We are victims of the culture of claptrap and dead psyche

The top brass around power is either a cocktail of perfect dissemblers, or they are simply dead. Whatever the case, they are to be pitied. “We are the dead,” Winston Smith says at the moment of rapture in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. An invisible metallic voice frightfully echoes him in affirmation, “You are the dead.” Kenya’s crème de la crème frightens you with the thought that they are dead. Do we seem to have lost all capacity to interrogate things, to see issues in perspective? Or, perhaps, we just never had the ability in the first place? We have always subscribed to the school that says, “Ignorance is strength.” Where we are not genuinely ignorant, we must either feign ignorance, or force it – especially in pursuit of narrow political correctness.

We have watched two appalling claptrap events this week. It does not seem politically correct, of course, to talk about the awkward and anxious moment in Mathira, when the nation’s psyche was on the burial of Nyeri Governor Nderitu Gachagwa. President Kibaki had an awkward moment with his speech. He got people of conscience worried. And I kept wondering where his speechwriter was, or what he had done with the speech. This was no way to treat Mzee Kibaki. He was let down badly. Yet the notables around him went on clapping amid the awkwardness. The less said the better. Suffice it to say this serves to demonstrate that we are a claptrap nation. We will clap because we think everybody is clapping.