Where is the middle class?

What is the role of the leader? Is it to play cheerleader to the masses or to show them the way? When the Member for Makadara rose to ask a question in the National Assembly regarding the manhandling by police of the Member for Embakasi, he hit the nail on the head. It cannot be that every time a Member of Parliament joins his constituents in opposing an unjust act of the state that he is hauled off in handcuffs on charges of incitement or disturbing the peace. Whatever ones feelings of Ferdinand 'Embakasi Style' Waititu, we must not forget that the good people of Embakasi elected him to serve in the Tenth Parliament, his warts notwithstanding.

In the Dark Days of the Moi Regime, it was the President himself who set the tone of public debate and who decided where the debate would go and how it would be conducted. Members of Parliament were mere voice-boxes of the President, and it was a brave MP who decided to actually take the role of representing his constituents' interests seriously. A surefire way of getting thrown out of the ruling party was to take positions that the party chairman and president had not, or would not. It is now emerging that Robert Ouko, the assassinated Foreign Affairs Minister, had decided to take on the role of the first anti-corruption crusader in Moi's Cabinet and this may be one reason why he was murdered in cold blood. That he carried out his campaign out in the open and in front of his constituents must have rubbed his fellow MPs the wrong way and very few of them were sad that he met such a brutal untimely end.

Public discourse has degenerated into a slanging match between supporters of different political personalities. The role of the middle classes is nonexistent. In their absence, the public arena is occupied by demagogues of all shades and stripes and the level of public debate is so low that even a child of five can participate and sound a sage. Speaking at a lawyers' conclave earlier this year, the Member for Gichugu called on the professional classes to take their rightful place in political parties, helping to craft ideology and policy at grassroots level. In her estimation, the days of the middle and professional classes crying foul over the misdeeds of their elected representatives are over. If they wish to see an improvement in public policy and development, it is imperative that they join political parties in numbers large enough that the party leaders do not walk over the rank-and-file with their ideas or ideology. She argued that their absence robbed the nation of valuable ideas that could be used to temper the rhetoric that politicians employ in political activity, ensuring that a considered opinion is always the watchword of political discourse. By defining 'politics' as the knowledge of government, she stated that it is the responsibility of every Kenyan to educate himself on what his government can or cannot do, in order to be in a a position to hold the Executive and his representative to account for his deeds or misdeeds.

For those of us who were not victims of the Moi System, it is imperative that we shrug off the apathy demonstrated by our seniors and undertook an examination of what it means to be a professional in the Kenyan political system. Many of us are professionals in our own rights, with white collar careers to think of. But we seem to have forgotten that our careers live or die by the state of the government. If the next Executive is tyrannically-minded, God forbid, our absence from the political arena will hurt us more than a studiously hands-off approach that we have applied thus far. As a member of the Law Society of Kenya, I would have no cause to complain if I did not take part in the activities of the Law Society when decisions were taken without my input. It is my responsibility as a member of the Bar to hold my Chairman's and the Council's feet to the fire if, in my estimation, they are overstepping their boundaries in managing the affairs of the Society. This should be the same philosophy that governs our relationship with our elected representatives and the State. While we may decry the methods that the Member for Embakasi employs to resolve the problems of his constituents, it must be asked where the middle class members of the constituency are. If they truly care about the image of their constituency in the eyes of the nation, it is time that they engaged more forcefully with their MP ad stopped sitting on the fence as if it were an Olympic sport. In the end, if they continue to do nothing, they will have no one to blame every time he is hauled off to jail on charges of incitement or disturbing the peace.