Politicians claiming to be in youthful phases of their lives are not role models

By James Onyango

It has been said the youth are the leaders of tomorrow. In Kenya, the youth have remained leaders in prospect because tomorrow has been kept out of their reach and have not risen to the occasion when it matters.

If environment and training plays a big role in shaping up future leaders, then we are either a country held captive by a rotten system so that we cannot produce good leaders or the wrong people are in charge.

But age alone cannot be young people’s claim to leadership because leadership has to be earned. It is something to be consistently worked on with time.

Last week, the world’s top female tennis player, Serena Williams visited the country on a tour sponsored by Hewlett Packard to inspect projects under her charity.

The 28-year-old American, winner of 25 Grand Slam titles, advised Kenyan youth to set high goals and work on them, saying that is how she attained the long journey to the top of world tennis. She could as well have been advising local youth on how to achieve their dreams of rising to the top of the country’s leadership.

But going by recent proclamations about ambitions of leadership by individuals well beyond their youth, then, as a colleague once told me, I could as well be a toddler if indeed the people claiming to be the youth are in the youthful phases of their lives.

If this is true, then I do not want to be a politician when I grow up. By extension, all those born at the start of or during the Nyayo era, should either be learning their first steps or are clad in nappies if individuals claiming to be youthful leaders are indeed categorised as young.

Today, young people grow up knowing it is okay to lie because this is what our leaders do.

It is an act Kenyans have let politicians get away with and, because we are a forgetful nation, we swallow the same lies hook, line and sinker, year after year.

Politicians make promises they cannot keep, deny the very statements they make on national television and are captives of ethnic cocoons.

A good number have broken their own marriages due to strings of mistresses. Sadly, the only leaders young people know of are politicians.

Your average politician is a man or woman blessed with the (un)fortunate gift of backstabbing, blame game, witch-hunting and malice.

Like the city fathers of City Hall, mastery of turning seats into missiles to realise what dialogue can best achieve is another must-have for our politician.

I am disappointed when professionals leave their careers to venture into politics because, going by experience, academic training plays little role, if any, in political success.

Yet professionals must take up political careers because, by failing to do so, they leave the running of the country to people out to con the public of the sound leadership we so badly need.

Professionals must not shun political offices but must participate in and sanitise leadership. Young professionals must take up their role of leadership to give youth of this country some hope for a better tomorrow.