Fantasies of easy lives

Only small children fall for the fantasy of Father Christmas and similar wishful thoughts. Adults should know better: in this world, there are no free lunches, good behaviour is rarely acknowledged or rewarded, the rich and powerful almost always get away with murder, and the only thing that is permanent in politics is that politicians are most certainly not heroes.

In Kenya, the numbers of adults who behave like small children, wishing for utopias that cannot be wished into existence, is growing alarmingly. These are otherwise sensible men and women who have correctly diagnosed many of the problems of their government, their political parties, their society and their constituencies but have failed to diagnose the most important problem of all: themselves. Some have invested time, money and other resources into fantasies in which they are superheroes who will instill a sense of discipline into the body politic and wring change against the kicking and screaming resistance of the political establishment. They refuse to face the awful truth: Kenya doesn't need political superheroes; Kenya needs a root-and-branch cultural revolution.

The culture that we must break with is the one that has corrupted the "system" that many of us rail against. In this case, even the President of Kenya is right: it begins with you and me. If we are to resist the corruption of the institutions of Government, then we must resist it in ourselves and that is a far harder war than we would like to acknowledge. In the seventies and eighties when men and women were murdered for voicing opposition to the corruption of Government, our fantasies of a corruption-free government made a little sense. Today, we can't afford the luxury of wishful thinking anymore.

Last year there were many new voices that entered the political arena with promises of leading from the front on the war on corruption. One memorable candidate, who founded a new political party to advance his ideas of truthfulness in public service, drew up an impressive manifesto. Of course, few of his potential voters bought his shtick and he was soundly defeated at the hustings. What is interesting about him are some of the battles he chooses to fight. On two occasions he has refused to give way to Government vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road, documenting his protests on social media. This is admirable. Now, if only he lived by the same principle.

He recently documented his altercation with airport officials at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. He had apparently been delayed in getting to the airport to catch an international flight out of the country. He wanted and demanded special attention so that he could be fast-tracked through JKIA's notoriously slow processes so that he didn't miss his flight. Airport authorities refused. He got mad and went on social media to complain about the corrupt unfairness of it all. He missed the point by a mile: he wasn't special; his flight wasn't special; he was not the only ordinary Kenyan who missed his flight that day.

We can list all our personal failings that are externalised: many of us don't think twice when we litter; many of us silently thank our PSV drivers when they speed, overlap and generally thumb their noses at the Highway Code because it means we will get to work earlier; there is a large cohort of motorists, Mututho Rules or not, who still drive while drunk; the number of "developers" who cut planning corners by greasing City Hall mandarins' hands is measured by the numbers of people who die or are injured in collapsing buildings; and the persistence of the flat plastic bags menace is a testament to our determination to ignore Nema, the environment ministry and the environment itself so long as our lives are not inconvenienced. (That the plastic bags ban is an assault on the constitutional and statutory framework is neither here nor there.)

Many of us are personally and professionally corrupt and yet we expect politicians and high government officials to be paragons of virtue. We engage in corrupt acts but blame "others" when corrupt men and women are elected to high office. In short, we are hypocrites and our hypocrisies are preventing us from solving relatively simple problems, like urban floods during rainy seasons or the effective management of national referral hospitals. Unless we reckon with our individual acts of corruption, that of the body politic will never be resolved. What we will keep doing is wish for the problem to go away, the way small children do when faced with unpleasant things.