Thursday, February 11, 2016

May Trump and Sanders prevail

If you thought that it was going to be a coronation, and there are Kenyans whose hearts will be broken because of it, it will not. Hilary Clinton will not be crowned this week as the nominee of the Democratic Party, and if she keeps getting it wrong, she will get her ass handed to her in South Carolina in the next ten days by an old, curmudgeonly Jew from Vermont who wants to launch a revolution in the United States. There are millions of young US citizens who are Feeling the Bern and who have upended the well-laid plans of the Clinton Machinery. And that is a very good thing.

There are one or two Kenyans who labour under the delusion that dynasties, political or royal—look at how they fawn at the British royal family—are a good thing, yet what Kenya has is a republican, democratic government, where dynasties went out with the felling of the Kanu hegemon in 2002. They have been celebrating the Clinton campaign as if it were a good thing for one family—just like the Bushes—to dominate the national politics of a nation such as the United States, control the national narrative frequently for personal gain, and exclude the alternative voices that instil caution in the process, such as that of Bernie Sanders, the Jewish democratic socialist who is making the Clinton coronation that much more uncertain.

Kenya was held hostage to the Moi narrative for twenty four years and there is a segment of the country's political and business classes that miss the Old Man, despite the fact that so much went so wrong for so long under him. They have done a good job of rehabilitating his reputation—with a massive dose of assistance from the leaden-footed among the neo-Kenyatta-philes in State House today. But no matter how much his reputation is sanitised, he is a very good example why for-life "appointments" for which no competition will be brooked are a bad idea. The Clintons and the Bushes are cautionary tales that Kenyans should learn from, and in-bred shenanigans of the British royals should help all right-thinking Kenyans disavow dynasties of all kinds.

Bernie Sanders and the hateful Donald Trump are important of only to remind the citizens of the "world's most powerful nation" that it is their overreliance on the Bushes and the Clintons that brought them to this sorry place. The political revolution that Barack Obama launched in 2007 will eventually sweep away the ancien regime that has refused to exit the political stage. It is only a matter of time before the British royals exit the stage and finally let the United Kingdom become a republic; the "decentralisation:" that has benefited Scotland and Wales will soon engulf the entire emerald isle. Whom will Kenyans enamoured of the royals look to for inspiration?

I hope that Trump takes the Republican nomination and Sanders takes the Democratic one, and that Sanders prevails over Trump in the general election. It will be the end of the Clinton and Bush dynasties in US national politics for at least a generation and that will have salutary effects around the globe.

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