It is time.

It seems as if things are getting out of hand, does it not? Moses Wetangula goes on record on the stump that some properties, acquired by the family of a Jubilee luminary, are of questionable antiquity and that Kenyans should reject the candidate because of those dubious antecedents. This is an escalation from the tit-for-tat between the said Jubilee luminary and the CORD standard-bearer from a few days ago. In other quarters, candidates and potential candidates are storming the offices of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission because of the shenanigans going on in their own party. Mutterings of dark forces have been made by some who believe they are the Second Coming and all should bow down before them. Of course they wrap their rhetoric in the cloak of the phrase "the people have decided" as if it covers their dubious attempts to paint themselves as the true representatives of the voice of the poor and the downtrodden.

Still in other quarters, candidates are rejecting "direct" nominations because they believe the positions their parties want them to contest are "beneath" them. They believe they have the intellectual heft to sit in the Senate. Of course they base their claim to intellectual superiority on their academic documents, forgetting that not all intellectuals are lettered or that innate intelligence sometimes is not revealed by the grammatical syntax of the candidate but by the wisdom of the choices they make and the manner in which they represent the interests of those they claim to speak for.

The IEBC has a lot to prove, not the least being that it is better organised than the briefcases we mistakenly call political parties. If the country is to be rescued, the nawabs of the IEBC must get off the bench and engage in a series of show trials. It is unconscionable that politicians continually behave in a manner that undermines the spirit of the Constitution and the electoral law of Kenya while the IEBC wiles its time away watching the countdown to the general election. The Commission must remind all candidates that they stand for the election only on its sufferance, observing all constitutional and legal niceties of course. The "little" infractions that it has allowed candidates to get away with should come to an end once it hauls one or two before its tribunals and strips them of their certificates of nomination.

It is only in Kenya that ideology and principle are mere words to hoodwink the electorate as to the sincerity of the men and women seeking to rule them. We pretend to emulate "mature" democracies by enacting laws and establishing institutions to govern us. The truth of the matter is that we no longer care for the laws we enact or the institutions we establish; as soon as they are enacted we work twice as hard to undermine them and as soon as soon as they are established we find reasons to ignore them. This was the case with the electoral law of Kenya; we enacted legislation to level the political playing field and discipline politicians, but the Tenth Parliament reminded us why it is we find politicians a scourge that should be eradicated by the political equivalent of DDT. They amended the law at will to give themselves a greater chance of prevailing at the hustings, but as the good people of Luo Nyanza demonstrated, you can only lead the people by the nose for only so long. Their nascent rebellion against a prominent Luo political juggernaut should be a warning to the remaining Caesars in waiting that the moral arc of history bends towards fairness and justice.

Kenyans have been reminded time and again that the general election is a make or break one and that if they get it wrong this time round, they will regret it for generations to come. Kenyans do not want to be reminded of this fact; they are not all toddlers being entertained by the class clown. We are a sophisticated people who have discovered the emperor is butt-naked. We know what we know and on The Fourth so too will the men and women who have treated us like shit.