When East African countries attained independence, there ensued an era where universities took the frontline in staging fierce intellectual battles.
The then two regional giants of intellectual discourse, Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Daresalam in Tanzania, found themselves in scathing battles and scholars took their Kalashnikovs and went on the attack from either front.
Makerere boasted of taking a route that would produce a 'deep' scholar who was well-versed in ideas of the world. Daresalam, on the other hand, prided in producing hands-on technocrats who would solve challenges in their immediate environment, in this case Tanzania (or Kenya), East Africa, and Africa in that order, before paying any attention to the world.
Kenya seems to have not provided a frontier in the war at the time.
But every liquid has its own boiling point, and Kenya was perhaps preparing for a rival from outside the continent. (After all, wasn't it Mazrui who led the Ugandans in creating the universal scholar in Kampala?)
Two intellectual messiahs of the country have sprung from the bushes and pushed Kenya from the spell of intellectual laziness into one of the most epic battles of the scholar.
On the one hand sits Nairobi governor Mike Sonko, a graduate of the Kenya Methodist University. The other side has the unrelenting Kiambu governor Ferdinand Waititu of the great Punjab university.
The subject is, government demolitions of buildings on public land.
Following the government's decision to bring down all buildings constructed on riparian land, the Methodist school says everything marked for demolition must, will, and, shall come down.
Even if surveyors were to find the State House a fruit of the forbidden land! Okay, he does not say State House, he says Weston Hotel, which means the same.
The Methodists claim that the demolitions are an executive order, and that he who fights executive order must be as prepared as he who swallows an avocado seed.
In other words, exexutive order is more superior to the law.
The Punjabites however say that this is counter-productive: a waste of public resources and a repulsion of the much-needed investors.
How do you bring down buildings worth billions of shillings in the name of saving a dirty river that still flows anyway?
What Punjab is suggesting, at the end, is that the government should allow an investor on riparian land to move the river a little bit away from his construction.
To where, the Indian school of thought does not clarify.
What is important, however, is that the river should eventually not flow near buildings and suffer pollution. Perhaps every scholar at Punjab is filling the government's post box with the same solution: Buy a huge jiko to boil and evaporate all the river water so that we eventually do away with rivers encroaching our multi-billion investments and the huge loans.
Earlier when the demolitions targetted the Nairobi peasants of Kibera, very few leaders raised a voice.
It was former Constitutional Review chair Prof Yash Pal Ghai who raised his finger against the government in very clear terms.
In his argument, Ghai said something only law students will understand: something about the Constitution being taller than the law.
He took issues with the manner in which the evictions and demolitions were done, arguing that the 'rough' approach by the government disregarded the human dignity of the displaced humans.
Perhaps our Punjabite scholar from Kiambu was waiting for a cue, which he found in Ghai's argument.
The Methodist scholar, on the other hand, seems to have been listening too much to another law professor PLO Lumumba.
While addressing the issue of corruption and how to drill holes in the case of impunity on the continent, Prof Lumumba argues that African countries need a conspiracy of institutions to see an end to impunity.
What he means is that the rich can afford to buy the law and justice. So to kill the wealthy Kenyan cartels one has to hatch a rendezvous between CJ Maraga, DPP Haji, EACC, Uhuru Kenyatta, and other shot-callers where they conspire to suspend protocol and punch impunity in the face.
Speaking of punches, they better learn to fly like a butterfly but sting like a bee because without that KO punch, the cartel republic always finds a way to dust itself and come back stronger and more immune.
It is a law in those quarters that when the government hunter begins to hit without missing, one must learn to fly without perching.
Which way, anyway? Do we hail the Methodists or carve a cow for Punjab?
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