Farce and tragedy

We are living the same script. A presidential election is held, contested, adjudicated, declared and a president is sworn in. The losing candidate, The Losing Candidate, refuses to accept the result and embarks on a mourning spanning years to undermine the legitimacy of the presidential election; the president counters by making increasingly unwise declarations. Eventually the political rivals strike a bargain “to cool political temperatures” and patently unconstitutional schemes are hatched that may, or may not, be scuttled by an increasingly assertive judiciary.

2023 is no different from 2017 which was a rehash of 2013 and 2008. The situation is exacerbated by a political class that is bereft of vision, incapable of seeing beyond its collective nose, held hostage with the need to win the next election at all costs, and exhibiting all the attributes of the intellectually inferior and politically dwarfish.

The president and political leader of the majority party and the political leader of the minority party (not to be confused with the minority and majority leaders in parliament) both suffer from a lack of a clear, defining political vision, because the political vehicles they own and control are not founded on any clear political ideologies that inspire their members to articulate a vision of this country that transcend petty parochial sensitivities. They cover themselves with the language of political discourse, but if you rub off the thin layer of sophistication, what you reveal is a barren, desiccated and arid wasteland of dead single-party norms and dear leader vibes.

The consequences are dire. Had either of them the ability to clearly articulate a unified vision of what Kenya is, what it aspires to be, and what to can be, you would not have, five months after the Supreme Court declared with finality, morose politicians swinging wildly at the dead horse of the presidential election resuscitate. You would have them speaking with authority that, for example, competence based curricula are a death knell of young Kenyans’ futures; that the sale of the national family silver to johnny-come-latelies is nothing more than a 1990s desire to transfer state assets to well-connected political operatives and not to build national economic and industrial champions; that so long as thieves are responsible for public health policy, the dream of universal health care will never come to pass; and so on and so forth.

We know that they lack a coherent vision because their mouthpieces and surrogates keep repeating the same moribund political ideas; keep rehashing conspiracy theories that have been rejected by the highest court of the land; propose scatterbrained economic revival programmes that are thinly veiled schemes to swindle the state of billions of shillings. Anyone who takes an accused attempted murderer seriously in matters of truth, justice or reconciliation, and permits that person to speak for him, undermines the legitimacy of his political claims. Anyone who promises probity in word and deed but appoints men and women with known doubtful antecedents, desecrates any trust he may have garnered from the voting citizenry.

We have seen this movie before. They say that history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. The farcical bit ended with the interment of the BBI scheme. The tragedy, bar a radical change of course, is unfolding right before our eyes.