Stating the obvious

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." ~ Leo Amery, House of Commons, 8 May 1940.

The events of the past decade may not have the same gravity as the Dardanelles campaign that prompted the debate in the House of Lords on the 7th and 8th May 1940. But it would be just as catastrophic for the good peoples of Kenya to continue to be ill-served by men and women who swore an oath, many of them on books of scripture, to uphold and defend the Constitution and to offer good government to the people of Kenya.

For a decade we have perfected the act of public flash over substance, papering over the deep fissures separating good government and great crimes. Some time this week the clerical class, enervated by revelations of sexual impropriety and spiritual chicanery, roused itself to condemn the ballooning problem of senior officials of the State keeping concubines. This too in the week our Parliament was to debate the report of the President regarding corruption in his government. To say that we can no longer expect bold guidance from the men and women of the cloth is to state the obvious.

Those that broadcast on our air, promising "information, education and entertainment," and those still pursuing their craft as members of the print press, have singularly failed to keep the peoples either informed or educated; it is no longer possible to trust that what we are informed of is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth regarding the acts of omission and commission by senior members of our government. The amount of time that owners of our "free" media devote to our entertainment has indeed ballooned and it is a scandal that we have been conditioned to expect stories about million-shilling beds belonging to women who have made a career parlaying scandalous notoriety for Warholian fifteen minutes of salacious fame.

It is that that must burn at our consciences. We have adopted a prurient fascination with the secrets between men and women and, increasingly, men and men, and women and women. When those secretes belong to the rich, famous or powerful, we are driven to great lengths, no less by the purveyors of "news" stories, to discover more and more about the salacious lives of these people. But in service to our fellowman we have become ever more disinclined to hold each other to account for our ever brazen commissions of the seven deadly sins. As our national treasury has been emptied out to finance boondoggles of spectacular uselessness, our eyes and ears are firmly trained on the secret an secretive goings on in the bedrooms of those that would seek to rob us blind and corrupt the very soul of the nation.

Were there stalwarts of probity and integrity to remember the spirit of the Narvik Debate among our educators, spiritual leaders, business champions and political leaders and recall the words of Leo Amery. But, alas, we the people are on our own. We have been abandoned by one and all. In our confusion we have adopted the style and substance of men and women of straw. We have become our own worst enemies. Those words, "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go" might as well be directed at ourselves. As our shame no longer shocks us, perhaps we are better off living in the Hobbesian world where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.