Wednesday, August 03, 2022

The war of blame-shifting

"Let me apologise on behalf of the government. The electoral commission must be given whatever they want, whenever they want it in order to be able to carry out the free, fair, and justifiable election." - 3 August, 2022

The discerning among us will realise that the underlined italicised words have the effect of shifting blame from the maker of the statement to the beleaguered IEBC. The speaker apologises - and adds that it wasn't his fault. It was that other fellow who done us wrong. I did my job. Leave me alone.

It frequently surprises me the lengths to which men with power will go to avoid carrying the can for their decisions. This man is no different. He does as he pleases. Then when the shit hits the fan, he dissembles. When that doesn't work, he finds some hapless underling to blame for his actions. He almost never takes responsibility for his actions. It is almost always someone else's fault. Kwani mnataka nifanye nini? seems to be his modus operandi.

Despite the theatrical antics one or two irascible Kenyans, everyone and their cat knows that general election in Kenya shall be held at the end of five years after the previous general election. This is not rocket science. With this cast-in-stone calendar in mind, and knowing that polling stations in Kenya are public schools, no government official, regardless of his station in the firmament of the state, can pretend not to know this fact. Consequently, planning for the "disruption in the school calendar" during an election year should not be the cause of poor planning or poor execution of existing plans.

A responsible person would admit that they were wrong and leave it at that. A responsible person would know that sifting blame is the sign of a bad leader. But responsible persons do not consistently behave the way our speaker does. His notoriety is no longer amusing. Since he took up his job, he has acted as if he is surrounded by utter imbeciles, that only he knows what is best for everyone else, that his public statements are made for our own good, that he has no obligation to be careful, dignified or kind. He acts the way he does because he is utterly confident in the justness of his ill-judged causes and, more crucially, that he can and shall get away with them all.

Responsible behaviour is not a feature of the majority of his work colleagues, though. Few of them take the time to carefully consider the import of their public statements. They indulge in the most callous acts in the course of their official duties secure in the knowledge that the hoi polloi can do nothing about it - save, perhaps, to vent on social media sites, a largely futile fact in the face of social media engineering by well-resourced #547 "bloggers".

In 2003, in the wake of the Yote Yawezekana Bila Moi moment, Kenyans were found to be the most optimistic people in the world. That moment did not last. If the same Kenyans who responded to that poll were asked the same question today, how much are you willing to wager that the poll will reveal depths of despondency only experienced by people living in a war zone?

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