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?

The indignity of extremist social control

Some of us have extremely thick skin which we cover in resplendent glamour. Many of us, though, are extremely sensitive, particularly about being called out in public for the apparent violation of a norm. Many of us have seen that TikTok video of a fashion maven narrating her treatment at the hands of watchmen at Strathmore University's Madaraka Estate Campus. There are those of us who have shown solidarity with her, and demanded that Strathmore abandon its demeaning dress code. Some others, however, have blamed the victim, saying that she should have known better.

We have faced these kinds of issues in the past, usually when something tragic has happened and the victim of the tragedy has been a woman. Almost a decade ago, a woman was assaulted, stripped to her underwear and paraded in public because the men who assaulted her thought that her dress was "inappropriate" and "against African culture". It led to My Dress, My Choice, a public protest, that attempted to advocate for the treatment of women in public on the basis of their character and actions, rather than the length of their skirts or the tightness of their shirts. The protect did not receive the full-throated support of the State (though a few women parliamentarians joined in), the ministries of faith in Kenya and, certainly, none of the institutions of higher learning such as Strathmore. For sure, influential opinion-shapers and social influencers were determinedly quiet and the protest, and issue, fizzled out from public notice.

Now comes the ill-advised shenanigans of Strathmore's lecherous watchmen, their lechery receiving the endorsement, encouragement and imprimatur, of a respected university. What has emerged over the few days since the TikTok video was shared on social media is that, and this is not surprising, the Strathmore policy is more strictly enforced when the target of the policy is a Black person, particularly a Black woman. If the offender is of apparent Caucasian descent, they will be given greater leeway, something that many thought would be anathema at a university campus in the twenty-first century.

We have been witness to the lengths the mostly-male victim-blaming will go and how far some are prepared to bend backwards to justify the way that woman was treated. It comes as no surprise even as it stings that Black women are, by and large, still second-class Kenyans. In my opinion, there was no reason for the woman to attempt to justify her choice of dress for the presentation she was to make at Strathmore; as a maker of fashion videos, renown in her field, her choices were not subject to reproach. Given the audience she was going to speak to - young people, mostly - and the subject she was going to speak on - modern fashion - I thought she had presented herself beautifully and, though it need not be said, decently. In fact, attempting to say that she should have been allowed to proceed with her presentation because non-Black women are given freer license by that university misses the point. All women deserve to be treated as equals and with dignity.

There seems to be a mean-spirited determination to exert ever-tighter control over us, whether that control comes in the shape of the ham-fisted Huduma Bill (which has very little huduma in it) to the crass, Victorian-England demands for modesty (and purity) from mostly-Black women by institutions such as Strathmore. We all deserve lives of dignity and that includes lives where we are not judged on the basis of our outer accoutrements. We deserve to be treated with decency and respect. We should loosen the tight bonds of control, if not cast them aside entirely, that police how we walk, talk, dress, think, or present ourselves. A society that celebrates and protects the freedom of expression is, in my estimation, happier and more just. But so long as institutions built by and for male-dominated control continue to make the rules, especially undignified and bad rules, we are the poorer for it as a people.