Welcome to tragedy

When they went round the country seeking our vote, they promised the moon. Or, as is increasingly becoming apparent, the appeared to promise the moon. Now that the bill has fallen due, they have resorted to increasingly aggressive interpretations of what exactly they meant. This should not come a s a surprise. Ten years of Jubilationist two-faced-ness should have prepared us for extreme disappointment if not despair.

I don't much care for political manifestos or promises; they are largely meaningless documents that are rarely supported with any kind of deep thinking or planning. The last three presidential elections have seen teams of wonks pick their candidates and "advise" them on the best way to achieve one policy objective or the other. But even then, the wonks have played a secondary role, at best. Their job, it appears, has been to manufacture pithy one-liners and going-viral soundbites, rather than actually think through the intricate and intimate difficulty of making government do something meaningful.

I once deprecated the civil society types who fought and won elections or were appointed to the senior ranks of the national executive. I had observed that nearly, if not all, of them had turned out to be great disappointments. The promises many of them made to "combat corruption" turned out to be the snake oil they sold us in order for them to get heir hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Not one of them has ever emerged from the political arena smelling of roses. They have all been tainted.

The same is true of our favourite wonks. When they are on the outside with their noses pressed against the window, they make all the right noises about how they will craft sound government policies to solve seemingly intractable problems as diverse as chronic youth unemployment, rampant banditry in ASALs, implementation of new basic education curriculums, provision of universal health coverage, and development of large quantities of affordable housing for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

When they are eventually invited to the party, and they are shown the mess that was left behind by the previous team of promise-makers, and they finally realise that they will need at least ten years to just undo the last guys' messes, they almost always scale down, if not give up, their lofty ambitions and instead focus, body and soul, to winning the next general election. Governing and governance are shat into the deepest pit latrine they can find and, with their fingers still smelling of shit, they enter into a quasi-fugue state where they lecture us about how we misunderstood the promises they made. Some are quite good at the finger-wagging. Most are just crass.

What we see, what pisses us off, is the reckless way they adopt the airs, foibles, mistakes and white elephants of their predecessors, almost walls with less class or subtlety. In Kenya, the period between 2003 and 2005 was the most impactful to and for Kenyans. What Mwai Kibaki, Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, Martha Karua, Raila Odinga and Wycliffe Oparanya achieved was felt way into the 2010s What his successor did, the depths to which he sunk, will reveberate in infamy for decades. That the new kids on the block have ignored the lessons of the excesses of the last guy is tragic.

Seriously difficult decisions need to be made. We know it. They know it. Whether or not the decisions will be made appears to be foresworn, for now, as we are treated to theatres of the absurd: random senators waging war with polygamous spouses; random TikTok celebrities being appointed to policy-making committees; random shirtless "spokesmen of the youth" getting arrested for some new asinine demonstration; over-the-hill politicians whingeing about unopened servers; and so on and so forth. History repeats, first as farce and then as tragedy. Welcome to the tragedy.