As we eat, sleep politics, where are the issues?

By Jenny Luesby

Roaring candidates, cheering crowds, twists and turns in alliances and candidates, posters on walls, trees, bridges, and even party-branded boda bodas: our election is in full swing! Yet all I can feel is the vacuum where politics should be.

Is it really true we are going to waste yet another shot at great government on celebrities and dynasties — forgetting all over again to nail anyone to some promises on actual policies?

And if so, what is this disinterest in actions and solutions? Noone is claiming we don’t have issues to resolve — we have rows of burning problems, which no candidate is yet offering anything on except passing references.

Our early deaths, overstretched hospitals, rotten infrastructure, unemployed youth, heaving pollution, ad nauseum, are they really not worth a single policy commitment between them?

I know I feel that as an election hole more than most because I’ve lived through so many elections elsewhere that really were about politics — as in, who stood for what, and who was going to do what.

I still remember the US election, ‘watch my lips: no more tax’. I lived through British elections where the winners won on promises to rehabilitate our ailing National Health Service.

In France, in one election, pensions where the red hot coal, as the population aged, and every working French man and woman moved towards individually covering one and then two whole pensions each from their own taxes: which adds up to a lot of taxation.

I’ve seen riots over local council taxes, demonstrations over abortion rights and raging street battles over unemployment.

How hard then to follow an election, now just eight weeks off voting, and we didn’t get to any politics yet.

But, obviously, that’s the order of the day, which means that one of two things has to be true.

The first possibility is that no-one cares what the government does, as in, there isn’t a single policy that we care about enough to vote for. With regards to Kenya’s future, we’re entirely indifferent. Filthy or clean, rich or poor, war-torn or peaceful, sick or healthy, alive or dead, we don’t care.

Parent overstretch

It would certainly explain why fewer than half of us registered to vote. Yet, as my Mum used to cite to me in those (obviously rare) moments I wouldn’t engage: “‘Don’t Care’ didn’t care. ‘Don’t Care’ died.” And she was right. If we really don’t care whether we live or die, we will, most surely, die.

But it surely has to be ludicrous to suppose that we in Kenya just don’t care what policies our leaders introduce, or what resources they mobilise and who gets to benefit. It just cannot be possible that we have nothing, any of us, we truly and definitely want changed for the better?

So the second possibility is that this is a matter of despair. We do care if Kenya is poverty stricken and sick, but we have no hope whatsoever that it can be any different.

On which basis, we are not asking for, and wouldn’t anyway believe, in any policies and politics. It is all going to be rubbish and disappointment and cheating and no progress anyway, so why bother to ask for any policy commitments we don’t ever expect to happen?

But if that’s the story, what’s wrong with us? One shocker recently put before me was the fact that half of all families in Nairobi are headed by single parents, and with horrible consequences: some 60 per cent of those who never make it through secondary school go down on the poverty borne of single parent overstretch.

Indeed, these kids without a marriage behind them do worse on almost every front.

So are we so blind that we think absolutely nothing can be done to improve that? Brazil ended its street children blight. Asia transformed its economies. Have we never heard of child support? Half the world gives it, but not for we in Kenya?

Are we just a sub-level? Other countries can organise good roads. But we in Kenya can’t? Like the national opposite of Obama’s ‘Yes, We Can’, we are the nation of ‘No, We Can’t’. We can’t do anything meaningful about unemployment, or road carnage, or our still so-low life expectancy, our housing, or our economy.

No matter if some presidential candidate stands up and says they are going to stop the illegal meat trade, saving us from countless deaths and impending civil war around Baragoi. We either don’t care and won’t vote for it, or we don’t believe it can be stopped.

Genetic ties

So instead, dear politicians, please give us an empty bag of platitudes about making Kenya peaceful and wealthy, and we’ll just vote for the most charismatic family or the one we share the most genetic ties with. Because government doesn’t matter, and doesn’t make any difference anyway.

Except it does. So how stupid does that make us for not asking how these politicians are going to change our nation? As they say: People get the government they deserve. If you don’t think policies matter in deciding which leaders you vote for, then live with the policies you get, and don’t blame the politicians.

You never asked for more.

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

 jluesby@standardmedia.co.ke