Why our leaders don’t know what the real world really looks like

By Barrack Muluka

The African big man is the outright isolated big chief. Although he may rarely leave the confines of his country, he veritably lives abroad.

Chinua Achebe has captured this aptly in The Trouble with Nigeria. He says of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, when he was the President of Nigeria (1979 – 1983), “Shagari is neither a fool nor a crook. So I must assume that he lives abroad. Which is not strange or fanciful as some might think.

Many Presidents, especially Third World Presidents, do not live in their countries. One of the penalties of exalted power is loneliness. Harnessed to the trappings of protocol and blockaded by a buffer of grinning courtiers and sycophants, even a good and intelligent leader will gradually begin to forget what the real world looks like.”

The last thing the self-seekers around the big man want is that the boss should know the truth about anything.

This feverish fawning lot wants the big man to know that all is well and God is smiling in heaven. When the African big man sets out to see things for himself, what does he see? Achebe has the answer. “Highways (that) are temporarily cleared of lunatic drivers by even more lunatic presidential escorts. Hitherto impassable tracks (that) are freshly graded and even watered to keep down the dust.”

Everything is calculated to keep the big man and reality as far apart as possible. In any event, he does not seem to mind.

And so the big man sees “buildings dripping of fresh paint.” He does not ask why buildings in the country seem to be permanently dripping of wet paint. He sees newly graded earth roads everyday and he believes that every earth road is graded every day.

Everywhere he goes, he is received by well-fed groveling ‘welcome notables.’  Ululating women and children who have not recently had a decent meal adorn him in garlands, ribbons and badges.

They treat him to ‘cultural dances’ in the scorching heat. One speaker after the other showers him and his brand of leadership in extravagant flattery.

Conscientious objectors from inside will tell you that it is not just in public where courtiers kowtow and verbally ingratiate.

In private, there exist cabals that think the big man is their poodle, their lapdog. They want to create an aura of fear around him. The big man must be feared, where he should be respected. You are supposed to be terribly afraid of the boss, even as a key adviser. When the big chief walks in, the code is that first you freeze. Then, suddenly, everybody feverishly scrambles to attention.

They smile sheepishly, for no reason. The big man’s opinion, fashioned in the kitchen, is everything. It cannot be contradicted, not even with utmost decorum and civility. Therefore the big man says what should be done.

Everybody else amplifies and rationalises, no matter how irrational it all is. The outcome is that the African big man, held hostage by a coterie of praise singers is really a stranger to his country. He only knows what the toady wants him to know.

Adjoining our magnificent Thika Superhighway is a severely dilapidated Ojijo Road, in Nairobi. A visitor from Thika must suffer heavy culture shock once he leaves Thika Road. If he thought Ojijo was just a little irregularity, Ojijo disembowels him into an even more horrific Chiromo Lane, with permanent burst sewers and odoriferous emissions. He turns right to Muthithi Road and it is crying potholed shame. 

There is a whole community of horrendously dilapidated roads in this up market residential and business environ: Mpaka Road, Ring Road, Mogoitio Road, General Mathenge Road, Brookside Grove, Brookside Drive, Grevillia Grove, Loresho Ridge, and you could go on and on. I sample these few because they are in high end Nairobi. There are so many roads in similar dilapidation in the capital city, in what we often call ‘leafy suburbs.’

Now if this is what our ‘leafy suburbs’ look like, do not start asking what the rest of Nairobi (I hesitate to use the word ‘city’) looks like. Do not try to think about the rest of the country.

Quite often, the boss has been told that these roads are in mint shape. The courtiers keep the lie alive by physically sheltering him from these roads. Meanwhile, they are busy running their mouths about. “Oh, we have really developed our infrastructure.”

Sometime in the early 1980s Mzee Moi visited what was then Kakamega District. His mission would end up in Mumias. He was surprised that his itinerary was routed through a detour to Bukura and Butere, where he had no business.

It would more than double the distance and on poor roads. They told the President that it would be good for him “to meet the people.”

Moi refused. He did not have the time just now, he said. He could come back some other day. Besides, he wanted to have a feel of the ‘newly tarmacked Kakamega-Mumias Road.’

The President was hugely shocked and angered to discover that not an inch of the road had been tarmacked. But hadn’t his courtiers, retainers and allied wheeler-dealers always made him believe otherwise? Where had the money gone?

If the big man is misled on things that we can touch, hear, see and smell, what of the less obvious things?

Does the big man know the true state of security in the country? What is told in high circles about the mayhem in Eastleigh, Garissa, Baragoi, Tana Delta, Turkana and about security in the country generally? 

Achebe reminds us of Haroun Rashid of 18th Century Baghdad. Haroun frequently disguised himself and went unaccompanied into city streets by day and night to see the ungarnished life in his country – the uncensored reality.

Yes indeed, “one of the penalties of exalted power is loneliness. Harnessed to the trappings of protocol and blockaded by a buffer of grinning courtiers and sycophants, even a good and intelligent leader will gradually begin to forget what the real world looks like.”

The writer is a publishing editor and advisor on public and media relations