By Eric Wamanji
The jinni has leaked from the bottle and seems to be troubling Kenya. And this devil is having a field day twisting our very morals and consciences. He is sauntering around with a spring, in self-importance, perhaps swigging a gin. Our society, in turn, has hugged the Jinni. Thus, folks, we are blindly sauntering down a treacherous path to self-destruction. Every single morsel of our system seems to grow a tumour. And, sadly, we have either elected to ignore this ghost, or worse even, we are ignorant of its hurtful propensity.
Hmmm. Someone hand me a cold Tusker.
While we bliss on the booze, the thought that we are on the tenterhooks of moral and social collapse, and consequent oblivion, sparks shockwaves through my nerves, heats my saliva, raises my hair and my heart sprout wings.
Sleek Veneer
Sadly, the agents of the devil would even proclaim dalliances with the etiquettes of Judeo-Christian ideologies. They even religiously troop to the synagogue as it were for “supplication.” You bump on them at the corner, poolside, the boardroom or restaurant and such utterances as “God is good,” smoothly waltz from their lips.
Yet, that is a sleek veneer for cover-up.
Pray, why would a normal human being smash the poor life of another? Why would anyone torch and loot another’s business premisses without any provocation? And why should a poor soul be jobless because of a plotted downfall? To what benefit is it to you that a soul is in tears, in mourn because of your heinous act? haven’t you ever heard of Immanuel Kant’s maxim of acting on which you will to be universal law? How about the same happening to you, your kinsmen or kindred?
Many souls in our midst are bleeding because of our threadbare conscience. Now, how on earth, after soiling your hand with the blood and tears of the innocent get to have a good time with babe and tot?
Folks, we have lost the sense of right, and, worrisome, we seem not to know what’s wrong. We relish earthly delights, where our heads are deeply buried, sucking the sap as we cause unspeakable pain only for our own individual aggrandisement.
Smashed consciences
Indeed, irreducibility of the morals as strands for a functional societal fabric is non-negotiable. Sadly, in the wake of smashed consciences, the ghost is slowly but surely chewing us, as rust eats into iron.
And even amid this ruin, we, the hoi polloi, line the alleyways, cheering on this savagery of our idols. Because? We admire them? We live their lavish lifestyles albeit vicariously? They are our heroes? Ooh, how I pity Kenya.
State of Nature
You see, want of a moral compass, has technically rendered our society beastly, and at a supersonic speed, we are retroceding to a jungle life, what thinker Thomas Hobbes call the State of Nature. This lawless design – physical or ideological – is a product of trusting miscreants and idiots with certain captaincy in our midst. These idiots are strewn all over from the pulpit to the bus park, from parliament to the operation theatre at the hospital. When they walk and talk, they stink like raw sewer, and you can imagine their fans hot in pursuit like blue-green flies. In fact, lacking in the noble traits of the Platonic Charioteer.
So what is ailing the Kenyan society? Is it the insatiable desire for money? Is it a collective psychological dysfunction of crushed esteem? Is it fear of failure? Just why are Kenyans behaving like a hungry beast in a jungle – complete with foxes, serpents, lions and of course the swaras that are always on the run.
Where was mum?
It is most irksome that some of the transgressions against man and environment are waged by some of the fairly educated chaps you’d expect sobriety from. The so-called elites that ought be the conscience of society are ironically the patriarchs of savagery. I wonder they have mothers? Didn’t those good women of yore taught you folks some manners? Didn’t they, spank you every time you uttered a lie so that your brother could be punished? You mean mum never forced a compulsory fast on you? Never forced a cold shower on you because of your delinquency? Where did you grow up? The jungle?
Our society, unless divine intervention happens, is, as Oswald Spengler observed in Decline of the West – on the path to defeat and decline. Nihilism is ruinously chewing Kenya away. Yet, even with our evil psycho-milieu, we have the temerity to beam a sense of self-entitlement, we act and feign victim for societal sympathy. What utter nonsense. Where on good Lord’s earth, did you shred your conscience – we could go collect and reconstruct it.
Small wonder our world goes to flames, our people slandered, our children massacred, the poor detained in hospital and our food and water poisoned…the litany runs ad infinitum!