Opinion: Why Uhuru Kenyatta will find it hard to lead Kenya

Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist to drive home a political truth. Ironically, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist Carl Sagan, a specialist in astronomy and space science, opined that “one of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back”.

The bogeyman narrative, stereotyping certain communities and branding political opponents in ways that demean their standing in society, has driven Kenya to a crossroads. It was appalling to hear President Uhuru Kenyatta, a man of pedigree whose noble upbringing should have endowed him with a sense of finesse and decorum, borrow from his deputy William Ruto’s choice epithets for Opposition leader Raila Odinga and call the latter ‘mchawi’ (witch) shortly after he’d been handed the winner’s certificate by the chairman of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission that declared him winner of the October 26 repeat presidential election.