Beware the voices of inexperience promising solutions to problems that have bedeviled even the Devil himself. Scholarship is bereft of education today; it's principle aim, it seems, is to wangle the fattest paycheck in the shortest time for the fanciest toys. Scholarship is desecrated in the mad rush to move up in society, be seen at the right party, be seen with the right people, and be seen in the right accoutrements of material achievement. Scholarship is notable for the absence of wisdom and the haste with which new ideas, which are not really so new, are embraced as panaceas for what ails the Republic.
The constant battle waged between generations is in full swing in the political arena that Kenya has become over the past decade. In March 2013, #TeamFresh, in the words of my friend Eric Ng'eno, triumphed over the Old Men. But it might turn out that the victory of the Jubilee pair may be Pyrrhic; it's cost continues to devastate vast swathes of the national psyche. If there is one thing that is notable about #Team Fresh, it is the distinct lack of wisdom that characterises their obsession with the moves and countermoves of Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetangula.
It is satisfying, in a childish way, to kick the Minority Party while it is down. Some children, who end up as some of the most crass of adults, spend a considerable portion of their childhoods with magnifying glasses torturing small creatures under the scorching noontime sun. They take great pleasure in causing pain to others. Their "curiosity" is never sated; they grow up to be the high school bullies and the self-entitled wingnuts atop political or commercial enterprises of dubious provenance.
The Minority Party, unless one is wearing blinders and quaffing the Kool-Aid with wild abandon, is ashambles. This is something even the former Prime Minister will admit in the privacy of his coldly calculating mind. It is not a mess simply because its principals are Old Men; it is that their ideas may have been progressive in the heat of anti-establishment combat in the darkest days of the 1980s and 1990s, but today they are moribund and decrepit. Their ideas do not tug at the heartstrings of the demographic bulge that scares some and brings hope to others. It therefore beggars belief that #TeamFresh continues to obsessively track an Opposition peddling pig swill to a generation that has refused time and again to be seduced by that very pig swill. If #TeamFresh really was fresh, its ideas would prevail, it's programmes would receive overwhelming support and it would not even bother to dignify the 13 Points with a response.
What distinguished #TeamFresh in 2012 and 2013 was its unprecedented professionalism in running a political campaign, its munificence in political expenditure and its deployment of new media. Its manifesto, sadly, did what all Kenyan political manifestos did; it overpromised. But no one seriously thought of holding #TeamFresh to its campaign promises; we have been promised the moon so many times it's time we started taking Lunar Shares at each general election. But we did not anticipate that in governance #TeamFresh would, and with determination too, adopt battle-tried-and-tested "analogue" solutions to twenty-first century problems.
Two examples will suffice. When faced with a shambolic, though popular, demand for dialogue by a shambolic Opposition fast losing friends and allies, rather than redeploy the campaign braintrust that allowed it to keep ahead of the political game, #TeamFresh reached back to 1969 and 1990 and unleashed the forces of law and order on the opposition. It even deployed the same rhetoric in its allusions to political zones where the Opposition was unwelcome.
When faced with increased threats and violence against the public safety, #TeamFresh reached all the way back to Operation Anvil (1952) and rounded up every suspicious person it could find, evidence be damned, and deported those it could, jailed those it could, held many in a concentration camp and secretly assassinated those it could not handle.
We were seduced by the rhetoric of #TeamDigital versus #TeamAnalogue. We were seduced by the Twitter handles and Facebook pages. We were seduced by the matching red shirts and yellow shirts. We failed to peek behind the curtains. We didn't bother to ask the hard questions. We allowed "youth" to be a catchall for "change" and the "future". This nation is devoid of progressive leaders, never mind our progressive Constitution. If the likes of Mr Ng'eno believe that #TeamFresh is the future, it is time they injected wisdom in their ideas. It is time they turned their eyes firmly to the future and withdrew their hands from the cookie jars of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s.
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