Youth is wasted on the young

Pick a side; stick to it, no matter what. That seems to be the foundation of the Jubilation's twitter army of influenza. It's funnier to think of them as the flu though some flus can and do kill. But when the Jubilation's twitter flu starts supporting patently unintelligible ideas - that twitter posts on the price of milk have real world effects on the price of milk - founded on the cherry-picking of elements of political or economic theory, how else can one view them but as a kind of influenza virus?

Truth, such as it is, is truth and right, such as it is, is right. No amount of mealy-mouthed legalese will make the people accept a bad thing as anything but bad; even when loyalists sing your praises about your virtues and achievements, not even your hubris that demands such praise-singing will hide the truth about your virtues, if they exist, and your achievements, if they ever occurred.

It is an election year and so the Jubilation and the Nasalites have deployed hordes of viruses to massage the news and shape opinion and infect the public space with lies, distortions and the praise-singing of political champions and the virulent castigation of political enemies. The Jubilation has its grubby hands on the levers of power and as the dust settles on the fiasco of its party "primaries", semi-literate acolytes with an internet connection and bank accounts to fill are busy setting the stage for total information and communications control on or before the general elections.

The same asinine argument relied on by the Central bank Governor to explain the straitened circumstances of the Chase Bank is the same one being relied on by the Jubilation's army of pseudo-intellectuals to lead the people towards accepting a decision by the Jubilation to switch off the internet in the name of the greater public good. Desperate politicians with boatloads of cash always seem to surround themselves with youthful men and women with talents to advance political interests that will eventually consume those same youngsters. It happened in 2007 and in 2013. It is happening today. Kenya's political class has mastered the washing-machine cycle of winning elections: wash, rinse, repeat. The playbook has not changed; what evolves is the technology.

We are being prepared for political confusion and, perhaps, political violence. The Nasalites are determined to spread the idea that its constituency is larger than that of the Jubilation by a couple of millions and that nothing has changed since the 2013 contest left the Jubilation in firm control. While the Nasalites' political lineup remains virtually the same, the political football pitch has shifted. The Nasalites continue to field old, tired and morally compromised political warriors against the Jubilation's reincarnation of the KANU of the late 1970s and 1980s that at first refused to accept the mortality of the president and then did everything to perpetuate the stale Soviet gospel that the president has been immortalised in the political philosophy of the day: fuata nyayo!

It is now almost certain that the internet will "fail" and that the mobile networks that have become intertwined in all our dealings will be offline until the "situation is resolved". Court jesters - like those seeing correlations between tweets and milk prices - will perform for the Jubilation. And soon thereafter, just as history reminds us, they will be betrayed. Youth is wasted on the young because it is often stolen for the pleasure of the aged.