By Kipkoech Tanui
We shall begin with the story of tortoise and baboon then Barack Obama and Jack Ryan in the battle for the Illinois senate.
We shall see how like the tortoise and baboon, our politicians seemingly live to double-cross each other each day and painfully carry us along their revenge missions.
From Obama and Ryan we shall discern how impudent it may be to anchor your political message onto one individual, who is not even in State House, and distort the bigger message; which is how you plan to rule Kenya should you get the chance, and how differently from last three.
Light ethnic fire
Deep in the heart we know of course we are the problem, they do not tug us with ropes to follow them.
They just excite the ethnic fire in us and we glow with it. We also may feel we can’t have the president we should because s/he has not thrown their hat in the ring.
But even if s/he were to do that, we shall still judge him or her using the prism of handouts and the ethnic barometer. Here goes.
Your granny may have told you a story of how the baboon tricked hungry tortoise to visit his house for a mouth-watering meal, only to ask him climb up the tree where he was if he wanted to feast.
Much as he tried, the tortoise couldn’t, gave up and went back angry and hungry. But plot revenge he did. He lit a fire around his home the night before, then invited baboon for a sumptuous feast, but when baboon showed up, having walked on his fours on the black soot, he was told he could only eat with tortoise if he washed his hands downstream.
Each time the determined baboon came back from the stream, he would end up touching the soot, and food would be denied.
It then dawned on him he had been tricked. May be even today the two are still plotting another revenge for yesteryear’s trick.
The tragedy is these tortoistic and baboonic politicians will always use us in their revenge schemes, but first after creating a herd mentality in us by creating one object of fear that will unite us as a tribe, with him as the saviour leading from the front.
He will tell us he knows where there is green pasture, and will whip us up with words and emotions to follow him.
Meanwhile at the other end, the one fooled today sits, waiting to revenge, and sadly, they carry us all along and so make us both tortoistic and baboonic until we wake up from the slumber.
Yes, you are right, we have the power not to be lugged along in their ‘revenge’ missions.
Now over to story number two. In 2004, when little-known Barack Obama stepped forward for the Illinois senate seat on a Democratic Party ticket, Jack Ryan, a Republican to boot, was considered the best bet for the seat.
Both won their party primaries and were set to meet kwa debe (ballot box). Then some strange story started doing the rounds about Ryan’s divorce from Jeri, a former wife with whom he had one child. The divorce papers were sealed by mutual consent by the two former lovebirds ostensibly to protect their son.
Commander-in-Chief
The old and tenacious Chicago Tribune and a few other media houses sought a court order to have parts of the record seals loosened because here was a man seeking to rule America and Americans surely ought to know as much as they could glean from his past so that they can decide if he was fit to be Commander-in-Chief.
Of course Ryan would not let that happen without a fight because therein lay his worst shame and softest point of the belly.
When the records were finally thrown open to the public, it turned out the man was a pervert, Jeri said he had asked her to engage in certain salacious sexual acts with him in public, and also took her to ‘exclusive’ clubs where apart from dim lights there were ropes, whips, and all manner of sex toys including the ‘rear-entry’ beads.
From then on, his growling opponents had him for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with his face on every clip and page of newspaper bearing his face, he was a cooked man and he soon abandoned the race.
As the filth hit the fan literally for Ryan, according to David Mendel, the journalist who followed him everywhere and finally wrote the spellbinding book Obama: From Promise to Power, Obama who stood to gain the most from his fail kept off the debate.
He even, he says, literally left Chicago for other remote campaign circuits so as not to be drawn into it.
His explanation was that he did not want to distort the message of his own campaign. He also, much as he cherished what was happening, did not want to look villainous, petty and unsympathetic.
Winner-take all
He let the people of Illinois judge Ryan for themselves and he won; Obama instructed his campaign not to say anything about it so as not to be blamed as the architect of the scheme, which in turn may win the opponent sympathy votes.
I guess you can relate this to our Kenyan case as well; the only difference is Obama unlike our noisy politicians had no skeletons in his closet, and much as opponents ransacked it, they found nothing except his cigarette smoking.
The writer is Managing Editor, Daily Editions, at The Standard.
ktanui@standardmedia.co.ke
