A tragedy of African politics is the use of Kenya to benchmark political progress on the continent. It is the sort of standard used in Dwarfland where, at three feet tall, you are officially classified a giant.
If anyone doubted the direction of our politics, a backward-pointing indicator offered itself recently.
It was in the form of a Nyayo-esque dishing out of political rewards that had very little to do with merit but everything to do with a reluctance to break from a backward past and do things differently.
It was a contradiction of the spirit of the second liberation of the 1990s of which the Kibaki regime made a mockery. It was a negation of Jubilee’s manifesto in which President Uhuru Kenyatta writes: “Our philosophy, policies and programmes aim to transform the way politics is conducted in Kenya and in Africa as a whole.”
In the same document, Deputy President William Ruto promises a “transformational model of governance” and a “generational change of leadership for which the country is now clearly ready.”
In other words, the two leaders promised to instil a progressive political culture in politically primitive Kenyans. One online facility defines political culture as: “the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process.”
Governing is one such political process, and the governed expect Jubilee to enrich our politics with some order, meaning, finesse and, well, sophistication.
Doing away with the patron-client mind-set of rewarding undeserving cronies, for example, would have been a clean break with the culture of using public resources to reward campaigners and other political foot soldiers.
Responsible Kenyans would have loved to see, after thorough interviews and vetting, qualified and untainted names chairing authorities and commissions regardless of their political affiliation.
To be fair to the presidency and from a real politick point of view, it will be reasoned that the appointments were made for purely existential reasons. That the President needs seasoned politicians as allies in every corner of the Republic ahead of 2017.
On that score, the appointments are actually a smart gambit that may benefit the President but not the Republic. His supporters can now argue that the appointments are nationwide and therefore a fair distribution of national resources.
However, it will not be lost to the more discerning observer that the appointments were, first and foremost, lifelines thrown to drowning politicians.
What credentials empowered Mohamed Dida Abduba to chair the Constituency Development Board? Was his eccentricity, which excitable Kenyans confused for a leadership quality, elevated to masterly in development economics and public finance? Has Agnes Ndetei ever displayed spectacular insight in the management of drought in Kibwezi? I could go on and on.
Our political backwardness didn’t start a fortnight ago. A political culture evolves with a country’s history.
It is also a result of various contributions by notable people in that society and events that alter the trajectory of history for better or worse. We mainly owe our current political freedom to the champions of the second liberation who said no to Kanu dictatorship.
On the negative side, we are indebted to the first two Kanu regimes for political backwardness in the form of dictatorship, glorification of corruption, sycophancy and other manifestations of political decay.
Just as is the case with the arts, economics and the sciences, a nation-state’s politics needs to develop in quality. The negative values and aspirations of yore need to be buried and forgotten. We have tried to do so, but we falter too frequently with too many relapses to a dark past.
For instance, why do we still have parastatal men and women in nylon suits singing empty, feel-good songs during national holidays?
Isn’t this a throw-back to the Kanu-era we can do without? Why are sycophantic hymns making a comeback without anybody questioning the context in which they were sung and what they did to the national psyche?
