Despite Nakuru county government
getting Sh45 billion
from the Exchequer
for five years, Sh6.6 billion for
CDF, Sh330 million for youth, Sh330 million
for women and another Sh15 billion from
local taxes, development in the county
has almost come to a complete standstill.
As a result of this five year stagnation
of development at county level, the desire
for change in many counties is very
high.
But as many desire change, citizens
whose clarity of how problems can be
solved are suicidal as a solution to their
problems.
Many people have concluded
that since their MPs or Senators
and governors have not solved their
problems or come back to them after
their election, voters should sell leadership
for money, and leaders should
buy leadership with money they give
to voters as business they add to the list
of their personal properties.
After selling leadership to politicians
whom they send to county assemblies,
parliament, senate, national government
and county government, voters
are too shy to seek services from their
mercenary leaders.
Instead, they meekly accept whatever
they are charged to get business
tenders or for their children to get jobs
in the police or the army.
Equally, when leaders give voters money to buy leadership, when they
become MPs, MCAs, governors or senators,
they use new offices, power, authority
and influence to make the same
money they spent with voters during
campaigns.
Here we need to point out that voters
are not aware what they lose when they
sell leadership.
Somehow they think
they can eat their cake and have it.
When voters ask candidates to buy
them beer, or to be given money for this
or that, in return for votes at election
time, they are selling leadership which
will not serve them without demanding
money too.
When leadership is sold and bought,
it is never leadership to serve voters
who sold it, but leadership to exploit
and extract profit from them.
During campaigns you hear voters
say coffee is ripe and it is their time to
harvest. Of course the ripe coffee is the
candidates who are literally forced to give out money or get no votes without
giving a thought to consequences.
To make it worse, although there
are many voters who will vote as their
civic duty without demanding money,
many others including churches that
should offer moral leadership to voters,
will organize Harambees to which
as many candidates as possible will be
invited to contribute money in return
for votes.
Unfortunately because no one asks
how the money given was made,
churches are turned into instruments
of laundering money whose owners
are assured if theirs is stolen money,
it is cleansed henceforth by God and
blessed are efforts to get more similar
money.
During campaign time, many
churches and political parties receive
money even when they know it is not
lean or legally made.
They accept the money even when they know it is stolen or made from
selling drugs.
Yet stolen money that is not questioned
or rejected is condoned and accepted
as proceeds from corrupt businesses
whose success is based upon
exploitation of the very voters who
asked for it.
Selling leadership is the source of
our bad leaders and all corruption in
the land.
When voters sell leadership
to corrupt leaders, they are all praying
for corruption to thrive.
Corruption of selling and buying
votes is the primary source of bad political
leadership that is birthed by and
thrives upon corruption. Electoral corruption
is the source of the corruption
that we now see raving our institutions
and entire country.
Having said it wants to eliminate
corruption, the Jubilee government
should help to eradicate electoral corruption
as the genesis of all corruption
through bad corrupt leadership.
The Jubilee government must do
whatever it can to end the corruption
of giving money during elections because
it is most primitive and only done
in backward nations among which we
should not be counted.
Voters who need salvation from poverty
must also know that they cannot
have electoral corruption and also good
leaders they need for their salvation.
While money in elections might look
like poor man’s savior, it is the curse
that dooms him to eternal poverty.