From Ted Malanda
[SIZE=4]A country is doomed when its ‘best’ leaders are Uhuru, Raila and Mudavadi[/SIZE]
in 2013, we missed the joke of the year when the goddess of laughter announced that Kenya’s leading presidential candidates were Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta and Musalia Mudavadi.
In one of Africa’s greatest nations, land of amazing wildlife and 40 million people, home of Waiyaki wa Hinga, Koitalel Arap Samoei, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, Mekatilili Wa Menza, Lwanda Magere and Mukite son of Nameme, the best we had were Raila, Uhuru and Musalia. Good Lord!
Can you recall something philosophical and profound that those three said last month? Last year? Ever? When you listen to them, does their intellect, depth and grasp of issues hit you smack in the face? Thought so.
No wonder they were whitewashed during a presidential debate by a joker called Mohammed Abduba Diba, a man who would have great difficulty convincing a village baraza in Wajir to allow him to cough. We should have laughed, but we didn’t. Big mistake.
When a journeyman steals the show in a debate against the country’s foremost leaders – the son of an iconic freedom fighter and president, the son of a vice president and towering opposition leader, and the son of a former powerful Cabinet minister – it can only mean one thing: Iko shida. We have a crippling shortage of political talent.
Let us begin with MaDVD. Everyone agrees Mudavadi is a nice person. But the nasty thing about life is that nice people belong in a kindergarten, not State House. Countries are transformed by ruthlessly efficient and determined people. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is not nice. Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi was not a nice person. Transforming a country, especially a kumbafu one like ours, requires a bad ass guy who kicks butt like kicking butt is running out of fashion. You know what I mean?
That, by the way, is a weakness Mudavadi shares with Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. In 2013, half of the country was dying to undress for them. The two were posing in elegant suits on billboards and claiming they would transform Kenya (it must have sounded very funny to them!) But that they were posing with Charity Ngilu, Najib Balala and Joseph Nyaga in that billboard should have sent sirens screaming nyuuuwii! nyuuuwii! in our heads. When you are going to transform a dead country, you carry a stick, an axe, a machete and a hoe. When you walk in carrying Balala, Ngilu and Nyaga on your back, you are a joker.
Anyhow, we bought it hook, line and sinker. We are so reckless that we actually elected two guys who stood the risk of getting locked up in a foreign jail by the International Criminal Court. Such is our recklessness that had those two been locked up at The Hague, we would have been stuck with Justin Muturi. Yes, that one.
That Uhuru and Ruto looked across Kenya and decided Muturi was the best person to be speaker of the national assembly isn’t surprising. I mean, they saw a bright spark, shining star, in Joseph Ole Lenku and Kazungu Kambi, too!
Remember Ruto was in something called Youth for Kanu. When the country was falling apart, and everyone was crying for change, Ruto was handing out ‘fake’ Sh500 notes to villagers and cooking inflation to buy votes. Now he was staring us in the face, saying he wanted to transform Kenya and we believed him.
Meanwhile, Uhuru’s political career was as short as a miniskirt. More scaring is that there was nothing particularly inspiring about his ministerial career, which was even shorter than a miniskirt. Yet we believed he was this great leader who was going to transform Kenya.
We forgot that as Kanu boss, he didn’t dare call a delegates meeting because even those incompetent Kanu yajenga nchi crooks were so pissed off with him they wanted to fire him. You know why? He abdicated his duty as leader of the official opposition and refused to run for office in 2008, instead throwing his lot with Kibaki, the very man he was meant to oppose. Like Kizza Besigye of Uganda supporting Museveni. Who does that?
In fact, when the late John Michuki popped up with the idea that Uhuru should run for office, people thought he was comically juggling a piece of liver. Uhuru?
Well, we missed that joke and now we are sitting here gnashing our teeth and screaming about El Nino sanitary pads worth Sh6, 000 and a government that is so broke that Kenya Power can stroll in whistling and disconnect power at the National Assembly.
Not that Raila would have been any better. As Prime Minister and co-principal of the coalition government, he had been thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the sickly Mwai Kibaki, the aloof politician christened “General Kiguoya” (coward) by his own people.
It is Raila who came up with that pea brained idea to sell unga at one price for the rich and another for the poor. All we got for that brainwave was a smelly maize scam (and you know the scum who chewed that maize, don’t you?). But we kept shouting, “Baba! Baba!”
We hailed him as a reformist and democrat despite him leading shambolic political outfits where party elections are a cocktail of nepotism, mindless violence and outright robbery.
A Legio Maria adherent, he was baptised by the ‘Mighty Prophet of The Lord David Owour’, stepped into the Kayas of the coastal people, and crept into the shrine of Elijah Masinde’s Dini ya Musambwa. He had eaten iftar with Muslims while dressed in kanzus and even laid claim to being a direct descendant of Nabongo Mumia of the Wanga people. But instead of asking ourselves, “Just who is this man who wants to be everything?” we kept screaming, “Baba! Baba!”
We ignored the fact Baba had a singular knack for shedding talent and surrounding himself with rude, noisy clowns, that WikiLeaks had quoted his own lieutenants saying he has poor managerial skills, and that he just didn’t seem able to keep friends, the reason he kept losing elections (or rigged out depending on whom you listen to).
When Kalonzo was leaving in 2007, his sycophants said, “Let him go. He is inconsequential”. Kalonzo left with 800,000 votes and Raila lost the election. Now Mudavadi was leaving and the same clowns were shouting, “Let Mudavadi go. He is inconsequential!” Mudavadi left with 450,000 votes and you know what happened.
But like a bunch of fools, we kept screaming “Baba! Baba!” believing he could transform Kenya. Transform Kenya? The guy couldn’t even transform his own political party!
The hilarity of it all is that he told us the election was about reformists (him) and non-reformists yet his co-principals were Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetangula. And the nonsense of it all didn’t bother us.
When Miguna Miguna tried to convince us to ask certain questions of the man who were dying to elect, we chased Miguna like a mongoose. Ask Baba questions? Were you mad, Miguna Miguna?
Miguna was not mad. It is us who were mad. So we voted for Kamwana. We voted for Baba. And we voted for MaDVD. What choice did we have? Now we are broke. In three years, we can’t point at one thing and say, “this is what we have accomplished”. Tribes are dying to fling stones, bows and arrows at each other. The nation is bleeding. And what our leaders are doing? Figuring out who fixed Ruto.
The funniest thing about it is that the 2017 general elections are months away and guess who we are stuck with? Uhuru, Raila and Mudavadi!
Ted Malanda is the Associate Editor, Nairobian
Visit his blog at www. tedmalanda.com
