Thinking Outside the Jamhuri Day Box

Ever since I was a boy, the script at national days has not varied one bit. It features the same obsequious announcer (‘if it pleases you, Your Excellency, we will now have the Kapenguria Dancers’ – what if it does not please him, one wonders). Those Kapenguria dancers will be hustled off stage by the obsequious announcer, without any regard for whether they have completed the dance they spent months rehearsing. There will be the obligatory march by the uniformed forces, as well as a fly-past by the Air Force (helicopters towing an desultory message, the F5 jets screaming overhead, and another announcer on television proudly informing us that those planes are being flown by ‘vijana wetu’ – our boys – as if we should be pleasantly surprised that it is not Jordanians or New Zealanders at the controls of our planes).

After that will be a long procession of ‘dignitaries’, each more senior than the last, culminating in the President ‘delivering his remarks’ (again, that doesn’t change – he begins with a written English speech that has been sweated over by bureaucrats for weeks; and then finally says what is on his mind in Kiswahili, which is the only speech that matters).

There have been a few tweaks in recent years – the dancers are sometimes joined by Kenyan pop groups, and, as we saw last week, there is potential for a lively exchange programme with countries such as Botswana.

As for the dignitaries, Nairobi’s Deputy Governor enlivened proceedings slightly at Jamhuri Day when he read his speech off an iPad (a risky move if there ever was one – what if the device had crashed in the middle of his speech?). But President Kenyatta’s speech was the same as other Presidents in years past: a laundry list of policy proposals in English, and an angry, vitriolic Kiswahili address that hammered all enemies present and future.

There’s nothing wrong with tradition, and there’s a certain comfort to be had from certain eternal rituals, but there has to be something the matter with ceremonies that have not changed in more than thirty years. It is either that we have little imagination, or that no one wants to be the person who brings in an innovation that doesn’t work out. Alfred Mutua was the last one to try, when he dressed the crowd in t-shirts in the national colours, which looks rather good – if a bit North Korean – on television.

No one’s ever written the President’s speech in Kiswahili at the outset, or tried to hold the celebrations in the evening at prime time (the Uhuru Gardens confusion at last year’s ‘Kenya at 50’ celebrations is a debacle that is best forgotten).

Maybe these ceremonies will not change any time soon, but there is one element of them that can. A little tweak which will improve the economy, begin to engender national unity, and invigorate tradition. Why can’t we hold our national day celebrations outside Nairobi?

Nairobi is the obvious natural choice. It is the capital city, and many of the involved parties – Cabinet Secretaries and the like – are to be found here. But who says the whole kit and caboodle cannot be moved to cities around the country? There are three constitutionally mandated national days – Madaraka Day, Mashujaa Day and Jamhuri Day, as well as the nationally celebrated Labour Day. If we were to hold each of these in a different location, in two years the national caravan would have visited eight locations around the country. One can even theme the days in the first year: Madaraka Day in Nyeri (the hotbed of Mau Mau activities in the 1950s); Mashujaa Day in Kisumu in celebration of Tom Mboya (he was a Nairobi politician, but is buried on Rusinga Island nearby); Labour Day in Thika (in celebration of its past reputation as Kenya’s industrial heartland); and Jamhuri Day in Kapenguria (one imagines that the area’s security issues would be solved in one fell swoop). The following year, the caravan would take in Mombasa, and Eldoret, and Kakamega, and on and on around the country.

It is an idea that has actually been tried elsewhere. When I floated these musings on Facebook last Friday, my old high school chum Bernard Maronda, who is a doctor in Windhoek, told me that that’s what happens in Namibia. Local economies benefit from all the custom they receive from the hundreds of people who would need hotel rooms, food and other services. National unity receives a big boost, as everyone feels part of the nation.

It wouldn’t take much to do, except a willingness to cast pre-formed notions aside. It would involve an uncharacteristic Kenyan effort to innovate, but we do need a solid kick for us to leave the comfortable box in which we reside. It may be imperfect first time out, but in a few years, we would all wonder why no one had thought about it before. A generation from now would wonder at the past parochialism of holding national days in just one location.

Let’s try it.

This is the last column for the year – I’m off to indulge in very Kenyan, very traditional rest and nyama choma. But we’ll be back in January. Happy holidays.

Also published in the Business Daily on 16 December 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Thinking-outside-the-Jamhuri-Day-box/-/539548/2557370/-/item/0/-/6tourwz/-/index.html