How many among our leaders today can pass for being public models? How many leaders are ruled by integrity? For example, have we stooped so low that a whole professor paid by the government can steal in brought light? The worst thieves in the nation are those paid by the government. We have heard of cartels operating in the State House. Could those cartels also be agents stealing for the government?
What would a primary school teacher tell his pupils about why a professor or Member of Parliament, or a cabinet minister, can steal? Majority of leaders in the government, obviously representatives of the government, are doing the worst when children are watching. What kind of nation will those children form when they grow up?
Once upon a time, President Julius Nyerere, fighting for African Socialism, Ujamaa, hit at the fast growing capitalist Kenya by saying, “Kenyans are a man-eat-man society.” It’s long since Nyerere died. You wonder what he would say about Kenya today if he resurrected. However, Nyerere would also have to concede with some post-Nyerere death development in Tanzania whereby Tanzanians have acquired a fraction of the man-eat-man-society mindset because, after all, Tanzania is trying to catch up with the epidemic moneymania destroying Kenyan integrity.
Most of the Kenyans in power are on heat looking for any form of economic fertilization. They appear powerful not only in self-destruction but in integrity destruction. They have turned politics into a boxing ring where they go for nothing else but technical knockouts.
Recently Kenya got a real Mother-constitution in her best features. She has a beautiful chapter on integrity. But the Parliament has kidnapped her and taken her to what they describe as August House. They used a criminal a Parliament-home-made knife to genitally mutilate her in order to serve their purpose.
From the national government up to the local government, it is the politics of kumalizana in the culture of who eats. Politicians have learnt and perfected the art of lying and harm-twisting in order to get to their position of power. Churches have become battlefields for politicians where they use their political clubs to main their opponents. Political vultures descend in their large numbers and land on funeral functions. There is no more integrity in burial places and the dead cannot be buried honourbly before political vultures grab the opportunity to destroy their opponent. The government cannot stop this cultural abuse because the vultures are reared at the State House.
Followers of political parties that are devoid of any ideology are ready kumalizana. Money and power are the ideologies with which political vultures devour the integrity of this nation. Either the government has become deaf and dumb or it is an interested party in the rotten deals.
No matter whatever reason one would use, no one can convince children that it is not bad for either their mother or father to tell lies or misbehave. The father and mother are symbols of integrity. To them the parents are their gods. The children expect them to uphold honesty and perfection. But what happens to the children when, either one or both of their parents, openly engages in criminal things? Or what would they feel to hear that their father or mother was caught stealing somewhere? What would they feel to hear that their father has raped a village girl? The immorality of their parents make them morally devastated and psychologically traumatized.
A government is a bigger picture of human family. The worst form of any government in the world happens when its citizens lose faith in it. That faith is lost when citizens see its leaders become active in engaging in criminal actions yet get away with the crime. It becomes a rogue government that citizens should not respect. Consequently, that government sets itself against its citizen. Both the government and the citizens engage in the game of kumalizana. History has it that in long term, the government becomes the loser and citizens become the winner although at terrible price during which a lot of blood will have gone under the bridge. Why should citizens have faith in a government that sees its citizens as nothing but raw materials or the way a farmer sees his chickens?
In this country the worst times for citizens strike during general elections. This is when political thugs and megalomaniacs buy voters with anything. They arm their agents with clubs, pangas, arrows, drawn them with chang’aa and poison minds of the youth with opium to kill in order to destroy political opponent. That is the culture which had developed a psychologically radicalized poor youth against the government. That youth can easily set the whole city of Nairobi on fire because, in any case, they have got nothing to lose. After all, the city is exclusively for the haves but not for the have-nots.
In order for us to know whether it is the government or the citizen who has been trying to maliza the other, we have to look into the history of the functions of the past Kenyan government regimes away from rhetoric. For example, how come that, since independence, Kenyans have never seen any top government official getting charged and thrown into prison? The only times big people were hurled into prison was when they challenged the government but not when they committed a crime. The challengers were picked up and thrown into detention. Today, not a single Kenyan prison has a big man serving any sentence. Yet when Wanjiku steal a chicken, she is charged and thrown into prison, but not when a Mheshimiwa steals millions of public money. When the son of a big man rapes a young girl, he gets away with it, but when a village man does so he almost earned himself death sentence.
