There’s a growing sense of disappointment among Kenyans with the ongoing vicarious war between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto over the control of the Jubilee Party.
As Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt the world as we have known it, every government is rallying its citizens regardless of political beliefs, race or social standing to take up the fight against this pandemic.
Overriding logic, therefore, holds that we also ought to go into this war together as a people, buoyed by the power of peoplehood, to weather this storm as we have done before.
But that isn’t the case. Politics of preservation and self-establishment has upset the applecart. It’s now public knowledge that the concentration of our leaders, that is, the president and his deputy, is far removed from the health crisis we’re facing.
The hunger for power is one of the main reasons why so many politicians are misunderstood. They have not the will, and do not know the way to empower the people.
They make no genuine sacrifices for the wellbeing of the citizens. Their minds, like their souls, to a certain extent become fixed with their own sense of importance and selfishness.
Leadership has been defined as the power of “taking pains”. But the trouble of politics, the business of consolidating power and the demands of growing rich, destroys the purity of the soul and elasticity of the mind.
It’s thus not really surprising that the ruling party is involved in some form of fight in the face of a pandemic that has turned everything upside down, world over.
There’s no pressing necessity to try to understand the reason for this either. The minds of our politicians that were once sharp at identifying and promising remedies to our problems, have now become crowded with other things that don’t relate to what we eat or how we pay rent.
Even before this pandemic, our politicians have shown little interest in addressing challenges facing us. They have been slow to control the limits of their passion. They have pursued their own interest, plundered public resources and manipulated institutions to preserve themselves.
Remember what National Assembly Minority leader John Mbadi said in a recent interview with one of the local TV stations? “This crisis is too weighty a matter to expect any legislator to intervene”.
Dear Kenyans, the sooner we accept that we’re on our own the better. It will save us a lot of disappointment.
The writer is a journalism student at Multimedia University
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