Unless you are in it, there is no way you can tell how you will be changed by being an insider in a government. Most of what you think you know about the mechanics of a government are quite often wrong, wrong-headed and uninformed. The day you become a member of that category of civil servants known as "State officers", your fortunes change for the better in dramatic, and disconcerting, fashion. You cease to be a member of the hoi polloi, and you become a member of the elite. Even if your office is a temporary one, your life is changed forever and unless you are a complete imbecile, you will never backslide into the category of Kenyan that lives hand-to-mouth. Ever.
In 2017, a young political hopeful in Meru campaigned in the poetry of the people he hoped to represent and won an electoral upset that inspired many young people across the country. It took a handsome gift from the head of state to put paid to his ambitions of being a peoples' representative. When he next floated across our view, he was waving a pistol around and firing in the air because the people he was meant to represent had a few hard words to have with him. The other young people who came after him have fallen faster from grace than one could say "woman representative".
One is whingeing that his net monthly salary of 91,000 is "too little". For a man paying a mortgage of over 500,000, that's a bit rich. His counterpart, a woman representative, spent two-thirds of her allowance for a constituency office paying close relatives' salaries. She seems to have missed the memo on nepotism in the public service.
The reason you are shocked about how these people are behaving is because you think that they have the strength of character to keep their head when they become part of the eating society. You only pick and choose what to eat and what to cast aside if you already have eaten too much and you can't eat anymore. These people, especially the more youthful ones, have never been exposed to this much money, power and privilege, especially the kind of money, power and privilege that comes without accountability or transparency. They are coddled and protected by a system that has become self-sustaining and self-protecting at a very high level.
They live in a cocoon of privilege that the outside world does not trouble. They don't have to, and they actively avoid, having to sit and talk to the people who have conferred them with the privilege, power and money they enjoy. It matters not whether they sit in legislative chambers or ministerial offices; once they occupy those positions, they and the people are divided. A wall is erected that separates them from the people, and the truth of their iniquitous existence. It is why, within a very short time, they lose whatever empathy they have for the man in the street and instead, assume the visage and character of ogres from fairy tale.
Indeed, when confronted with the horrors of their hypocrisy, the system they have joined educates them in the ways of gaslighting and blaming the victim. What you think they had promised, they say, is a figment of your febrile imagination. What you think they should do to ameliorate your straitened circumstances, is the road to communism. If things don't improve for the better, it is your fault.
You can't have known this unless you live and breath the air these people breathe. The day they suck in their first lungfuls of this rarefied atmosphere, save for those with the mental and psychological strength to know themselves, is the day you loose them. And once lost, they can never be saved. Ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment