Kenya: That Unobscure Object of Ridicule

Kenya's youth no longer have any political heroes, and they have no champions. Nor do the poor and the hungry and the marginalized and those ill of health. Their erstwhile heroes have committed the political equivalent of hara kiri before their own eyes -- theirs and theirs. Any name picked from a list overpopulated by the discredited lot is likely to be met with hoots of derision and dismissive laughter, whichever name is mentioned as a possible exception and a potential hero in the days ahead.

At the helm of the political class are, of course, President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the most ridiculed twosome in all of Kenya's post-independence era; a sort of two-headed gargoyle. In their official prominence, and enormous capacity for attention-grab, the pair has become that inobscure object of ridicule -- and loathing. This is a tragedy of monumental proportions, both for the duo and the nation, for all societies must have an acknowledged leadership -- which must be trusted to lead, and lead with vision and coherence to be trusted. But there is no trust here, for there is no coherence and no vision. The public interest does not matter. In its place there is brazen parochialism. And there is pathological greed, mean-spiritedness and myopic self-interest.

More and more Kenyans, it would seem, are cultivating the view that it will not matter who wins the next Presidential election in 2012. So, there may well be no "fire next time", contrary to widespread concerns here and abroad. There will be no one worth fighting for, or dying for. What is more likely to happen is that certain political fortunes will come to a dead stop at the hands of an electorate that at last rejects, with finality, their decades-old Presidential and related ambitions. Kibaki will, of course, be retiring. So the future is not as forbidding for him as for Raila, for whom time is clearly running out; and who does not seem to see that Kibaki is perhaps letting the time run out unhindered and even, by design, quirkily -- at whatever cost, that is.

The face which the twosome appears bent on presenting to the nation elicits only opprobrium, on a large scale, which is infecting the entire political class; which, incidentally, is not guilty merely by association, but by brazen deeds, acts of omission and, in effect, broad-daylight contempt for the peoples' sovereign aspirations. There is now mutual contempt, as Parliament degenerates and descends into a den that will defend its own at every turn and every opportunity, against a public opinion that has gone hoarse in its incessant call for accountability, simple justice, equity and the practice of basic principles of elective representation.