KAIKAI'S KICKER: Kenya vs Tanzania - Who won the contest?

On my Kicker, I hope we can end it here — this sudden Kenya versus Tanzania contest that has been going on for the last one week.

The sober ones in the room must have been watching with grave concern as a tiff that began with the arrest and deportation of Kenyan activists from Tanzania mutated across the week into a nasty spectacle capable of straining diplomatic relations. The spectacle played out on two main platforms — that is, the respective internet and parliaments of the two countries.

Here are my observations about the Kenya versus Tanzania unexpected exchange. First, to the two nations, at an adult, state, government, and diplomatic level, that was dangerously reckless and unwarranted. As Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet and philosopher, warned many centuries ago; “From a little spark may burst a mighty flame.”

History teems with examples of wars fought over the flimsiest of reasons, ranging from a kettle of soup to an unsettled grocery debt, among other petty excuses. All it takes is for sober heads in a room to be outnumbered, and events of the last week have shown us that that prospect is not impossible. Which takes me to the second observation:

The parliaments of Kenya and Tanzania are almost equally gifted with a sizeable number of hotheads. Remarks on the floor of the Senate in Nairobi flawlessly reflected the debate in Parliament in Dodoma. It felt like a matchmaking exercise — some kind of East African talent show premier on how to run your mouth na kuongea mbaya.

Elected leaders on both sides of Mt. Kilimanjaro demonstrated their capacity for street brawling and mindless verbal bravado — kuongea bila break! On the aggregate, it was a poor, immature, and emotional show by the two parliaments. One would cringe to imagine what would have happened if some of these politicians were around when the East African Community collapsed in 1977 under a huge cloud of broken relations between Kenya and Tanzania. What if? Dreadful.

My third observation: the cruel, boundless capacity of Kenyans for online wars. From nasty, outright cyberbullying to brutally creative satire, the internet will never forget the horrid online offensive by Kenyans. Many social, cultural, and political boundaries were crossed online. We cannot even mention diplomatic bounds here. And I point this one out here, at the high risk of kusalimiwa.

My final observation: our respective internet and parliamentary hotheads were really eager to make this a contest between Kenya and Tanzania on a wide range of issues, especially around politics and governance. It was thrilling watching them cancel out their scores. Where Kenyans boasted about exporting civil liberties, Tanzanians crowed about physically kicking out Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada from power in 1979.

When Kenyans touted their bill of rights and freedom of speech, Tanzanians prided themselves on ideology-driven politics grounded in the teachings of their founding president, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Another potential score cancelled out. So, my scoreboard was still reading Kenya zero, Tanzania… then I heard a Tanzanian saying they have little and nothing to learn from Kenyans. He went on to explain in eloquent Kiswahili how Kenyans compete and even kill each other along tribal lines every election year… It was getting personal…

Still zero–zero? Over to the V-A-R.
That is my kicker.