Self-interest the reason many seek public positions

Quite a large number of Kenya’s citizens reportedly planned to spend a very large chunk of the Kenyan taxpayer’s money to travel all the way to Dubai in the Arab world.

The question is: Why? No, the quest – as this newspaper called it in its page-one “splash” story on Christmas Eve, was merely “to save Sonko”. For those unfamiliar with him, Sonko is the informal appellation of one profoundly controverted Kenyan governor, whose real last name is Mbuvi.

Yet Kenya’s daily newspapers did not at all seem concerned to make it absolutely clear how a mere trip to the Arab world would have cleared anybody. 

From the statement ‘MCAs planned [the] trip to Dubai to save Sonko’, the intelligent newspaper reader would have noted that, to many Kenyans, salvation of Mr Mbuvi was a task much more urgent than salvation of Kenya’s economic property. For readers unfamiliar with the local politics, MCA refers to a member of a county assembly.

Concerning those worthies, then, a reporter wrote as follows on page one of the newspaper’s December 24 number: “…18 MCAs were cleared for [an] 11-day junket that would have lasted until [the] end of [the] year…” Readers from countries in which politicians are at least a tad more respectful of public property will have wondered greatly at such wastefulness of public property by so-called public leaders.

 Indeed, if you are Mr Mbuvi Sonko, and not very highly educated academically or in any other way very sophisticated, your own activities, especially oral ones, might make it well-nigh impossible for you to avoid negative controversies and escape nationwide censure. I know from those with whom I have exchanged words concerning that news item that, about the public’s economic things, even the most highly educated Kenyan is at best only ambivalent.

I say so because most individuals with whom I used to agree fully concerning certain social issues have proved quite the opposite when they themselves were later appointed to central social positions either in the government or elsewhere in society. Yet the question powerfully invades my head every time I come across a relevant story in the public media or in Kenya’s economic activities.

What is it that makes even the most highly educated Kenyan so self-serving when it comes to solid economic materials and issues? Why does it seem to me that certain Kenyan individuals occupy certain high government offices only because of what they stand to receive through it from the public’s coffer much more than what they can invest into it either through ideas or through selfless service to their own parents, brothers and sisters?

The answer to such a question can only be that, in terms of ethical ideals, Kenyans are an extraordinarily badly brought up society. Individualism – the extreme concern to serve only the interests of the self – would appear to any objective observer to be the most significant consequence of what we allege to be our “education”.

The evidence of our (East African) “education” consists, then, merely in certain pieces of paper – the scraps of paper that we conceitedly parade as “degree certificates” -- every time we visit an office to apply for a job advertised in the public media. If, luckily, you secure such a job, that will be the end of your quest for knowledge of any true kind.

Once you start receiving a high salary and fat benefits, even if your certificate is a glittering PhD, your ignorance of the human needs around you and throughout the world will remain not only absolute but also embarrassingly self-evident. My quest is to urge you to struggle much harder to make all your academic achievements to amount to true education.