The clergy and the presidency.

When Peter Okondo warned Alexander Muge from travelling to Kitale, Kenya turned a corner. Bishop Muge died in a grisly road traffic accident on his way to Kitale in 1990. Mr Okondo never lived down that death, even if it is likely that he had nothing to do with Bishop Muge's death. In 1997, Timothy Njoya was on the receiving end of a police rungu, to stop him from voicing his very strong opinions about Baba Moi's regime. Both Bishop Muge and Reverend Njoya were plain and outspoken, refusing to defer respectfully to Baba Moi or his regime. We are still turning that corner.

Patrick Gathara has caricatured Uhuru Kenyatta and his government for the Nation Media Group for the past few months. His cartoons have drawn ire from some online quarters because they are, in his avowed critics' eyes, grossly disrespectful of the president and the presidency. None other than the Public Editor of the Nation has joined battle against Mr Gathara, calling some of his cartoons an unwarranted attack of the president. Mr Gathara is one of a handful of critics who have occupied the space that used to be the preserve of Bishop Muge, Rev Njoya and their colleagues such as Henry Okullu and David Gitari.

Where the critics of the Moi regime tended to be under a big tent that took in the likes of the Seven Bearded Sisters, senior clergymen, the Law Society and pro-democracy pressure groups such as the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy, FORD, clergymen are distinct by their absence from the critics of the government of today. Instead, quisling-like, they are avowed members of the Respect-the-Government bandwagon, and many of them have gone out of their way to lay hands in prayer on some of the seniormost government leaders, such as the President and Deputy President.

Let no one conflate justified criticism of Mr Kenyatta's government with the puerile lunacy of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy, CORD, especially that of the likes of Johnstone Muthama. What Mr Muthama said on Wednesday at Uhuru Park is a cruel caricature of political opposition was in the 1990s. If Mr Muthama was a US citizen, he would find himself in good company with the doyens of US talk radio, such as Howard Stern. As it is, I believe Mr Muthama would actually make an excellent guest on Kenya's morning FM radio station shows where puerile salaciousness rule the airwaves.

But the cravenness of the clergymen in the face of the political and social upheavals that have made Kenya more divided than at any time in the past. The so-called mainstream churches that were led fearlessly by the likes of Bishop Muge, Davide Gitari, Rev Njoya and Henry Okullu, have chosen to keep their silence in the face of their ill-judged pro-government partisanship in 2007. The space they have vacated has been occupied by the leaders of the charismatic churches that have done so much to expose all that is wrong with organised religion in Kenya today. These are frequently the least intellectually engaged men and women of the cloth in charge of people's spiritual lives. They will do anything to be legitimised in the eyes of the people, and this legitimacy, to their minds, is to be found in the close proximity to the government of the day that they have placed themselves.

The outcome has been the ridiculous calls by "bishops" for the inept political opposition to "respect the presidency" or words to that effect. What they mean is that the likes of Mr Muthama should stop being mean to the president and "his people." This one of the stupidest calls to make in the twenty-first century, the Digital Age, the Information Age. Social media alone is a tiger that we can only ride out our peril; controlling social media is the equivalent of commanding the lunar phases or solar flares to do ones bidding. The "presidency" should be prepared for more mean things from Mr Muthama and the rest of the anti-serikali, anti-Uhuru world. It will not abate. It will get worse.