A story is told of the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda who spent nearly 30 years in the Philipines jungles after the surrender of Japan during World War Two.
Whereas Japan surrendered by the war’s end in 1945, Onoda held out up until 1974, fighting a war that Japan had long lost.
Siaya Governor James Orengo is increasingly morphing into another Hiroo Onoda, thousands of miles away from Japan.
The incessant attempts by Governor Orengo to persuade the Luo community to posture as anti-government agents have become too loud to warrant a coordinated response by different segments of the Luo community.
The Luo community have borne the heaviest brunt in its agitation for reforms in Kenya. From old people to barely months old children, breastfeeding mothers to disabled men; state response to Luo agitation has been excessively brutal.
The decision by the Luo to join President Ruto’s government arose out of the post-Gen Z protests, where there existed the real possibility of state collapse. Before then, the Luo had been nearly alone in the agitation for tax reforms and the lowering of the cost of living in 2023.
The agitation by the Luo has been to ensure the country thrives amidst the many challenges it faces, and has never been to destroy the country.
The agitation has also been about inclusion, with the Luo feeling perenially excluded from participation in state building, despite the skills and knowledge present among us.
What Governor Orengo is missing is the fact that much of the rights he wants the Luo community to continue fighting for have been codified in law and various institutions built to protect and defend those rights.
Hundreds of people earn fat salaries to secure the rights of Kenyans in constitutional commissions and other independent state agencies.
Citizens across Kenya are uninterested in fighting for blanket rights, otherwise they’d have joined you in 2023.
Luos must abandon a self-imposed burden to fight for rights that others have achieved on our backs.
For years, Orengo and his Luo generation who perennially drag the Luo community to the streets have achieved little from the streets, but at very high costs to our community in terms of the destruction of the economic lives of the people, the injuries sustained and the death toll from state rights abusers.
Only a fool repeats the same thing many times expecting a different result. Orengo’s generation are proud fools. They do the same thing the same way, each time with the same result, over and over, and still expect the most educated generation of the Luo to follow them, without question, because of some historical struggle debts we allegedly owe them.
Jaramogi left government as the Vice President of the Republic of Kenya and died as mere MP for Bondo. By the time of his death, he was no longer even the Official Opposition Leader, the role having changed hands.
Jaramogi’s decades of fighting successive regimes may have opened up Kenya in the end, but at what cost to the Luo community?
Orengo’s own record as governor of Siaya has been variously questioned. Is Siaya a model county on respect for rights and freedoms?
In power for nearly 30 years now, occupying various capacities, the respect and deference we have accorded the Orengo generation should not be at our own expense.
The Luo community is reorganizing itself for the next 50 years. The quest now is for economic prosperity and social freedoms — education for Luo children; affordable, accessible and quality healthcare; commercial agriculture and industrialization; infrastructure development and the staggered rebuilding of the Luo political machine.
We are not abandoning the fight for rights. Economic rights are rights too.
We are aware that we are squatting in President Ruto’s government. This situation is not of our own making.
The same Orengo generation that has failed to capture power on their own terms are again attempting to rig our collective future and continue the material miseries pervading our community — failing healthcare stretched by preventable waterborne diseases, children ravished by hunger and malnutrition; derelict school facilities, impassable roads; poor households unable to educate their children without CDF or county bursaries, college educated youths opting for sangwenya gigs to survive, the list is endless.
Just as Orengo said we all cannot be in government, he must be aware that we all cannot be in the opposition — especially this current one.
It is time to take a rest.
It is time to hunker.
Maandamano wabiro timo, tok sani.
