Tu quoque is the last refuge of every scoundrel. When everybody is guilty, no one really is. Or so the Kibaki junta wants you to believe. Even as evidence mounted of their theft, Kibaki’s PNU manufactured the meme that the ODM was as guilty of rigging. No matter that if this were the case then it supported the case for a recount. No matter that any rigging would prima facie be in favor of the incumbent who is in control of state machinery. No matter that this does not address the doctoring of results at ECK headquarters.
The PNU tu quoque frame is a manifest act of cynicism and bad faith. But it is just as important not to let pass another insidious tu quoque frame, this time being advanced by many well intentioned Kenyans and observers anxious for the violence to end. This is the claim that Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga are equally responsible for the violence that is currently tearing Kenya apart. Kenyan Pundit highlights as “Comment of the Day” the statement of an unnamed “foreigner” : ” Yes. It is extremely important for both Kibaki and Raila to place the citizens and the country before their own power-hungry egos. This is insane. The whole country is being destroyed. For what? Who cares who is president. As a foreigner who has no tribal association here I have absolutely no respect for either of these politicians. They are both the same, not worth a single lost life. Both men are bad for Kenya. You need a real leader with real ideas. These fools are not worth the violence.”
WM condemns Kibaki and Raila: “Much worse, we have decided that the only two people who can save us are the precise two men whose overweening ambition and horror of unemployment have led us to this despicable pass.” WM then indicts the entire Kenyan polity: “Let us at least have the courage of our venality; let us look at ourselves squarely in the face and say “we screwed up big time, and we knew it all along, we did it knowingly and now we have to suck it up and deal with the results of our mistakes.”
To be sure, there’s some plausibility to the ”pox on both houses” stance. Perhaps the most charitable reading of it is that it is meant to focus attention on ending the violence first — other matters can be handled later. Less charitably, it may be an attempt by the speakers advancing such a frame to cast themselves as even-handed and neutral, a space clearing gesture for seizing the commanding heights of ”objectivity” or ”disinterest.”
The problem, though, is that such a claim is not accurate. It is not true that Kibaki and Raila are to blame in equal measure for Kenya’s current predicament. It shouldn’t need saying that Kibaki stole the election; that the violence that erupted is a reaction to a coup. Attempts to bracket Kibaki’s wrongdoing in the name of focusing on ending the violence simply echoes Kibaki’s own vacuous talking point that he will only engage in dialogue once there is peace. It just so happens, though, that the violence stems from a dispute which must be resolved in order to bring about peace. Moreover, Kibaki and Raila do not occupy symmetrical positions of power. Kibaki, having seized the presidency, has the entire military-police apparatus at his command. He has far more resources, albeit illegitimately expropriated, and far more direct command over his forces than Raila does over the crazed mobs carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Kikuyus. A case in point: Kibaki’s internal security minister, John “Rasputin” Michuki, has converted Kisumu into a human abbatoir.
To be sure, Raila Odinga is not himself blameless. He could have done more — and can still do more — to restrain those fighting in his name from the unconscionable ethnic cleansing of Kikuyus. But it is reductive to claim that he is causing the violence. Injustice — historical to be sure, but perpetuated by the Kibaki regime’s destruction of Kenyans democratic aspirations — lies at the heart of the Kenyan conflagration.
The upshot, it would appear, is neither to reduce the issue to Raila or Kibaki’s “egos” (as if these two men have no followers; or that the issue is purely psychological, not structural), nor to indiscriminately place blame on a collective Kenyan “we” (as if Kenya is monolithic; thus erasing agency and distributions of power in the Kenyan polity). Yes, indeed, none of us are innocent; yes indeed “we” all are to blame — but in different ways, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Some, like Kibaki, stole the election. Others, like Michuki, stole the elections then ordered the slaughter of a city in order to hold on to that stolen election. Others, in the Rift Valley, burned people alive in a Church. Some, like David Kobia of the Kenyan online discussion board, Mashada, fanned the flames of hate.
This is also about agency. And it is in recovering our agency (including recognizing the points of articulation of our guilt and responsibility) that we may yet imagine a peaceful, pluralistic, just Kenya.
