Peacocks and weaver birds.

The Senator for Nairobi City County has done it again. He is the topic of avid discussion on the "serious" shows on morning FM radio as well as either the butt of cruel jokes or the envy of many on other less "serious" ones. He has managed to be both hero and villain in the space of one week.

First came the image of the Senator alighting from a lurid gold-coloured Toyota Land Cruiser surrounded by a praetorian guard of shotgun-wielding and AK-47-toting bodyguards. Thereafter, he announced that he had set up a "trust fund" for his eponymous Sonko Rescue Team, that would offer the long-suffering residents of Nairobi certain civic services for free (wedding limos, breakdown services, disaster rescue, and the like).

Meanwhile, health workers in Machakos have gone on strike leading to the sometimes agonising deaths of patients in public hospitals in that county. A post by the Governor of Machakos on his Twitter account shows him meeting with a motley bunch of "committee chairmen" of the Machakos County Assembly; no mention is made about the ongoing health workers' strike.

The Nairobi City Governor, on the other hand, still dreams of turning Nairobi into Berlin or Frankfurt where the knowledge industry nestles comfortably next to the manufacturing industry, backed by an efficient county public service, light taxes, low unemployment, growing revenue and civic pride. He has just accepted a grant to "refurbish" the Pumwani Maternity Hospital. He was in Germany late last year to explore the possibility of bringing German-style mass public transport to Nairobi.

What these two governors have in common is a penchant for flash over substance, much like the senator for Nairobi City. Terrible at politics, they compensate for their inadequate political skills with their PR skills; the Machakos Governor has made a decent fist of the political propaganda skills he honed as Mwai Kibaki's government's official spokesman. The Nairobi Governor still sounds stilted, stuffed up, condescending and a man without a clue, surrounded my piling mounds of garbage, a public transport infrastructure still in the shitter and a reputation for loving Luo Nyanza more than the county which he governs.

The Nairobi Senator can mouth off about the Sonko Rescue Team Trust Fund, and how impossible it is to get a Bill through the senatorial snakepit, but the only difference between him and the governors is that his failures will never be seen as failures because very  few Kenyans will ever visit Parliament to sit through a Senate session and determine the level of legislative participation that the Senator engages in. The failures of the governors are plain to see; dead and dying patients in public hospitals (Machakos) and mountains of solid waste and rivers of sewage (Nairobi).

All three politicians are symbolic of the entire political machinery that is unwilling to put in the work required to rebuild public institutions that were hollowed out by decades of corruption and marginalisation. Every politician in Kenya is in politics for personal glory and personal glory only. We all now that Nairobi City needed longer than a decade to rebuild, but we chose to listen to the pie-in-the-sky promises of the Governor and we are paying for that folly today through congested public roads, a ballooning street families' problem and the ever growing mountains of garbage on the streets.

We cannot escape the blame, either. For far too long we have refused to account for the political choices we have made as voters. We elected the Machakos Governor for no reason other than he was the preferred nominee of the "right" party in Ukambani. I don't think he would have fared well had he chosen to seek the Governor's seat through TNA, KANU or NARC-K. And because of the blind manner in which we cast our ballots for him, patients in Machakos hospitals are dying because the Machakos Government has allegedly failed to remit statutory and other deductions from Machakos health workers' salaries to the relevant institutions.

We now know who we want to represent us at the highest political levels. If we allow the likes of the three castigated in this post to pull the wool over our eyes once more, then we deserve the political pain that such a choice will bring. We have seen the flash; it has done little to improve our quality of life. Perhaps it is time we pain attention to the reserved wall-flower with a solid record of middle-management success and institution-building. It is time to ignore the peacock and deal with the weaver bird.