It is for History to Judge Us.

“History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity.” These were the words of Cicero. It is through antiquity that we get the words of this great orator. And that is precisely history.

History illuminates our pathways so that as we move, we have an understanding of where we are coming from, where we are and thus where we are going. So a man without history is like a tree without roots. Without roots, a tree is doomed not to survive.

What we do with that history is another story. There are those people who look at history as though it is a burden that they are deeply indebted to. But we should understand that for us we are to learn from history. It is only a fool who wants to experience it himself even after learning and beholding how it feels from other people.

A few weeks ago, a judge nailed her hammer to mark a verdict to a case that saw a hefty penalty imposed on two individuals who had colluded to steal from the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB). This was a milestone in dealing with graft; a malady that has crippled this country. Unfortunately, we seem to have a double standard in our legal realms.

It raises eyebrows that we have cases thrown out of court due to ‘lack of sufficient evidence’ or because there was no sufficient ground for the establishment of charges. And these are the cases where billions of money were stolen from public coffers.

The reason for such developments lies in how politics plays and to which side of the competing teams you are playing. But at least we have seen a tiny development in how to deal with these graft cases and this may point to a bright future for our country towards the individuals who have milked this country to death. I mean dead. History proves this.

And the greatest problem today is that we never learn from history. Let me take for instance the young Turks that held the government in check in the 70’s up to the turn of the century. These were guys who seemed to be led by principle and ideology rather than impulse and wishful imaginations.

History is there to illuminate our path on how they mounted from the back so to speak. Instead of the young Turks of today borrowing a leaf from them, they are only led by appetite and the philosophy that the stomach is in the front. The very reason they end up mounting from the front if I may speak in the words of Kamau Ngotho.

Another interesting aspect is in how we look at the West copying whatever we feel will boost our ego and raise our self-esteem. That is how we copy their mannerisms, their speaking accents, their fashions and their movies as well as music trends. And we stop there. In other words, we copy the non-important things and leave the very essence of the need we have for the moment.

We ought to copy their way of governance, political play dynamism, and academic dispensations in terms of where vain study lies about research-based academia. We need to copy their way of dealing with corruption cases and even those who joke with public resources. We need to copy their mantra of stopping at nothing but the very end of a case even if it means going to other countries to smoke out the culprits.

That is what happened with Pablo Escobar, Osama Bin Laden, El Chapo Guzman and other culprits who posed a threat to the United States of America. Even in the East, once you are accused of a case touching corruption and it is discovered that you were truly involved thus making you guilty, it may mean a death sentence to you.

I brought up some of these histories because we need to learn from history. If we cannot learn from our history, then we need to learn from other people’s history. That then begs the question of how history will judge us in future instead of the present political and social realms we are living in.

I imagine in future when our children will be learning from history how we stole their innocence by going after huge unsustainable loans that were filled with a lot of graft and that did very little to liberate their future misery which they will be burdened to pay.

How will history judge us when they learn how we were very shrewd to judge small thieves of chicken and cows with hefty fines and long jail terms but then we left the huge thieves of billions of money walking freely and lying to the very public that they stole from to muscle for them and again support them to another round of stealing.

I am wondering loudly how democracy will be defined in our times at that time. It will be a selective rule of some few people on behalf of a huge brainwashed people who they lead to wherever they wish for their benefit. They use the majority of people for their benefit because the public cow never runs dry. But it is for history to judge us.

I leave history to judge us in future. Truth be told I cannot liberate that future alone. We either work together to liberate ourselves so that history judges us fairly in future or we die together as fools or rather a name is left for history to tag us.

End.