Bittersweet laughter

Watching the US politicians campaign for the nominations of their parties to stand for the office of the President of the United States has been spectacularly entertaining. The political press has consistently gotten it wrong about the duration of the campaign of The Donald, Donald J Trump, a reality TV star billionaire real-estate magnate from New York who has defied conventional wisdom, pissed on good taste, riled both the liberal intelligentsia and the Establishment Conservatives for his non-traditional campaign, and tell-it-as-it-is hardass-ness. 

Mr Trump has enjoyed making Jeb! Bush look like a weakling, Ben Carson as naive, Marco Rubio as a child and Ted Cruz as a hypocrite. On the Democratic Party side, the contrasts between Bernie "Feel the Bern" Sanders and the former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, are animating the liberal mainstream media with pundits staking out their positions (and sides) with one or two upsets, like Te-Nehisi Coates saying he will vote for the Vermont senator and not, as expected of a Black Man in America, Hilary Clinton.

Looking at the buffoonish nature of the US presidential campaigns, one can't but help but feel smug about our own lot, except we are much, much worse. The US media isn't afraid of describing Mr Cruz as a "fundamentalist charlatan", Mr Trump as an "authoritarian white nationalist", Mr Rubio as a "Marcobot", or Mrs Clinton's campaign as "spinning out in glorious fashion". When they bandy about the phrases "Freedom of the press" and "the First Amendment", they really mean them and the Supreme Court has stood by them even to the point of absurdity as in the Citizens United case. In Kenya, unfortunately, thin-skinned politicians and judicial officers have wielded the power of the judiciary as a cudgel against bloggers and newspaper editors with reckless abandon in a bid to prevent unfavourable news coverage.

Worse still, political campaigns in Kenya are as opaque as they can get: there are no manifestos worth the paper they are printed on; there are no press-briefing in which candidates get to answer questions about their plans; we know very little about the source of campaign funds, but we have a very good idea nonetheless. The US campaigns may be cartoonish, but no one can accuse the candidates of hiding most things from the electorate. In Kenya, everything is a secret. Forever.

Mr Cruz and Mr Rubio have been running for the Republican nomination since February 2015. Everyone knew it. All that was unclear was when they would declare their intentions for all the world. In Kenya, the likes of Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetangula never stopped living under the delusion that they could somehow stop Uhuru Kenyatta in 2017 and have been campaigning for the CORD nomination since 5th March 2013, a campaign that has remained a secret all along, without a manifesto or a roadmap, and with the candidates keeping secrets about even simple things like whether the sky is blue or not. Not that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto and their armies of acolytes will give you a straight answer either.

Kenya's politics is a caricature of the cartoonish US one, and a grotesque distortion of the means of determining the people's will in matters of national importance. Once we elect our representatives, they more often than not become our enemies and they treat us as a threat, out to destroy their careers with our democratic demands. When their presidential campaigns begin in earnest, sadly, we will not be any more the wiser, not least like the US citizens we love to mock and lampoon.