The burden of foolishness in high places is beginning to weigh heavily on this country.
Each day, renewed evidence emerges showing that too many fools have made their way up the food chain.
In response, the citizenry is beginning to respond by slowly losing its humanity, or playing to the foolishness of the leadership. And with it, there appears to be an unchecked rise in public anger and disenchantment.
Take, for instance, the recently released BBC documentary on the shooting of protesters at Parliament Buildings at the peak of the Gen Z protests on June 25 last year. For ordinary, warm- blooded human beings, the first reaction on watching was outrage.
Outrage at the police (or people whose affiliation to any specific disciplined force hasn’t yet been established) killing young unarmed people barely out of their teens. At a time like this, one’s political leaning is irrelevant, and common humanity should take over.
But no, there were people, who should know better, including elected legislators, who dismissed the documentary as “the work of British imperialists”.
Of course, none of these outlandish statements could have negated, neither did their authors, the fact that young people died at the hands of police and the stark reality that the use of lethal force to quell the protests was uncalled for. But those on a mission have never been known to see sense.
As if on cue, the general public, represented largely by Kenya’s young social media users,has been responding to irrational leaders with even more irrational posts in the blogosphere.
Nothing demonstrated this more vividly than the tragic death of Kasipul MP Ong’ondo Were, felled by an assassin’s bullets, on the evening of Wednesday, April 30. If you logged onto the internet to seek more information on the life and times of the MP immediately after the shooting, you were confronted by gory details and accusations levelled against the departed legislator by hundreds of people.
It was eerily similar to narratives following the death of former IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati, when areas of the country opted to send a “rot in hell” message, instead of the more familiar “rest in peace”.
In the case of the slain MP, grotesque social media memes cropped up, urging the assassins to not stop until the entire house of Parliament was wiped out. These may seem like isolated angry reactions, but they form a disturbing pattern, as far as citizen disillusionment goes.
Before we delve into that, let me say something about VIP protection in this country. As a taxpayer, I am frustrated to see a sitting legislator, no less, taken out on the streets in a most callous manner.
We pay a fortune to elect members of Parliament, then pay more to secure them, because keeping them alive is not only part of our effort to sustain our democracy and legislative continuity. Their deaths usually occasion expensive and unnecessarily divisive by-elections.
However, VIP protection is a joke. Many serving legislators are protected by rusty police officers, quite often kinsmen picked from the Administration Police Service, many without any VIP protection training.
You will not be surprised to find these guards busy browsing social media for TikTok laughs while on duty, the phone being the biggest distraction from their focus.
To compound it, Kenyan VIPs love to use their guards as errand boys, dealing with all sorts of missions, from supermarket runs to condom purchases in the small hours of the night. This familiarity with security officers detailed to protect VIPs is as disgusting as it is unprofessional.
I have never quite understood why Parliament does not have its own Parliamentary Police Service, tailored and trained to meet the unique needs of the Legislature, with its deep political attachments.
But beyond that, the intelligence gaps in this country are now becoming embarrassing and costly. If initial police investigations are to be believed, the Kasipul MP fell to the bullets of a criminal gang.
But you and I know that no regular criminal casually plans and executes the murder of a sitting legislator, on a major road in the capital. Especially in the era of technological advancement, which makes surveillance easy.
Two incidents around the time of the MP’s murder confirm my worries that intelligence gathering in this country has become a clown fest. First, over the weekend, someone in a crowd in Migori county threw a shoe that struck President William Ruto. You shudder to imagine how that would have gone if the missile was something worse than a shoe. Presidential tours are intelligence-driven operations, where there should be no room for error.
Days before that, I had watched a bizarre scene on live TV, when Police IG Douglas Kanja was forced to sit in his chopper for more than an hour, when he landed, due to protests and insecurity.
Angry crowds at Ang’ata Barrikoi in Narok county were demonstrating following the police killings of at least five residents protesting an alleged land grab. Watching the scenes, I wondered how the chief of the nation’s police would run into hostile crowds, without prior intelligence warning.
Intelligence is the backbone of security. If the President is being ‘shoed’ in a corner of the country, the police chief is being marooned in another corner, while a sitting legislator is assassinated on the streets of the capital; the country’s intelligence agencies must be brought to account. The huge security budget has to be justified.
If anything, some of the said ODM leaders have recently behaved more like UDA than the real members of the ruling party, singing songs of praise for a government they now dare accuse of colluding in the MP’s murder, without any evidence.
It beats logic, therefore, why they are unable to leverage their broad-based networks within the regime, led by their party’s donated ‘experts’, to seek deeper investigations into the murder of the MP, rather than engaging in cheap rumour-mongering.
While we’re at it, let it not escape the country’s leaders that all the bad politics has the effect of seeping into the populace and setting up what now looks like a restive citizenry, just one small trigger away from a complete breakdown of law and order.
Too many fools hold high office in this land, the effect of which is that the leadership has no sense of presence and zero attention to the needs of the people.
The reaction of the population is becoming more and more anger, expressed in different forms, but with the worrying result that if not arrested, this public anger borne of unresolved disillusionment with the leadership will grow into something bigger.
It may currently manifest, at least on social media, in form of celebrating the deaths of leaders or wishing death on the living ones, but mass anger ultimately never ends well.
