True leaders, patriots should now come out of the shadows and offer leadership

We have a defectively frenzied political Opposition, riding on the unreliable energy of a blundering government and its own short sightedness. This is a useless outfit to bank on. It lacks the capacity to convert to advantage the political blunders and blustery recklessness of those in power. It can only flip-flop and fill up the public with a heightened sense of sadness and despair.

Let us face the facts. Kenya is perched on the horns of a government that is full of kiburi. Without elders in its ranks, this government operates on the whims of youthful myopia, blind anger, raw arrogance and sundry negative passions.

It has cloudy vision and poor sense of direction. The advisory faculties are dry. They ran aground before the aircraft of State left the runway of governance. The youthful duo at the top made a wobbly take off in March 2013. There was the ominous shadow of the International Criminal Court and claims of a stolen election and a looted national Treasury.

There was political greenness. It was even difficult to announce the government. It took them nearly two months to do this simple job. And when they did it, they only polarised the country.

They peppered Kenya’s historical ethnic wounds. Nearly three years later, they don’t seem conscious of the fact. Or, they don’t care. There are entire ethnic communities out there asking everyday, “Where do these people want us to go?”

I don’t know the answer. What is clear is that the Jubilee ship of State has never been stable. By all probability it never will be. A battery of vulpine cheerleaders from three ethnic communities compounds the wretchedness. They spew pure poison at hurriedly convened press conferences and public rallies. Quite often, the whole gathering is just one tribe! When your insensitivity has reached here, your goose is cooked. You have carried your sacrifice way past the crossroads.

That the Jubilee Government has lost it can no longer be in doubt. To believe otherwise, you require the faith of a super zealot. You need the energy of unbridled wishful thinking and a profound capacity for denial. It is hard to believe, for instance, that President Kenyatta has this week voluntarily walked into an aircraft and gone to New York. He was not helped or coerced into the vessel.

The President has left the country in the grip of unprecedented crises in the education sector – and indeed elsewhere. Three weeks ago, I wrote in this column that the ongoing teachers’ strike is capable of sparking the country to eat up the government.

Does it seem like we are engaged in the dialogue of the deaf? But then both the President and his deputy have repeatedly told us that the place of newspapers is the butchery – so much the worse for them. We say in Emanyulia that the newly circumcised boy laughed at his festering wound. Everybody knows what happened to the boy and his post circumcision gangrened apparatus. Jubilee laughs at its own kindred wound.

Jubilee thinks nothing of the decay in its vital organs. The President returned from Italy a few days ago to tell off striking teachers and to close all schools.

Satisfied with a job well done, he has left for America. Candidates waiting for national exams are at a loss. Someone tells them the exams are on. Never mind that science students in high school are not seeing any of the preparatory activities around the laboratories, ahead of the practical exams.

When the President addressed the matter at the end of the week, he fell far short of expectation. I had thought he would break fresh ground. Instead it was a hardening of positions, with sometimes embarrassing comparisons between Kenya and failed states in the region.

Some of the statistics that he gave also seemed off the mark. We are studying them closely. We will return to this subject in good time.

President Kenyatta and Jubilee are failing the test of leadership. Perhaps I use the wrong tense. But if they are failing, the CORD Alliance is shocking. The leaders lack the capacity to latch on to a political opportunity with credence, spice and decorum. Their celebratory and clownish drama in Uhuru Park was demeaning. Their proffered solution to the education crises betrays a crowd that has run out of ideas. We say in Emanyulia that you should never start what you cannot conclude. How could CORD leader, Raila Odinga, tell the world that they have opened an Mpesa account to sustain the strike?

First, this account is going nowhere. It is a stillborn effort – dead on arrival. And someone should have told them not even to think about it. It is simply kaput. Its only usefulness is that it validates the mental constipation and verbal incontinence that now rules the Opposition ranks.

In a sense, this is not any different from the thoughtless verbal diarrhea that defines Jubilee’s former scholars. Yet when the government in power has lost it, the people’s hopes turn to the Opposition. The people despair when the Opposition has nothing to offer.

Second, a return to work formula is urgently required. Now that the government seems helpless what ideas can the Opposition give the nation? What role can they play? If they stayed with the line that Kenyatta was holding the law in contempt and followed this through with decorum and credence, they would begin looking good. They would have done even better to coordinate efforts to bring together a panel of eminent persons from political leadership, religious groups, academicians and professionals, to help to force the antagonists from brinkmanship.

Instead CORD has said it is going to paralyse life in Nairobi’s central business district. It is fishing in troubled waters. The child we teach is nowhere in CORD’s plans. They are not bothered about the plight of the candidates now in a quandary. How will CORD’s stillborn cash kitty help the candidates? Never mind that it will never get off the ground, or help the teachers.

Kenya urgently needs leadership. The destiny of the country does not rest with either Jubilee or CORD. Once, long ago, Raila Odinga was on the right side of history. He no longer is. Like Jubilee, he has lost it. The true leaders and patriots should now come out of the shadows. Their job is well cut out for them.

They need to restore our sense of national unity and pride across ethnicities. They need to give us a practical blueprint towards the Kenya that our national anthem has promised us. People like Martha Karua don’t belong to either Jubilee or CORD. They should vacate that space and be part of the future.