New year is perfect opportunity to retrace our steps before 2022

This last day of a year provides the perfect occasion for a fair bit of navel-gazing.

Even as we prepare to ‘jump the year’ at some all-nighter ‘parte-after-parte’ or worship vigil, we should be reflecting on where we have come from, and where we are going.

Being Kenyan, we will be focused on buck-passing and lamentation gospels as we approach the New Year full of uncertainty and trepidation.

We will have easy scapegoats in the politicians we entrusted with leadership, whom we will, of course, blame for ruining the economy, destroying institutions, entrenching corruption, betraying our trust and generally messing up.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto and erstwhile Opposition chieftain Raila Odinga will all take their share of brickbats.

So will a number of other characters expected to play key roles in the continuing leadership tussles, such as former Vice-President Musalia Mudavadi and Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i.

But let us banish that entire cast from our minds.

It’s time we applied 2020 vision to our thoughts about what the new year holds for us.

We can best do that by focusing inward on our own individual roles in the scheme of things and how we can set the agenda and influence outcomes instead of forever being mindless automatons.

This country is too important for its future to be left in the hands of politicians. Fixing it starts with us.

It starts with you and I, and every other Kenyan who wants a better life for self, children and children’s children.

And this is not about how we will follow politicians and vote to their dictates. It is not about which individual we want to place in office or about loyalties to Jubilee, ODM, ANC, Wiper, Ford, Narc or any of their offshoots and other political formations.

It’s simply about how we live our lives, about the behavioural, moral and ethical codes we try to live by as individuals and also expect our children, families, neighbours, friends, colleagues, workmates and our micro communities to observe.

Most of us grew up adhering to moral codes and standards of behaviour and discipline prescribed by our parents, teachers and religious and affiliations.

We were taught to be courteous, respectful and considerate in our dealings with others.

We were taught not to steal or otherwise take without permission what belongs to others.

We were taught not to be gluttonous, not to eat too much and certainly not to eat what wasn’t ours.

We were taught to be kind and helpful to those in need, and to treat all with respect, irrespective of social and economic divides.

Along with all that went lessons in civility; how to live cordially within the immediate environs and wider community.

These are simple things like keeping both your front and backyards neat and tidy, trimming your bushes and hedges, mowing your lawns, and not littering or throwing garbage onto the streets or directing your sewage into the storm drains.

We were expected to pay our dues to community associations, participate in the neighbourhood watch, garbage collection and environmental clean-ups, and other communal social activities.

From that discipline and order starting at the basic family level onto the immediate neighbourhood, and the wider community, is where we should get the discipline and order that rises organically to the village or township level, constituency level, county level and all the way up to the national level.

It is also from that basic community organisation that leaders will emerge, who will then be worth our consideration as candidates for mca, MP, senator, governor and president.

Good, honest and upright leaders do not spring out of thin air. They do not just emerge from nowhere to wow us with money in their quest for leadership.

Leaders arise from the communities, and it is in their formative stages that they are weighed and appraised on their diligence, honesty, selflessness and commitment to the common good.

It is when we fail at the basic level that we later come to allow self-serving crooks and charlatans to capture us and direct the choices we make.

Let us admit that we failed at that basic level. When we failed in the order and moral code of disciplined society — and of course failed to instil the same in our children — that is when we prepared the ground for a greedy, disorderly and corrupt society.

Let us, in this New Year, commit to retrace our steps and see if there is anything to salvage before the next elections.