We should not be fatalistic about our political decay

Ballot boxes at Ruaraka constituency tallying centre, Stima Club, Nairobi, on August 11, 2022. [File, Standard]

The 2027 elections may be more than a year away, but it sure feels like we are already in campaign season. Politicians are crisscrossing the country in full campaign mode, making all manner of promises and trying to craft elite coalitions to secure victory next year.

At the same time, there is a sense that we are not moving forward as a country on many fronts, including politics. Imagine going back to 2003. The country is breathing a sigh of relief after almost 40 years of KANU rule. We were the most hopeful people in the world. We were destined for better governance. Decent and people-focused politics.

The majority of senior national politicians and MPs were serious people. Serious in the sense that they cared about how they presented themselves in public.

They were certainly not perfect people, but they showed decorum and aspired to project a certain image of responsibility. The country felt that real adults were in charge and ready to put us back on track socially, politically, and economically.

Then came the disappointment of the breakup of NARC. And the Anglo Leasing scandal. And the botched constitution-making process. And the 2007-08 post-election violence. And the failure to fully reckon with the crimes that were committed during the clashes in 2007-08 and the previous cycles in 1992 and 1997.

In a sense, the Kibaki economic boom made it possible for us to ignore the erosion of trust and public morality that happened during this period. Markets were working. Universal primary education was becoming a reality. Infrastructure was being built. Vision 2030 gave us a collective sense of being in charge of our destiny.

However, the soul of the country was being shredded. Ethnic chauvinism, much of it fueled by the siege mentality of officials in the Kibaki administration, took hold.

The divisions and mistrust extended to the civil society and religious organisations. Around the same time, we developed a populist style of politics that threw out leadership standards (one could argue that the framers of Chapter Six of the Constitution were responding to a process already underway). Known criminals who did not bother to hide their crimes became electable and were supported by the senior leaders in our parties.

Most tragically, it is this crop of low-quality leaders who were in charge of implementing the 2010 Constitution. And as expected, they did a monumentally poor job of it. They infused theft and deal-making into the DNA of public service. They rendered many of our newly empowered public institutions useless.

They botched the implementation of devolution as a developmentalist experiment. And unlike previous generations of leaders, they were unapologetically proud of the crimes they were committing against us as a people.

All this to say that we need to get back to a time when holding public office came with minimum standards of personal conduct. We do not mind if people are hypocritical. We are all fallible. What we mind is politicians being unapologetic in their lack of standards.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University