same set of laws is our modern Ten Commandments similar to the Tora you gave to your servant Moses who proclaimed it on his return from Mt. Sinai. Like the Tora, our ten commandments were proclaimed at a public rally in our city recently.
Lord of all creations, we thank you for ensuring that we campaigned peacefully, voted and approved the document despite some protests from some among us who claim to be talking to you directly. Like you, we saw their ploy and defeated their evil schemes. Now we have a new set of laws we intend to empower ourselves with.
The beauty of this law is that it has returned the power to govern ourselves into our hands. It has devolved the central government has exploited and impoverished us for five decades. Now we know that come 2012, we the residents of our county will not travel to Nairobi to beg for our rightful share of our national budget. It will be brought to us to see how best to develop our county.
As it is Lord, our hospitals and dispensaries are in a sorry state. Buildings put up in the 20th Century by the colonial government are falling apart. Hospitals have no beds, bed sheets or anything we can call linen. The few that are there are tattered, dirty and stinking. In fact going in to my village dispensary is journey into hell. I come out more sick than ever. The same filthy buildings that pass for hospitals have no nurses, doctors or medicine. For this reason they have become pre- mortuary rooms than healing centers. The other day one frustrated doctor left a woman on an operating table to go and have a drink. We don’t know why. May be he was frustrated.
Our children have no classrooms or even enough teachers. Today, our primary school teachers handle up to 100 children in a class, at times under trees on stones because our villagers cannot afford to build classrooms, buy desks and employ more teachers.
Our roads are impassable during rainy seasons if we are lucky to have paved pathways. Because of this poor infrastructure our sick mothers die in labour because we cannot take them to hospitals in good time. The little that we produce in our farms cannot get to urban markets on time. In a nutshell, Oh Lord we are a trapped community.
However, since the promulgation of our constitution, strange talk has been going on across the land in our country. We hear disheartening rumours that the very wolves in sheep’s clothes, the very fraudsters with sugar coated tongues, the very money bags that have stolen our rights for fifty years are now regrouping to devolve themselves to our county in readiness to receive our allocation from the devolution. They want to be our governors, senators and National Assembly representatives all rolled into one. To make it worse, even the ones we rejected three years ago are now planning a comeback to reap from our sweat; we the champions of change that have struggled and suffered for decades. Because they have the money bags, they want to be our new leaders in the new dispensation.
Lord of all creation, the protector of your children, we implore you to cast a spell on them so that they do not find their way to our county. Lead them astray into other lands so that they do not land on our shores because we have suffered enough.
We ask you all these in your name.
okungu is the publisher of Africa News Online & CEO of Kenya Today
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