Conservative? What a joke.

I can't remember when he said it, but Kenya's first Leader of the Majority Party, in one of those strange political rallies he was fond of attending so that he could pledge fealty to his Dear Leader, once declared The National Alliance (or was it the Jubilee abomination it eventually morphed into?) to be Kenya's Conservative Party, with the same ideological leanings of the US's Grand Old Party and the UK's Tory party. He didn't say that he was a conservative; only that he was a member of a Conservative Party.

In this week's Sunday nation, the Governor of Murang'a declared that he is a conservative, leading into the same "small government" predilections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Kenyan politicians are an astonishing group of people.

It is now safe to say that Kenya's politics is no longer moored to any kind of ideological framework. It is concerned, mostly, with taking money from the masses and wasting it on white elephants and thereafter, distracting the hungry, jobless masses that the reason their lives are so difficult has something to do with "corruption" and "tribalism". The declaration, "I am a conservative" or "My party is a Conservative Party" is the political system dipping its toe in the pond to see whether or not the people will fall for that shit because if the people do, indeed, fall for it, then they can watch as ever greater trillions of shillings are poured down the drain of "development" even as their lives continue to suffer degradations of unimaginable scale.

One of the most injurious things that Kenyans have done to themselves in the name of the Second Liberation is to separate the masses from national political institutions, particularly political organisation and political parties. Political decisions, particularly the choice of legislature candidates and allocation of scarce tax shillings, are now made by a tiny cabal that is not motivated with the greater common good. The most effective way to separate the people from their government has been to separate people from the toys they need for their political education, including music, theatre, sculpture and fine arts.

When Kenya's winning long distance runners returned from the Paris Summer Olympics in triumphal form, they were confronted with one of the most hideous sculptures ever foisted on an unsuspecting public. It was a statue of woman marathoner, put together in the most slapdash way imaginable, and placed installed in the dead of night, to be sprung upon a people who could neither process the insult nor work out how to punish the offender.

What I found interesting is that the discourse around the crass demonstration of the indifference that the state and its agent's treats the people was how the one of the reasons the statue was removed from public view without an explanation was that foreign capitals, particularly in the United States, have celebrated Kenyan athletes in deeply meaningful ways. The sculpture was removed because it made Kenya look bad in the eyes of the world; not because the asshole that had ordered its installation was even remotely remorseful for his crime.

So while Kenyans' minds are slowly poisoned against any kind of learning and political education, and the wool is pulled over their eyes with rambunctious "debates" about the "impeachment" of un-useful state officers, the more cleverer of that perverse class introduces ideas about political ideology that they neither understand nor know how to explain to the people they purport to lead. Kenyan political parties lack any form of political ideology so how could the politicians who sit atop of that pile of empty briefcases claim to possess political ideologies of any kind? These men have failed to empower the people they govern to participate fully in political decision making and in order to hide their inadequacy, they try and paint themselves as Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan when in actual fact they are the caricatures portrayed by Mr. Bean and Benny Hill.