Hate-mongers will even use JKIA disaster to demonise ‘those people’

The inferno that consumed the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport’s international arrivals unit nearly a week ago provided a gold mine for rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists, and mostly with that peculiar Kenyan political slant.

Facebook, Twitter and analogue conversations at the local pub, church, park bench, and everywhere else those with spare time gather, provided a bewildering array of takes on what or who was behind the blaze.

Some, of course, was pure humour, and Kenyans are masters of creating jokes and very tall tales from the grimmest of situations. Maybe that’s what keeps a mad country sane.

But there were also stories concocted and told with the seriousness that depict perfectly, the deep ethnic-political schisms and the extent to which rabble rousers and hate-mongers will go to demonise ‘those people’.

If we separate the humour in many of those conversations we see the destructive mindset that so often drives our political thought; a dangerous ethnic virus that infects so many Kenyans and can easily be used to incite hungry, angry, mindless automatons to murder and plunder in the service of the tribal eating chiefs.

Forget Kamlesh Pattni and the joke that the Goldenberg scandal architect had motive to torch the airport after being kicked out of the Duty Free operation.

More serious for me are all those rantings on social media, some by people I thought had a little brain, suggesting that depending on which side of the ethnic divide you sit, the perpetrator of the airport blaze was either former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, or President Uhuru Kenyatta.

It started off as some light-hearted tweet about the leader of the opposition Cord alliance wreaking vengeance after being denied the use of airport VIP facilities by the Jubilee government. But the humour soon gave way to a dark mudslinging campaign against Mr Odinga openly spread on Twitter and Facebook by President Kenyatta’s social media brigades.

The basic theme was that Mr Odinga was a dangerous character still smarting from the presidential election loss, who would employ all the dirty tricks he could to make life difficult for the Kenyatta administration.

For those purveyors of hate, it was not about the use of airport VIP lounges, but part of a widespread scheme to destabilise the government. And so, for good measure, all manner of ‘evidence’ was thrown into the malevolent pot.

Everything from the teachers strike, the brouhaha over the school laptops project, delayed salaries for civil servants, the apparent government cash crunch, and noises being made by governors and senators pursuing a referendum on devolution, was offered as sabotage driven by Mr Odinga.

The conclusion, inevitably, was that Mr Odinga must be “dealt with”, and the conversations were silent on whether it was the law or tougher extra-judicial methods to be employed.    

But from Mr Odinga’s battalions too, came destructive tales pointing the finger of blame at the government. A popular one was that President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto needed to create diversion from their up-coming trials at the International Criminal Court.

Therefore it serves their purpose to set the airport ablaze, and generally cause chaos so that they can exploit a national crisis as an excuse to skip their dates at The Hague.

The insinuation was that the airport fire was just the first in a series of manufactured incidents that will destabilise the country and make it impossible for the president and his deputy to be away.

The interesting, and frightening, element is where the disparate conspiracy theories converge: A crisis manufactured by the government will be blamed on the opposition leader. Mr Odinga, or some of his close aides, will be arrested, provoking fury and unrest among his supporters.

Widespread rioting and looting from Cord supporters, fuelled no doubt by the Jubilee dirty tricks machine and its National Intelligence Service partners, will provide the excuse for a brutal crackdown against all dissenting voices.

They say that an idle mind is the Devils workshop. But why does our NTV spend good money on cheap, mind-numbing Latina and Nigerian fare? We have enough home-made political drama to make riveting stuff that could stand its ground at the Oscars.

 mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com