Roughly a year ago, and at a time when it was by no means clear whether US President Joe Biden would seek re-election, I read an article by a journalist who had travelled with President Biden on his customised official jet – Air Force One – on an overseas trip.
The journalist described the lavish comforts and remarkable equipment and furnishings to be found on that plane (which is a full-sized airliner) and came to this conclusion:
Nobody willingly walks away from all this; Joe Biden will definitely stand for re-election.
I thought about this article in the context of the recent expressions of outrage, at the continuing extravagance of various top officials within Kenya, at a time when we are all being asked to pay more taxes and to forgo various significant subsidies that make life bearable for low-income Kenyans.
The mainstream media has regular reports on just how much money it takes to keep State House fully operational; and what is spent on overseas trips by Cabinet secretaries and other holders of high office.
But what this article from a year ago seemed to argue, is that it is not only in Kenya that the perks of high office are irresistible. Even a man like President Biden, who is famous for his down-to-earth ways, and who has never shown any particular love for luxurious living, apparently found himself addicted to the perks of office, once he landed in the White House.
By now we know how the Biden story ended: despite pleas from well-meaning supporters, he insisted on seeking re-election, and it was only after a disastrous performance in a debate with former president Donald Trump, that he was at last persuaded to give up his dream of a second term in the Oval Office.
But back to the Kenyan examples of the addictive perks of high office, I have a few examples of my own of this very phenomenon.
Just over 10 years ago, and at a time when I was fortunate enough to frequently get invitations to attend conferences in various foreign countries, on a few of those occasions, there was a Kenyan Cabinet secretary also invited to the same conference, to serve as a keynote speaker.
And I daresay that if you have not seen for yourself how some of these CSs conduct themselves when receiving the full VIP treatment at a conference in some foreign country, then you have missed a most instructive spectacle.
Since such high officials of the Kenyan government are invariably very courteous to any Kenyan journalist who might be present, I do not want to appear to mock them too much. But what I can say is that the same thought often occurred to me, as occurred to the journalist who was with President Biden aboard Air Force One:
Nobody willingly walks away from all this.
And yet Cabinet secretaries are presidential appointees, who, while they most likely have to canvas intensely for their positions, cannot be compared to the governors, senators and MPs, who must face the Kenyan voting public every five years.
Tragically, Kenyan elections at virtually every level have in many cases degenerated into what the former Prime Minster of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, speaking of disturbing anti-democratic trends globally, defined as “auctions, rather than elections.”
The amounts of money spent to win elections in the current political dispensation would have startled those 1960s to 1970s post-Independence Kenyan leaders who, whatever their failings, generally did not just pour out large sums of money to win elections.
But we are now in an era when “even an MCA” (as Kenyans would say) ends up spending at least a few million; those seeking to be MPs spend tens of millions; and what those aspiring to be governors spend, does not even bear thinking.
Under these circumstances, can we really expect that a man or woman who essentially managed to “outbid” their rivals, by their greater expenditure, mostly on direct handouts, is really going to show any restraint when it comes to sampling the perks of high office?
