By Jenny Luesby

If the nominations last week offered some sight of the elections to come, we are set to pay a heavy price based on how and why we select our leaders.

We all lived through the fires, deaths and displacements of five years ago, and for sure we debated the price of tribalism. But what have we really learned in getting ourselves leaders that are working for us: instead of spending their term fighting for tax-free pay and heavy exit perks for themselves?

Even our media is to blame, for its never-ending headlines on alliances and perks, while the country has slid into an abyss.

The track record of the current government would be counted as catastrophic in almost any other region of the world. According to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate had reached 40 per cent by last year, from 12.7 per cent in 2006. Youth unemployment is even higher, now near 60 per cent.

As a matter of delivery, that must be one of the most dramatic backslides ever pulled off anywhere, in five short years.

It’s a more dramatic rise in joblessness than the West experienced in the Great Depression. The World Bank has repeatedly declared it a timebomb in moving Kenya into violence. And the World Bank has solid history behind that warning.

A surge like that in youth with no place and no prospects has always led to violent protest.

So here we are, another weekend, watching the rumblings of riots.

But this weekend — thanks to the TNA nominations for Nairobi Governor — a light went on for at least some of our middleclass Tweeters that the city’s unemployed were the ones choosing Nairobi’s leadership: responsible for 40 per cent of the country’s GDP.

order of the stone

For sure, our middle class was outraged to have Nairobi named the second worst city in the world to be born in, but it is what one Tweeter this weekend called the ‘sufferers’ who now ARE Nairobi.

They are the majority.

And that presents an extraordinary political challenge. For they are angry. And rightly so.

They are ready to throw stones.

And last week, we saw them select a stone thrower as their preferred leader for the city. It didn’t matter he had no plan for homes and water and city markets and jobs.

It didn’t matter he can’t account for where the CDF funds went to in his own constituency, or that his education appears to be claims over reality. He has suffered, so he will represent the sufferers.

It’s to weep wondering who he will represent the ‘sufferers’ with, or against. For the point of leadership is that there is no oppressor left to hate: the leader leads. He has the budget. He has the job. His is to deliver the results.

His fellow contestant created Kenya’s largest investment bank, and promised to mobilise investments and extra financial tools to deliver half a million new homes and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

But for the majority of our city whose lives are horrible — struggling to eat, watching their kids cry on empty stomachs, begging for help to get even marginal healthcare, dying for stupid, unnecessary reasons, in some forever rerun of ‘Going Down River Road’ — the ‘elitist’ banker does not know or feel their suffering.

And that single perspective will now shape Kenya’s future.

For our now substantial middle class has done almost nothing to show it sees or cares. Middle class Kenyans hardly even discuss the terrible state of rising poverty of the last five years — it isn’t the done thing when socialising. They aren’t in political parties. They don’t campaign, and mostly they don’t even vote.

What they do is drop 140 character witticisms on Twitter berating the state of things.

So that’s Ok. Twitter will get great traffic. Our political wit and whinging will even sometimes trend worldwide, topping the global charts for the most intensive whinging.

And the majority of Kenyans, excluding our inactive middle class, will vote for politicians without ‘plans’, without extraordinary track records, or qualities of leadership, or transparency on their side.

And maybe our unemployment can rise another 27 points the next five years, to 67 per cent, and the few Kenyans left standing or eating, can think that’s a platform for some 2030 vision of health and wealth.

build higher fences

The truth is, we, the chattering classes, the middle classes, the agenda setters, the decision makers, we just spent five years looking everywhere but at our own. Not talking, not acting, not doing.

And everywhere that there has ever been a middle class that deals with a slide into hopelessness by putting up higher walls and getting extra guards, the endpoint has been the same.

In France, faced with starving masses, the eternal quote was Marie Antoinette’s ‘let them eat cake’.

Her class was guillotined.

Unless we choose this moment to seriously do something about the 40 per cent, they will choose their own, to fight for them. And if ‘their own’ don’t deliver the jobs, in the hundreds of thousands, which is a very real risk, then high fences won’t help anyone.

The writer is Group Content and Training Editor at The Standard Group.

 jluesby@standardmedia.co.ke