If you are in control, actions and calmness speak louder than you

Businesswoman giving a presentation. [GettyImages]

In classical political traditions, calmness was the highest form of power. This alphabet does not change. Measured speech signals control. You do not have to scream if you are in control. Your actions will speak louder than any words. Yet, has Kenya inverted this tradition?

 In Kenya, shouting signals “importance.” Silence suggests “weakness.” The sober measured politician who speaks with aplomb is mistaken for “lacking a message.” There is dangerous confusion in this Tower of Babel. Babel thinks that excessive verbal energy is eloquence and legitimacy. 

Yet, it is not. Screaming in public is neither heroism nor competence. From the presidency, through the Opposition, the Cabinet, all the way to Parliament and the County Assembly, the decibels are the same.

They have no sense of occasion, no respect for the audience, and no moderation, or self-regulation. Everyone “screams” their message. Even a written speech is screamed.

Communication in my country is no longer a vehicle for meaningful persuasion.

It is a melodramatic performance for dominance. It rides on misplaced urgency and emotional excesses. Volume and drama is what counts.

In public communications, this is at once a failure of oratory and collapse of political culture. It is a disrespectful and scared leader who screams his message. The audience is not recognised as an assembly of thinking participants. It is rather seen as a crowd of objects that need to be stirred up.  They are a mob that needs to be overwhelmed through noise; and to be owned by the leader. Some even refer to the audience as “my people.” 

They think of them the same way they think of their shoes, “my shoes.” They believe they own the people, the same way they own their goats at home.

Communication experts will tell you that the attitude underlying and driving this screaming in public is not respect, but suspicion. The man is afraid that he will not grab the attention of the audience. He fears that calmness will expose his intellectual thinness. Noise becomes a form of “insurance” and a cover for emptiness.

Noise compensates for conceptual weakness and lack of clarity, even in the speaker’s own mind, about what she intends to say.

The mouth on fire simply runs on and on, on the fuel of excess fear and verbal looseness. When he rebukes his rivals, he is in fact fighting another battle, this time against himself. He is fighting against his irrelevance. He mistakenly thinks the noise will make him relevant.

And when he is done, he looks around for validation, smiling and looking for hands of approval to shake. 

The bigger tragedy is habituation. This behaviour has now been normalised. From the presidency down to county assemblies, it is the same. From churches to rallies and to funerals, it is a querulous public performance.

There is no sensitivity to context, no respect for bereaved families, no humility in the church, and no modulation, whatsoever. Every space is a battlefield, and every microphone a weapon. Accordingly, the moral hierarchy of public life has collapsed.

A funeral is no longer a grave occasion of paying final respect to the dead and consoling their family.

It is a gladiators’ arena. A church is not a sacred shrine for worship of God, and sacrosanct reflection.

Because they expect handouts from visiting politicians, trembling church leaders hand over the sanctuary to the gladiators.

Attending all these is that younger politicians are learning from the worst examples. The scream is the syllabus. The snowball effect should worry us, for we are breeding just about the emptiest leadership anywhere on earth. Are there no exceptions?

Yes, we have in leadership a few men and women who understand that moderation and modulation is not weakness. We can learn about the sense of occasion from Uhuru Kenyatta.

He knows when to throw his tantrum, and when to be moderate, or even venerate the sanctuary. Musalia Mudavadi, Amos Wako, Kalonzo Musyoka, Martha Karua, David Maraga, and Okoiti Omutata. Jimmy Wanjigi knows how to package his message and get you to listen. The majority, however, are common “shoutants.” 

And it is from these shoutants that the youthful leaders are learning from. A minister picks up the microphone to explain an important government policy. You get ready to hear him out.

No sooner does he open his mouth than he sinks into a quarrelsome diatribe against absent detractors. Does Kenya need an urgent cultural exit from this toxic space? The very minimum is rehabilitation of calmness as power, and restoration of sense of occasion.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke