WHAT WAS KALONZO’S INTENT IN HIS RESPONSE?

Former Vice President and CORD presidential running mate in the last years general elections Kalonzo Musyoka is in the eye of the storm by the public over comments he made today during a Press conference. Responding to a journalist question on presumed CORD failure, as the official opposition party in the last one year, to suggest solutions to mistakes it blames on the Government, Musyoka instead turned personal which has been seen as a tribal stand.
He chose to interrogate the journalist’s ethnicity by his name, derisively dismissing his question as inspired by his tribe and therefore, his assumed political leanings based on last elections voting blocks, famously “strongholds”. In Kalonzo’s words, the journalist’s name “betrays it all.” To his mindset, the name ‘Muriithi’ is predominant in Central Kenya, a region whose followers overwhelmingly voted for Jubilee coalition that is currently in power, Cord’s main rival.
This thinking is regrettably parochial. Coming from someone with declared ambition to be the country’s president, it betrays a shocking intolerance to members of community constituting part of the very same citizens Musyoka would wish to lead come 2017 or any other general election in the near future. In any case, the stereotype behind it is also fallacious. It assumes members of a community belong by default to obvious political grouping which is not the case to an intellectual analyst. There is plenty of evidence that there are many Kenyans who have challenged this political herd mentality, including prominent members of Musyoka’s Cord coalition.
However, it should also be noted that as much as we may interpret this as a tribal sentiment, our backgrounds and understanding of our local names vary. Most of local names that we Africans get have a unique meaning which in most cases is usually only known to the members of such a locality. Our we send our sentiments and views, it’s therefore worth that we listen keenly what was Kalonzo’s intent in his message to the journalist before giving our very own interpretation.