From: A Child of the Republic You Almost Built

Ndugu zetu, o foolish and gifted yet dangerously misguided founders. We write to you from a country you built. A country shaped by your hands, your speeches, your signatures and by the blood of those who believed in you without reservation. A people who sang for you, named their children after you and even stood in the rain for you. Independence is not your greatest victory but your first test and you are already failing it in ways that will echo for generations.

You have forgotten the very people who carried you here. The women who smuggled food, bore intelligence, endured detention and violence. Where are they now in your Cabinet? In your Parliament? In your councils of power? You have written them out in the very story they helped author. What kind of a republic is built by silencing half of its voice? A nation that excludes its women builds itself incomplete. You will not feel their absence immediately but for decades and generations the woman will struggle to secure her position in governance.

You have begun to tribalize power. Already, governance is bending towards particular communities especially the Kikuyu within the Cabinet. You may convince yourself that it is practicality or trust, but hear from me who is your future that when power appears tribal the nation begins to fracture. You are planting seeds you will not live to see bloom but trust me they will. In 2007 neighbors will turn on each other, not because they suddenly became enemies but because over decades you taught them that power belongs to the tribes and not the citizens. Division is weakness and you of all people are nurturing it.

You have dismantled the one tool that was seeking accountability (KADU). Do you understand what you have done? You have not defeated opposition but instead buried accountability. KADU was not merely a rival party, it was a restraint and a necessary counterweight and a voice that could question power before it hardened into domination. By absorbing and silencing it you have began constructing a State that fears disagreement. Hear me clearly o people, many of you will pay for this with your freedom and some with your precious lives.

You have witnessed assassinations but said nothing. Voices are being removed not through arguments but by bullets and fear. You resolve to lower your voices and whisper in the shadows. What then becomes the difference between this and what you fought against? The Mau Mau went into the forest to fight for our land. Dedan Kimathi and many freedom fighters died for it and was buried in secrecy like a shameful truth. Now under your watch men who speak for truth and justice fall in the same silence. Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto and even J.M. Kariuki are but among the many who will suffer this fate. You will know but choose to say nothing. Fear has entered your leadership and where fear governs, justice dies quietly.

You have allowed foreign ideologies to define and divide you. The Cold War is not your war yet you have imported it into your politics turning brother against brother. East against west, Tom Mboya against Jaramogi Odinga. Why must you choose division when you could choose wisdom? You stood at a moment where you could draw strength from both worlds and craft a Kenyan path. Instead, you risk becoming a battlefield for interests that are not your own.

You failed to hold and fight for KPU. With this, you destroyed political choice for the people. What is democracy without opposition? What is an election where only one voice speaks? You are building a one-party state and calling it stability but we disagree and say that stability without freedom is only silence. You can choose otherwise and save KPU because having seen the consequences of a one-party Kenya, the latter is recommended.

You have turned Parliament into an instrument for the Executive. Through amendments, through quiet legal manipulations you are reshaping the very institution meant to check power into one that serves it. How does the people’s house become the executive’s shield? You had the numbers; you had the voices and yet piece by piece you surrendered it. An unjust law is no law at all. You are not breaking the law but you are using it to break the nation.

You detain your own. Men who stood beside you in the struggle now sit behind bars because they dared to say “no”. Tell me, what has changed? What is the difference between your prisons and those of the colonial master? If independence results in the same chains only held by different hands, then what exactly have you achieved?

The land, you took it and sold it back to its people on loans with interest. You call it reform; the people call it hope but we who have witnessed history call it betrayal. Harambee, you said. Let’s pull together. But Harambee requires equality at the rope. Yours was not.

You had everything. Not perfect conditions but something far more powerful. A people who believed in you completely. Do you understand what that means? That kind of faith cannot be manufactured, cannot be legislated and cannot be recovered once lost. You are losing that faith slowly and quietly.

You can choose to build institutions stronger than yourselves, protect the opposition instead of fearing it, distribute power instead of concentrating it, return land justly instead of commodifying it, include women as equals in governance, reject tribal arithmetics in favor of national identity and allow parliament to remain a true voice of the people.

Instead, you are building systems that will outlive you and resist those who try to fix them. From sixty-three years ahead we tell you this: we are still fighting the battles you had the chance to prevent, still filing cases, still demanding accountability and still trying to finish what you began. Hear this also, Kenya survives against logic, against history, and against you, as the dream refuses to die. So, we write not only in anger but in hope because you are still in 1963. The ink is still drying and the people are still singing. You have the chance and time to change. Do better as we have told you how.

Written in grief, in truth and in stubborn hope,

By one who has seen your tomorrow,

And knows it can still be changed,

From Children of the Republic You Almost Built,

Camila Jelimo Murgor and Akachukwu Odira Okonkwo.

Kabarak University.