Happy New Year Kenya

[DAILY NATION]
COMMENTARY

In comes 2007, with new ‘breed’ of politicians

Story by MUTUMA MATHIU
Publication Date: 12/31/2006

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the captive state of Kenya.

If the Islamists in Somalia were to invade the sacred soil of our homeland, or the Norwegians or Martians or Neptunians or any other group of foreigners were to invade us and impose their rule, we wouldn’t be any more of an occupied territory than we are today.

We are captive, not to a foreign power, but to our own brothers, sisters, fathers, (a few) mothers, uncles and aunties. We are the captives of a class, the political class.

In 2002, we were “liberated”, just like Iraq was, by President Mwai Kibaki and the National Rainbow Coalition from the yoke of Mr Moi, Mr Nicholas Biwott, Mr Henry Kosgey, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, Mr William Ruto and many other gentlemen of the same water.

A few months earlier, Mr Moi was ruling with the aid of Mr Raila Odinga, Mr Kalonzo Musyoka, Prof George Saitoti and a houseful of similar gentlemen. As you well know, Mr Odinga led Prof Saitoti, Mr Musyoka and a battalion of similar gentlemen in aiding Mr Kibaki in his liberation of our good selves.

Today, Mr Odinga is leading a strong force to liberate us from Mr Kibaki. The force includes Mr Musyoka, Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto and has unsuccessfully tried to enlist Mr Moi’s support in the process. Mr Moi, it would appear, may have chosen to stand with President Kibaki, the man who liberated us from him.

You could do a screenplay and win an Oscar without breaking a sweat.

In a matter of hours we will be in a year that causes palpitations right from the Governor’s Mansion on the hill to the humblest council in the bush. It’s the year of the election.

The mighty and the humble will be equal, if only for a few days, as politicians who regard themselves as some of the toughest people on earth get down on their knees (as it were) in hamlets, villages and slums where people defecate in their houses, to ask for votes.

This is the year that politicians reaffirm their commitment to their tribes in night meetings and confirm their commitment to Kenya in the light of day.

Those who had changed their numbers dust up old sim cards, call up the loyal old friends they shafted in January 2003 and flatter the market women whose smell they couldn’t stand for four years.

Politicians, who by their very construction are incapable of keeping a true friend and wouldn’t recognise loyalty if you shoved it up their nose, will suddenly be surrounded by a retinue of village failures, gritting their teeth and drinking warm beer with every description of low life.

They will eat mashed rice and watery stew at church functions — and probably have their stomachs pumped later — and attend so many funerals that by the end of the year they will be smelling of formaldehyde.

Editors, whose calls ministers might not take under normal circumstances, will have their butts kissed in an effort to pass off garbage propaganda as news.

The corruptible will be offered small handouts, others will be co-opted into “think tanks” for politicians from their tribes. Of course no politician takes the advice of the so-called think tanks, they use them as a method of buying loyalty by making people feel needed, wanted, important, consulted.

Politicians will read statements at press conferences, setting out their “vision”. The statements will have been written by other people. Little or no research will have gone into these “visions” and if they were to be implemented the country would probably explode. But they are not for implementation, they are for reading at press conferences.

The Constitution will regain its importance. We will be informed that we, the Kenyan people, have demanded that the document be turned upside down in accordance with the Bomas this or that, that our salvation lies with the politicians demanding constitutional change at rallies; that the Constitution needs to be cut to whittle down the powers of the imperial presidency, create semi-autonomous enclaves, probably ruled by relatives of the victorious political grouping and out of which the Kikuyu, or some other tribe, will probably be asked to leave.

Around August, out will come the manifestos, most of them the tepid work of ageing and unenthusiastic leftists, others cut-and-pastes from the Internet. Yet others will be an attempt to re-live the Kenyatta years and Sessional Paper No 10 of 1965. You will comb the manifestos for a single, miserable new idea and you wouldn’t find it.

Come December 29, 2007, I and a couple million others will stand in line and vote for “liberation”. The subsequent Cabinet list will likely read like the one read by Mr Moi soon after he won re-election in 1992. We will dance in the streets and write eloquent editorials about “a new beginning”; a captive nation will rise and roar approval to its captor.

Happy New Year. Drive carefully — and slowly if you can — and if you drink, hitch a ride, if your driver is behaving like a fool, please tell him so.

Don’t pay a bribe, don’t take one and if you have ever bribed me, please let me know. I will put your cheque in the mail, with specific instructions where to put your money in future.