‘Ujinga’ in our politics won’t end any time soon

In the week that the US Congress reminded President Donald Trump that he can be made accountable and actually punished for acting contrary to what is expected of his high office, the Kiambu County Assembly was doing the same to its governor but with vastly different motivations – he fell out with people that were willing to tolerate his boorishness, ineptitude and illegal actions as long as he played ball.

That is generally Kenya’s way of doing things, hence the resonance of King Kaka’s searing song, "Wajinga Nyinyi" (You Fools) with a vast majority of people.

The message in that song is that the mess that we are in now – stuck in the rut of hopelessness because of corruption, incompetent and selfish leadership, hunger and unemployment – is of our own making.

Although the singer has no kind words for politicians, pastors and others, the real venom is directed at voters that routinely elect the politicians and masses gullible enough to fall for the choreographed drama of commercialised evangelism.

Humorous politician Abduba Dida, who regaled Kenyans with his unconventional views as he sought to become the President during the 2013 General Election, captured this in an acerbic tweet after the impeachment of Governor Ferdinand Waititu.

He opined that Kenya’s Senate should save the Governor so as to let the Kiambu people suffer for the balance of his term in office. After all, he was their choice!

Seriously though, lamentations about the generally parlous state of leadership are not new.

Hundreds of thousands of column inches have been inked by many brilliant minds dissecting the mystic of Kenya’s politics and the grip the political elite have over the minds of Kenya’s voters.

Songs have been written and television pundits have flipped the dilemma every which way in attempts to explain it.

The wajinga have listened but done exactly the same thing at every election.

They welcome the season of “eating”, force the politicians to spend tonnes of money illegally acquired to eat, drink and wench and then vote for whoever they think deserves a turn at the high table.

That winner will spend time recovering from the rigours of the campaign and on repaying himself.

At the presidential level, the game has been defined by tribal arithmetic controlled for a long time by the historical accident that made the Kikuyu nation the most dominant in numbers and wealth, with the Luo nation in opposition.

Neither tribe could win alone so there has always been this courting and divorces as alliances were formed and broken.

The challenge with this is that the President becomes hostage to whichever interests he aligned with and is preoccupied with either fighting them or coddling them.

President Moi and President Kibaki were exceptions — the former because of the paranoia from the coup that targeted him, the latter for successfully separating politics from government and allowing technocrats to work as he fenced with politicians.

Since a popular uprising is improbable in the near term, the advantage is still with the political elites.

If there are some clever enough to see that the job of feeding the insatiable greed of a tribally stained politics is unsustainable, they should work to institutionalise what President Kibaki did and what other mature democracies have done – separate fully the state from the politics.

If the state is working well and ensuring that private business is enabled and facilitated, the ujinga of our politics does not have to destroy the country.

Tom Mshindi is the former editor-in-chief of the Nation Media Group and is now consulting., @tmshindi