A woman waits to board a bus at the Machakos Country Bus terminal on December 24, 2024.
Kenyans are in a foul mood. Even as they ate Christmas and made merry during the holidays, they muttered darkly into their soup in hopeless despair. One would have thought that with the economy showing signs of resilience – inflation is down below three per cent, the shilling is stable the result of which the foreign debt is down; hell even the interest rates are inching down though the banks are fighting to make a killing – but no.
It is all doom and gloom with wide-eyed talk of runs on banks, haircuts, debt defaults and God knows what. Nearly everyone I meet is persuaded that the country is headed in the wrong direction, the government is clueless, that politicians will change term limits to rule longer and that massive looting of the country is afoot.
The despondency and anger is highest among young people. The angrier blame anyone who is older than them for messing the country up, or watching it being messed up without “doing something about it”.
It is a generational anger, directed indiscriminately at millennials, boomers and what have you. Increasingly, there is less of a youth determination to fix things and more of: Why should I? You are the ones running things. Others have taken to posting morbid photos of leaders on social media, with the consequence of allegedly being abducted by the State, or worse.
Towering genius
It doesn’t take towering genius to know that this is not the right environment to get much done. “The masses have boundless creative power,” Mao Tse-Tung said, while leaders are often childish and ignorant, a view of course that might not be fully shared. Leaders can reshape history and move mountains, not by rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves but by dreaming and firing up the people. The great ideological leaders of history – Lenin, Nyerere, Castro, Mao - were great thinkers but also great talkers, not only were they eloquent, but they talked a lot, seducing the people with their words and transferring their ideas to the common consciousness. And the people trusted them, believed that their ideas were good for the people and their country.
What has happened to Kenyans? Are they possessed by an evil spirit which causes them to oppose everything, as it was at one time put? Hardly. I think because of the broken trust between the people and their leaders, the people are losing faith in the promise of government.
They are beginning to lose hope in government as a harbinger of good, positive things for them and increasingly see it as a vehicle for oppression, suppression and corruption. It is no longer government of the people by the people for the people, but a vehicle for political shysters and oligarchs to oppress and dispossess people of their wealth. This is not really new. The colonial state had nothing to do with government by the people for the people, its agenda was occupation and exploitation. But the breakdown of faith in government is now almost universal.
Malaise
This patronising mentality that government folks and politicians need not explain anything to the people because they know the people’s needs better than the people is partly the source of this malaise, especially after it has been proven than nothing could be further from the truth, that leaders often have selfish motivation for policy decisions and pronouncements. Other institutions, such as the police, are outright misaligned. The violence they mete out on the people does not bespeak of protectors of the weak but an occupying force deployed to suppress and subdue the people.
I think leaders at every level need to have fully formed ideas about what they are in government for and to be able to convincingly prove, at least rhetorically, that they are sound, practical ideas intended to benefit society and not them. It takes humility to do the Nyerere thing: to respect ordinary people enough to want to carry them along and sell your vision to them, not to always assume that the leader knows best and need not explain anything to anyone. To tell a man that you understand his needs better than he understands them himself, while sometimes true, is dumb politics.
Purity of motive has died in Kenyan politics. The idea that someone can do something and in the process even make sacrifices purely for the benefit of the Republic is neither common nor popular among politicians and the upper crust of government service.
Yet leadership is exactly that: sacrificing one’s interests for the common good. Granted, this is difficult because Kenyans are their own worst enemy: they have no respect but lots of contempt for those who sacrifice for them and venerate thieves so long as they have money. Which makes leadership a more difficult, thankless job. The average Kenyan has no regard even for those who sacrificed their own lives for freedom. They think the liberation war is a Kikuyu con.
Whatever the case, if we don’t have a national conversation in some form and rebuild what we have lost, 2025 won’t go down well.
Have a great year and keep the faith.
Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected].
