There are times when opportunity and hardships inspire brilliance to produce long-lasting work. In 1513, a Florentine courtier, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a little book, The Prince, on how to acquire and maintain power that has acquired the status of 'gospel' in Western political discourse.

It is part of classics that include Plato's Republic elitism championing governance by philosophers, slave dealer John Locke's Second Treatise on Government contradicting himself with his 'natural rights' argument that excluded Africans, Thomas Paine's Common Sense calling for the overthrow of colonial governance, and Karl Marx's Capital/Communist Manifesto stressing class warfare. Machiavelli dominates general thinking on power which, Henry Kissinger supposedly claimed was 'great aphrodisiac'. It at least intensifies the rivalry between the inheritor and the grabber.

Occasionally, the inheritor and the grabber join forces to confront a mutual challenge after which they turn on each other. It happened with a short-lived collaboration in Kenya between Uhuru Kenyatta, the inheritor, and William Ruto, the grabber. Uhuru, born into power and privilege had a problem maintaining power. Ruto, the rural upstart penetrating the established power structure, has also had problems retaining power. The two attained power together but lost it separately, each by failing to know how to use power. They assumed arrogant postures, ignoring the advice from Confucius, roughly 2,500 years ago, not to push the ruled to points of desperation. They also ignored Machiavelli's injunction to balance the lion and the fox, preferring to be 'lions' at the wrong times, believing they could bulldoze their way every time. In the process, they lost the trust of those who trusted them.