Politics of rage can only smother national integrity

The Standard, Editorial.
Saturday, October 28, 2006.

To ask ‘Why do our leaders engage in politics of rage?’ citizens could be pardoned for responding: ‘What else can they do?’ The natural reaction of a people who have been betrayed by their leaders is despair and indifference, not reason. Yet despair will only chalk up more anger and frustration, which cannot get us through the politics of hate and recrimination smothering our country.

We need coherent answers. Answers that explain why the men and women we elected to positions of leadership have made a career in pursuing misguided policies simply out of spite.
To casually dismiss the circus playing out at the National Assembly over the nomination of MPs to the East African Parliament and the ever-present leadership vacuum that every so often stirs the basest of instincts in our leaders as acts of indulgent politicians may be reassuring, but it is false.

There is something stronger at work here than rivalry, incompetence and jealousy. Something that can move men and women sworn to protect the national good to rape it with impunity. The problem is bigger than just regime change. It is the Constitution and governance institutions.

Look at Kenya today. The promise of the second liberation has calcified into a belligerent nightmare. The Government is efficient in only one area: Rewarding sycophancy and strangling integrity. The Opposition is excelling in only coveting the presidency.

Where the country would think as one before, we have been balkanised into tribal groupings and compartmentalised further into ions that feed the hunger of the hungry cliques that lord it over the electorate. Is this how to run a country?

Revolutions, they say, don’t eat their children, but the Narc Revolution in 2002 has metamorphosed into a dragon that feeds on its minders and their children.

We think of dictators and warlords in Somalia and Sudan as rapacious, but our leaders in and out of Government are just as culpable.

The question is how a people who once yearned for good governance could reject it so dramatically. In the 1980s and 1990s, the talk was all about good leadership, now it turns out that good leadership takes more than just advocacy.

Research has shown that when the State or political parties fail to provide a sense of legitimacy, other organisations and despair fill the void.

There is a ready-made source of legitimacy in tribalism and nepotism. So it is not surprising that party leaders want their spouses, mistresses, kinsmen and protÈgÈs nominated to the East African Assembly in Arusha when the posts are supposed to be filled by the most competent among us.

This warped thinking is a direct consequence of the total failure of political institutions. Sadly, politicians have averted their eyes from this reality and would rather discuss the "2002 MoU" than examine the dysfunctions of their leadership.

But as Kenyans wallow in despair, a poisonous clique that reads from the same script with the devil is smothering the country.

Others are busy looking among the same herd for a better shepherd to lead us into prosperity. If Kenyans do not take it upon themselves to stop the country from falling prey to anachronistic medievalists, and devise a strategy to deal with this clique, nothing will save us.

We need a contingency plan that will not only restore our national integrity, but reform the political thinking and practice. Can the President lead the way?