God and fishes to fry

Unless he, or she, is your "sponsor", please do not, do not, DO NOT! use the word "seduced" in connection to the pitch politicians make when they are asking for your vote. Any word but "seduced", because seduction can't be the ham-fisted affair Kenyan politicians have attempted in the past two election cycles. Seduction implies a meeting of minds before a meeting of more base appendages. It implies that spoken words are not only accepted, but they are accepted as legitimate and true - or true enough. This is after all Kenyan politics.

Hyperbole defines the members of the professional classes as well as the scribes of the Fourth Estate, now known as "the media". It seeps through in everything that they do. Where one word will do, they will find the fifty that tell us absolutely nothing about what they think or what they mean. But even they have been overshadowed by the forked-tongued among the professional politicians.

Seduction implies a betrayal when the seducer turns out to be every bit the frog he pretended not to be when he, or she, was getting us into their bed under false pretenses. But can you honestly feel betrayed when the seduction that we speak of is made up almost entirely of a perfunctory recitation of a party manifesto and the forking over of large wads of cash all the while reminding us that we come from the same "home?" This appeal to an ethnic identity which fewer of us cleave to is not seduction; it is atavism and for it we have paid a heavy price.

Now, when you look at the things that have happened and the decisions that have been made since we were seduced into endorsing one gang over another, do you feel that if we had only prayed hard enough God would offer us solutions?  I know better; God never wanted us to have kings. He warned us about it. We ignored him. So I have absolutely no doubt that our modern-day kings are not ordained by God, but they are proof that we should have listened to God all those millennia ago and had nothing to do with them. Almighty God will not be interfering in this poisonous relationship we have with our kings.

If you understand, like I do, that presidential accomplishment has little to do with divine intervention, you have to ask, like Karuti Kanyinga did in the Standard on Sunday, what exactly has gone wrong? The seeds for this dysfunction were laid when there was talk of "dark forces" when certain choices were to be made in the wake of the ICC indictments. They were reinforced when the machinery of government was mobilised to ensure that mass prayer rallies were held for those being tried at the ICC. In case you missed it, God did not come down and specifically endorse a particular strain of thought regarding the ICC or the earlier "dark forces."

Do not wonder why deities have abandoned us but why you have abandoned reason in your choice of kings, endorsing dubious economic policies, educational plans of little merit and political promises we know to be patently false and the reasons that the exchange rate is against us, the interest rate is twice what we were promised it would be and the growth rate is barely half what it should be by now will become clear. Leave God out of our affairs. He has bigger fish to fry.