Friday, 21 February 2014

The Political Culture Of This Country

Every day I come across situations that hint to me the fact that many people are growing more and more complacent about the political mess of this country and continent.

Many Kenyans are aware that their towns don’t have piped water and lack electricity; perhaps the main reason is because some particular leaders are allegedly using assigned funds to enrich themselves. Many intellectuals in these towns are talking about this. But listen to them a more keenly and you will sense some despair in how they think the future will be. Kenyans are giving up on agitating for a better country.

Talk to people in the streets and you will get the sense that they have left all the worries that come with being politically aware to other people who are also in the process of leaving such worries to others who have also left such worries to be taken up by other people who they think are close to their leaders. And as a result of this abandonment of worries, the political leaders of this country are too comfortable doing what they think they should be doing and not what the constitution which is the only thing now enforcing some course of action for these leaders stipulates they should do – legislate to make development a reality.

We all know what in an ideal politically sane country politicians would be discussing. Kenyan politicians have the influence over you to make you forget for example that there is hunger in Turkana and they make you concentrate on how they think they should legislate over homosexuality.

The political culture of this republic is that of complacency and tolerance to politicians’ shit. It’s normal to not recognize you are making a mistake until someone confronts you about it. There is no hunger for a country where corruption is at a very minimal rate and where politicians are concerned more with the welfare of citizens than their car and mortgage allowances. There is no hunger for a government that actually does but does not claim to say and do when it is actually doing nothing. Most importantly, there is no hunger for a citizenry that is capable of demonstrating to their leaders that they can get them out of power any time they see it fit like it was seen in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

Citizens of this republic know the importance of watching news broadcasts. There is a culture of watching the political news, absconding the business news then coming back later on to watch sports news. It’s your television set you are watching (for very few people in this country), or your parent’s, brother’s or sister’s or relative’s or friend’s (for very many people of this country). I mean to highlight unemployment. Back to how we watch news. Most of the times we watch news to see what a politician said. This in most times is usually a contradicting response to what another politician or institution said.

And it is this war of words that excites us in news, not how a bank has reduced its lending rates to enable more citizens to take loans to expand their businesses. Consequently the next day while at the workplace, Kamau and Wambua talk about how politician X from coalition A replied questions about how the government is managing funds in the “latest multibillion dollar project” and not about how they can go take loans from the bank to expand their businesses because the lending rates have been reduced.

Recently a Kenyan parliamentarian said that “the government has allowed too much activism”. He did not specify which kind of activism he was referring to. I had my own understanding of that statement. What I deduced from it made me change my perception of that leader from that moment on more importantly because he is aspiring to be the secretary general of Kenya’s main opposition party. I concluded that the Kenyan public is indeed left on its own in agitating for better civil, economic and social conditions for themselves. When the opposition divorces itself from its marriage with the civil society of a country, who is supposed to ask the government the hard questions about corruption, unemployment and insecurity?

The opinion shapers of this country are as many as everyone who is alive in this country. We are all bringing this country down! And we are all looking at each other to see what the other person or institution is doing then we go back to our homes and watch news in the manner I described earlier and go to work, church, parliament, school, class, market the next day to have a conversation in the manner I described earlier on. This happens in a repetitive cycle and the culture is passed down to subsequent generations. If this political culture that I have broken down here is not accurate, then the accurate one is not far away from my analysis.

LET’S DEMAND FOR MORE NOW! Politicians who can’t deliver not even on their promises but even on their constitutional mandates to safeguard the welfare of citizens don’t need to be given any more time to try again. Kick these leaders out of office! Shame them! They are shaming us before the world. We can’t afford to be complacent about a complacent political culture anymore.

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 Cartoonist Tony Auth's impression of the Arab Spring.Collective public protests have over the years become a part of Egyptian culture.