AJUOK: Modern generation of voters a danger to global order

Excitedly, I said to the six young people, “Look, that’s so close to the home of the late Dr Robert Ouko!” To my utter shock, none of them knew who that was, leave alone the very public circumstances surrounding his death.

It left me wondering, if the people leaving universities and not only entering the job market, but voting for new regimes and fronting themselves as future leaders, do not know about the country’s recent history, how then would we trust them to sustain the dreams of the country’s founding fathers?

Would someone who has never heard of Dr Ouko have heard of Mekatilili wa Menza, Pio Gama Pinto and the great Elijah Masinde wa Nameme? It turns out my audience was not alone. Recently, the people of the Philippines went to the ballot to elect a new president. They chose the son of the country’s most infamous former president, and one of the world’s monuments of dictatorship and state excesses, Ferdinand Marcos.

He shares his father’s name and goes by the rather strange nickname, Bongbong. I don’t know what analogy to use, but the whole thing was akin to the devil’s son returning to heaven after centuries, to replace his father as Archangel. It is easy to dismiss the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jnr by stating that no one should be crucified for the sins of his father. Until you learn that to get elected, Bongbong ran a massive social media campaign which painted his father’s rule as prosperous and progressive, packaging persistent negative views of the Marcos regime as merely the work of jealous folks.

It is reported that Bongbong’s campaign indicated that the Marcos family held large deposits of gold and wealth offshore, which would be brought back home to help the people, if Marcos Jnr was elected. We can safely say the voters believed all these narratives, because they gave him a resounding mandate at the ballot.

Across the Atlantic in the US, 2016 unveiled one of the greatest political tragicomedies of all time, with the election of Donald Trump as president. There are several documentaries and books detailing the last days of the Obama regime, with consensus within and without being in form of the question “how was this even possible?”

Trump had been the most “unAmerican” of candidates, the quintessential political liar and vile misogynist. It had been taken for granted that since he had run a campaign of obvious lies, no-facts and nonumbers, he would probably just garner votes from white supremacists, gun lovers and unsavoury characters – not enough to win the White House.

The looks on the faces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton staff when Trump was projected winner may need to be analysed in whole books and research articles for years to come. We all must have been taken aback to see Trump supporters, after we had been accustomed to the image of America as the land of the free and the smart, denying climate change, claiming Obama was a terrorist related to Osama bin Laden, spinning the birther conspiracies and pushing theories caricaturing Obamacare as a wider Communist plot.

My household had to stop watching a favourite American televangelist when he and his Bible Belt types claimed Obama was the Antichrist. But overall, my worry as a student of history and politics was the sheer number of people who believed Trump and queued to make him the leader of the free world. It is scary.

There are way too many fools in Kenya and in this world. And they carry voters’ cards, meaning that their foolishness becomes an avenue to power for a breed of politicians which endangers the global order as we know it. Let’s come closer home and examine our own situation.

After the appointment of running mates, the two frontrunner tickets are now clearly fashioned out as reformists versus the forces of regression. There is no doubt that the Raila-Karua and the Ruto-Gachagua tickets are as different as day and night. As if to conform to this image, Rigathi Gachagua has spent the two weeks on the ticket perpetuating the bigotry that defined him even before he was picked.

However, we have to admit that this country gives DP Ruto too much free pass. As the most scandal-ridden person to ever run for office of president in the history of this country, I get amazed by the large number of people who believe that all the accusations against him, just like in the Marcos story, are the works of people “jealous of his success”.

In a way, DP Ruto has managed to manipulate public view of himself to fit entirely into what he wants. In a country where fact checking is alien, he has got away with it. It is not just him in this case, but many of his surrogates with long-running court cases have managed to convince their supporters that they are being targeted for their support for DP Ruto.

There are very few countries where Aisha Jumwa and Okoth Obado with murder cases, Ferdinand Waititu with a huge corruption case or Oscar Sudi with forgery cases, would convince the population that they are victims of state conspiracy because of their political choices. There are even fewer countries where a Deputy President would wipe his name clean of any failures from the regime in which he was number two for 10 years, then present himself as the saviour from the perceived ills of that regime.

More intriguingly, the Trumpian double-speak of the DP, as evidenced by the audio played at a rally recently by Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho, raises the question of whether he places any meaning to the promises he makes on the campaign trail or the deliverability of his manifesto items. Because let’s face it, the promises he makes regarding the Naivasha Dry Port while in Naivasha are starkly different from what he says in Mombasa.

I am not as concerned by the lies, conspiracy theories and fake promises churned out by politicians as I am about the fact that the rise of alternative facts and propaganda as an acceptable political philosophy is finding a home an emerging breed of voters who believe these things wholesale.

I never imagined we would live to see the day when those who were tortured and jailed in our second liberation would face those who actively enabled the destructive regime which carried out the torture and find more than a million voters willing to prop up the latter.

Either foolishness is becoming a way or life, or we are so detached from our history that nothing matters anymore. This is why the forces of freedom and reforms must re-unite to urgently rescue this country in August , before we become the regional, continental and global laughing stock.