{UAH} WBK/Pojim: Standard Digital News - Kenya : Migori and smelly skunk of our politics
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Standard Digital News - Kenya : Migori and smelly skunk of our politics
The ugly spectacle of heckling witnessed this week when President Uhuru Kenyatta visited Migori for a malaria eradication programme summed up the trouble with Kenya in a cruel way.
Yes, it gave us some comic relief akin to the old Barclays Bank's Ndombolo robot dance, and so we could laugh at the prospect of a dirty and smelly shoe landing somewhere near our President.
As parents, we could also exchange knowing glances in the family living room as our children laughed at the 'games' grown up men play, dancing and shouting like they not only got drunk on chang'aa, but had gone mad.
True, there is a lighter side to the political indecency witnessed, but search your soul deeper and you see the problem with Kenya.
It is a shameful act displayed clearly on the altar of unemployment, economic deprivation, limited access to decent education and alienation of the poor whose children are seemingly condemned to inherit the rags and tatters of their parents.
In other words, it was the meeting of the privileged political class whose best idea of ascension, personal prosperity and self-aggrandisement is the number of the poor and unemployed hovering around their feet for crumbs of bread to be swept off the table by the cleaner.
Let us step back and reflect on what could have happened.
In line with the way our political mechanics play out, word spread that the President was visiting Migori, the hotbed of Odingaism and Opposition politics for decades except for the few years Raila Odinga was a minister under Kanu and as Prime Minister in the querulous coalition with Mwai Kibaki.
The message would have spread in three ways and mostly orally; either face-to-face or through phone calls.
The first, would be by the President's hawks on the ground, who have to reach out to the youths through the known 'brokers', to ensure there would be a 'friendly' and sizeable crowd, nice enough to be beamed on television without embarrassing the President.
That is one side of the mobilisation of the youths, to ensure Bwana Mkubwa (Big Man) looks well received and in great company throughout. If you dispute the fact that this is what happens in Kenya when the big man visits even for such a noble cause as a health programme, then you are new to our country and you deserve our big welcome first.
Secondly, as the Jubilee ground crew with 'facilitation' from such nice and warm places like the Office of the President (where I am told in one corner you can literally 'smell' money) the Opposition squads activate their own network, in a bid to also get their snout in the trough.
They too are 'available' and can make the big guy visiting town look miserably unpopular, or even anyone else the 'financier' doesn't like. The best way to do this is to heckle, cheer and generally turn the function into a marketplace of confusion and disorder.
So in our political rallies two groups of hirelings meet at the behest of their benefactor and the rest is the nonsense you saw in Migori, where a malaria-eradication function was turned into an arena for local Jubilee and Orange followers to spit on each other's face. On the flip side, it also served to show just how political our country is so that no event misses the flavour of our tribal and party rivalries.
These are the two common denominators that divide us so much and are the ingredients that have set us two steps backward each time we make a step forward. By the way, before we move on to something else about the political servitude that our youths have found themselves where they are just hecklers for hire, and they can boo you today then the next day you can 'buy' them and take on your rival. Now the third way word spreads in the village about the visit of the big guy is businesslike.
The officials involved in the planning tip their 'friends' on opportunities to make money through supply of services and goods. It could be bottled water, chairs and tents, vehicles, accommodation, food and even bouncers to supplement the official security team to ring-fence the big guy from those entertaining the idea of rushing up to the big man, kneel and tell him all about their land, health or fees problems all in seconds before they are dragged away.
These days they ought to know, especially because of the terrorism scare, that running to the President in public buoyed by foolish courage, is akin standing in the fence of State House and throwing stones towards the President's office.
Even a mad man may not have a chance to be proven he is so, before the end comes. It is because of the way our politicians, regardless of party and social standing, manipulate the youth who in any case have been disempowered and made pliable by frustrations of life, that I laughed when they rushed to condemn the hecklers ofMigori and their financiers.
You would think they have never done anything like that themselves. That again manifests the double lives our politicians lead.
They have perfected the art of preaching water and gulping gallons of wine without collapsing in the public arena or suffering from temporary incontinence. It matters not what Uhuru or Raila ground crews did or even what they knew. What is important to appreciate is that this is how our dirty political machinery plays and until it -miraculously - changes, that is how the engine of our noisy, rusty and messy political machine will continue to shame us as a nation.
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