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Our underdevelopment rooted in leaders’ laziness, indifference and love for sleep

Counties
 A man masquerading as a leader is yet to get to his place of work, yet the people he leads are already up and building the nation? Photo: Gammz

I am not a morning person. But as a victim of necessities, I have to start my day early in the morning. That being the case, I prefer my mornings peaceful.

So you can imagine the amount of murderous rage I was seething with mid last week when we got stuck in this humongous jam, just because traffic had been stopped to create way for some dignitary who, obviously, was late for work.

Look, a leader who snores until 9am, only to harass and inconvenience city residents on the highways is neither worth his salt nor the title.

What was even more annoying was that the bugger was committing a common crime most leader commit almost daily with impunity.

The scoundrel was not only being driven on the wrong side of the road, his motorcade was dangerously speeding while at it!

Surely, at that time of the day, a man masquerading as a leader is yet to get to his place of work, yet the people he purports to lead are already up and building the nation?

Talk of leading from behind! Heck, even some serious and self-respecting animals would only be caught dead asleep at that time of the day.

I mean, at 8am birds and chickens are already laying eggs, with bees making litres of honey. And here is a leader, probably even planning to vie for a bigger office, still snoring, dreaming of becoming president one day, tossing and turning in bed.

Look, brethren, when weighty matters to do with leading people nag you, the last thing that should be on your mind is sleep.

By 8am or 9am, a proper leader is supposed to have read all the day’s newspapers, done a meeting or even two and now scratching his head for ideas on how to eradicate poverty, diseases and ignorance among Kenyans. This is the time a true leader should be receiving briefs from his juniors, going through reports and what not.

belching breakfast fumes

Unfortunately, in Kenya, this is the time when ‘leaders’ are belching breakfast fumes in traffic, breaking the rules and inconveniencing commuters.

Actually, the perception one forms of such an individual is of a lazy bum on whose mind the last thing is solving wananchi’s problems. Honestly, if, as a leader, you have no firsthand experience of traffic jam, where will you even get motivation to fix it?

I can bet, once such a clown gets to his office, he hardly puts in a hard day at work. He is the sorts of lazy busy body who, immediately he arrives, goes on to fool around, filling newspaper crossword puzzles and log on social media to weigh in on the day’s politics and pledge loyalty to his party leader.

No policy is discussed on their social media pages. No inspiration. No solution to this or that problem that bedevils his people.

But it’s this kinds of lazy and indifferent clowns you get for leaders when you ignore poor visionaries and elect the richest man. The bugger is not bothered at all by the travails and predicament of the average man, who pay his fat salary.

The irony of it is that it’s such lazy bums who are always yearning and threatening to run for bigger offices, where they go, of course, to joke big time.

Need I mention those MPs who are always asleep in Bunge? How about the alleged thieves, crooks and jokers fired in government the other day and are now running for governorship in their locales?

Look, if you can’t fix the smaller and obvious problems while in a smaller office, why should wananchi entrust you lazy self with bigger responsibilities?

This country is littered with the so-called smaller problems, which in the long run stifle development and lead to grinding poverty. But do leaders, especially those with direct contact to wananchi even bother?

Take petty theft for instance. In many localities, anything metallic, including, sufurias, barbed wire fences, farm equipment get stolen and sold as scrap metal. It’s sad that ours is increasingly becoming a society where almost every family has a boy who is a thief or an alcoholic.

Yet you find shenzi local leaders — MCAs, MPs, Senators or even governors who should be creating employment to nip such vices in the bud — in such places obsessed with national politics, crisscrossing the country with their party leaders.

It’s in such places where hopeless and jobless young people waste themselves on alcohol — dawn to dusk, with some smoking bhang in the open.

And their leaders know it, but do they care! At the root of all this is rampant family breakdown — a crisis no leader ever addresses.

These are small problems that largely trace their origin to poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. And they can only be solved if we get rid of the visionless dunderheads and lazy bums we elect as leaders.

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