Of presidents and shoes.

If I didn't know better, I'd weep buckets for the President and Commander-in-Chief for how he was George Bushed in Migori. Among the Arabs, so we are told by the wise heads of CNN and the BBC, throwing a shoe a person is the ultimate sign of disrespect. President Kenyatta not only had shoes flung at him in Migori, stones made their debut too. Why I will not weep for the leader of the Jubilee Alliance and the TNA head honcho lies in the post-Kibaki legacy of speaking our minds as freely as we can. In the heat and dust of the referendum political combat, President Kenyatta can expect even more vicious treatment in the political constituencies where Raila Odinga enjoys political primacy.

For more than three generations, it had been instilled in Kenyans that the President and the presidency must be respected, that these two institutions' integrity must not be sullied. If we are to achieve the laudable aims of Kenya Vision 2030 this officially-enforced instinct to genuflect and pay obeisance to the Head of State and Government must be erased from our minds. The President of Kenya is not God Almighty, nor is he Lord God's mouthpiece here on Earth. He is but a man, and a flawed politician at that. The institution of the presidency, as much as we would like to bend our knee to it in respect, enjoys about as much legitimacy as the National Police Service. Asking long-suffering Kenyans to bow and scrape in front of it is simply asking too much.

Kenya's first President laid the foundations for what came to pass in Migori this past Monday. Few Kenyans alive today will remember that the agitation for self-government in the 1950s was driven principally by the unfair land policies enforced by the colonial administration. The Mau Mau War was fought over land. Had Mzee Jomo Kenyatta's first administration honoured the spirit of the Mau Mau War, had he and his cronies avoided the beberu instinct of self-aggrandisement, and had he been honest enough about the challenges our fledgling nation faced, Uhuru Kenyatta would not be having shoes and stones hurled at him at a political rally in the opposition's strongholds. The edifice that Jomo Kenyatta built eventually became a Leviathan of corruption and misrule that was feared as much as it was distrusted. It was no longer a legitimate authority. There is no way it is going to recover its authority or legitimacy if all its occupants continue to obsess over their status rather than their responsibilities to the people.

For fifty years the presidency has been associated with many evils it was sworn to eradicate. For forty-seven of those years, Kenyans lived in fear of the midnight knock from the agents of the presidency. They witnessed billions upon billions of shillings squandered or stolen. They watched as hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land were parcelled out by the presidency to the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginalised. They watched in horror as hundreds, nay thousands, of Kenyans were arrested on flimsy grounds, detained without trial, tortured and murdered all in the name of keeping the presidency in power at all costs. And for three generations Kenyans have had to listen to the lies that the presidency told in order to justify its crimes.

The presidency does not enjoy widespread legitimacy in Kenya. It has not done much to change Kenyans' minds. In the recent past it has been variously accused of standing idly by as terrorists kill and maim with impunity, aiding and abetting grand corruption, doing nothing to stem the flow of blood on the nation's highways, and of enriching the rich and powerful at the expense of the weak and poor by imposing unfair taxes on the latter and granting tax breaks on the former. Whether these accusations are true is not the issue; until it can demonstrate in deed as much as in word that it is doing everything in its power to offer succour to the poor, the President can continue to expect hostile receptions in opposition bastions, whether the hecklers, shoe and stone-throwers are paid or not.