Poor Leadership Is Our Undoing
Today our politics are done ethnically and there are people who believe they cannot be done differently. In politics, Kenyans believe the end justifies the means and all is fair to get power and wealth. Though doing things the way we do them has given leaders power and wealth, clearly we have been going in the wrong direction and must have a paradigm shift to have development that has so far eluded us.
When five parties formed Hoja Alliance on Sunday, 3rd June, 2012, it was to seek a paradigm shift from the way we have always done things by addressing right issues and asking right questions to get productive answers to our problems, away from personality worship, power inheritance, leaders’ interests camouflaged as community survival, commercialization of politics, buying and selling leadership to the highest bidders.
When leaders call people to their meetings, it is never to discuss people’s needs and problems but cheer leaders and their interests. But when public rallies only address interests and ambitions of leaders, they perpetuate misery of people who must begin to focus on their own interests and survival or perish together with the nation.
One of Kenya’s major curses is ordinary people’s contentment with their own abject poverty. To have a paradigm shift, people must ask why they are where they are and how they can reach the Promised Land. But politicians who don’t help people to overcome their poverty are not their leaders. They are their enemies. To prosper, majority Kenyans must have no doubt. It is neither God nor Satan that has abandoned them in the desert. It is their rotten leaders who selfishly sneaked into Canaan alone. To reach Canaan, Kenyans must replace rotten with good leaders.
When people say the flock does not reach pastures if the leader limps, they mean to say Kenyans are in the desert of poverty because colonial governors and Presidents Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki failed as leaders. But worse, bad leaders are like carcasses. They attract hyenas, blue flies and vultures that pulverize the people and spawn political sons and daughters who want to inherit their fathers’ slaves and political kingdoms.
Moi and Kenyatta are not in power but dictatorship is not dead. Hence, Odinga proposes nay-sayers in the referendum should not be elected or given any job in the government, a cruelty that his own father suffered. People kneel before Odinga to speak to him. And Nguyai shamelessly urges Kikuyu voters to elect dogs to parliament rather than Kikuyu leaders of parties other than Uhuru Kenyatta’s TNA. Will these leaders not reinstate one party dictatorship if they get power?
Next year, Kenya will be 50 years older but poorer with more poor Kenyans now jigger-infested as they were during colonialism. With jigger-infesting poverty bred by a jungle society that is driven by the ideology of ‘survival of the fittest’, it is foolhardy to expect Vision 2030 or any leadership to develop Kenya even in 17 years with the same capitalism that has bred our problems. To liberate Kenya, we must substitute our man-eat-man system with Social Democracy that can liberate Kenya as it has Scandinavian countries.
Kenyans must wake up and stop day dreaming that carnivores of the jungle society can make laws that will arrest and imprison them for eating herbivores. Carnivores only make laws that legalize and legitimize their hunt of herbivores. As for corruption, it is inherent in the jungle society. When lions kill sheep, hyenas steal from them. When hyenas kill a zebra, vultures grab the meat from them. To end graft, people must end jungle society itself.
The only thing carnivorous elites do well is to keep the poor divided, fighting each other, too busy and confused to defend themselves from the rich fellows who rule the jungle. Yet, some will say our jungle now has democracy that must protect both herbivores and carnivores that eat them. But jungle society has no democracy. If it had, it would protect herbivores from carnivores and it is the majority poor that would be in power, not the rich.