Ken Ouko
18 May 2008
opinion
Nairobi — By electing the ladies and gentlemen in Kenya's leadership stable, we have woken up to enough drama to last us a lifetime.
And we need to collectively and decisively tell these leaders to give us a break.
It is deeply disheartening to see our leaders pulling in all sorts of divergent directions instead of sticking to their promise of pulling together to haul this beautiful country out of the abyss that they helped sink it into!
Pretentious weaning
I am sometimes tempted to think nothing will change in this country for as long as we elect and re-elect the same old faces into positions of leadership.
How else do you explain the prisons fiasco that the otherwise affable gentleman by the name of Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka dragged us through a while back?
If anyone had a doubt about the pretentious weaning from the Kanu and Moi era that our politicians keep proclaiming, here was stark evidence that such weaning had not been successful.
Non-consultative media appointments like those of the former VP Moody Awori and former commissioner Kamakil were the hallmarks of the Kanu-Moi style of leadership.
So even though we endured the failed Narc dream and ushered in coalition politics, everything has remained the same.
Back in the days when Professor Sam Ongeri was in charge of the Health ministry, the whole country was stunned by some fallacious statistics he released in an attempt to paint a true picture of the impact of the HIV/Aids pandemic on Kenya.
As it turned out, those figures were not only a gross exaggeration but also largely ficticious.
Years later, Mr Danson Mungatana churned out similarly alarmist and baseless statistics about how 16,000 Kenyan children die daily from hunger-related problems.
Then there is the debate about the Grand Opposition Alliance.
How embarrassing for the presumably resolute ODM leader Raila Odinga that a political neophyte in the name of Ababu Namwamba could strike a "dare me" pose to someone who only months ago he was willing to break parliamentary rules for by swearing direct loyalty.
It was bad enough that the Prime Minister's trusted lieutenants seemed to have left him the task of crowing the chorus of negativity against the proposed opposition alliance all by himself.
One interested, as some of us are, in mapping out the route our leaders have taken in response to the need to heal this country and set us on a new path of not just recovery but also rapid growth towards the 2030 goal would be utterly baffled.
Rhyme with the time
Our leaders seem instead to be revelling in the new-found comfort that the Grand Coalition has ushered in.
It would appear that when things appeared bleak and precarious, our leadership was all too willing to rhyme with the time and proclaim the need for unity and pacification of the raging circumstances stimulated by negative ethnicity.
As soon as the situation was brought under control, the chameleon-like nature of our politicians effortlessly reversed them to their true colours.
Isn't it simply amazing, for example, that the thorny issue of resettling the internally displaced should attract such pitiless politicking?
As fellow Kenyans squeeze soaked mattresses to dry, our politicians adjust their attire before bedroom mirrors in readiness for a media appearance about the selfsame IDPs.
When the IDPs shield their young ones from the biting cold and insistent mosquitoes, our politicians' children, from vantage positions on the plush carpet of their expansive living rooms, are probably making "Daddy, you look good on TV" quips to the smile of satisfaction from Mrs Honourable MP.
Then in comes the dreaded Mungiki and our leaders are making utter fools of themselves subjecting the country to predictably discordant tunes about how to deal with the group.
Perhaps it is time to tell our leaders that their indecisiveness and attendant procrastination carries the effect of fortifying the mysterious invincibility of the Mungiki.
Mungiki kingdoms
Similarly, when victims of the Mungiki realise our leaders are as rudderless as has been recently displayed, they opt to "live with the devil" and embrace the Mungiki's existence as an inevitable flaw of their already pathetic living conditions in the sprawling slum neighbourhoods that have become Mungiki kingdoms.
One day, our leaders are promising that they will pursue the ideals of collective responsibility to the best of their abilities.
The next day, none other than the minister for Internal Security declares that "the government is not talking to the Mungiki".
That pronouncement had barely hit the airwaves before the Prime Minister applied relational suavity and semantic juggling to powder some semblance of damage control vis-à-vis the government's stand on the Mungiki.
What we need in this otherwise great country of ours is leadership. We are definitely doing badly in that department.
And as Kenyans, we need to shift our energies into re-engaging one another, especially across the ethnic divide.
We must master the skills of cross-ethnic interpretation and perfect inter-generational productivity to such an extent that the younger generation does not feel stifled, ignored or altogether left out of economic production as well as political determinism.
Ken Ouko is a sociology lecturer at the University of Nairobi.
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