- Baiting jobless youth with water tanks embarrasses President Uhuru Kenyatta even more from the inside.
- A country cannot develop on the benevolence of one man who donates to short-term causes for minimalist personal gains.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. When it was thought elegant policies, integrity, principle, and conscience would determine electoral choices, Kenya is entrenching politics of propaganda and prejudices.
Handouts are being sanitised at the presidential aspirant level in the name of hustling. A Deputy President in a regime that promised industrial parks, employing more than 100,000 youths each, is dishing out campaign goodies.
The industrial park that would specialise in leather and textile in Naivasha has not arrived, seven years after the promise. Half the government that promised 1 million jobs per year, and a double-digit annual growth, in a Sh3 trillion budget economy, is shunning policies.
Delivery of these promises would make a huge difference to the economy, especially to unemployed youth, and their dependants. One hundred thousand direct jobs carry multiplier gains to communities. One employed Kenyan supports at least five others.
An industrial park also comes with multiplier effects to suppliers. Delivery of 1 million jobs a year would have produced about 7 million opportunities over the regime’s eight-year era of errors.
Many more jobs would be expected by the time UhuRuto’s mandate expires in 2022. Hustlers who are hankering around the DP for handouts, wheelbarrows, spades and water tanks would buy their own. There would be no room for ascendant beggar-a-politician mentality. Politics of handouts is psychological rigging of elections. It debases; it dehumanises.
A country cannot develop on the benevolence of one man who donates to short-term causes for minimalist personal gains. Jubilee had a campaign plank, which the DP has replaced with donations to manipulate malleable communities. That, is where we are with a ‘digital’ regime that failed to deliver laptops to primary school children.
The person who promised double-digit economic growth and one million jobs annually is serving pittance. Much like colonialists and American slave riders thought of Africans as proficient hewers of wood and fetchers of water. Now they are doormats for opportunistic gains.
Baiting jobless youth with water tanks embarrasses President Uhuru Kenyatta even more from the inside. Yet the President still believes in the viability of Jubilee’s Big Four agenda. The DP has all but abandoned the promises of promoting manufacturing, affordable housing and universal healthcare. He is mainstreaming dependency.
The man occupying ‘Halfway’ State House debunked policy planks of the Jubilee regime immediately after the election of UhuRuto for a second term in 2017. The DP is on a presidential campaign trail for 2022, fleeing from the blunders of their shared regime. Disowning the regime where he is DP is unconscionable mendacity.
The promise of food security was always hot air. Politicians are, meanwhile, promoting wheelbarrow economy and water tanks without secure sources of water. Wheelbarrows are innocent. The tragedy is a half government riding on handouts.
The person who promised double-digit economic growth and one million jobs annually is serving pittance. Much like colonialists and American slave riders thought of Africans as proficient hewers of wood and fetchers of water. Now they are doormats for opportunistic gains.
A community that allows psychological rigging of public minds undermines its progress. When you buy votes, you will spend tenure recouping, by any means possible, money spent on campaigns. But there is also the next election that must finance. Such politicians spend the electoral cycle chasing money to sustain destructive political careers.
The masses, poor, gullible and ill-informed about their civic duties, will be lining roadsides, timing politicians for handouts. The expression, ‘chuth ber’, legitimises political mischief. The low thinking has always been, since the politician bribed voters, the people have no right to hold them accountable.
Electoral corruption is widespread, and the gullible masses have accepted it as their lot. They cheer public ATMs for handouts, repaired public toilets, water tanks, earth roads, and rehabilitated dispensaries.
There is urgent need for civic education to save Kenya from the stranglehold of political opportunists. A case of small intellect growing smaller, with diminishing capacity to remember promises of previous elections.