Why the powerful suffer when they leave office

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, according to a certain Lord Acton in a letter in the late 1800s. Give a normal person some sort of power and most will wield it to the maximum allowable under the situation, and where the setting allows, go ahead and abuse it to test the system – just because they can.

Look at your average watchman (they prefer security guards). Before he settles into a job properly, he is all obsequious and meek. When he gets comfortable, he becomes another animal altogether. He can even lock out of the gate the very employer who’s given him the job.

Perhaps I have started a tad on the lower side. Let’s look at someone whom you might have known as a not-so-bright fellow but then magic happens and their man becomes, say, the President. They become big headed, make public pronouncements that should be made by their bosses and generally become a bully.

Of course, these things sometimes backfire. When one Riggy G was the Deputy President, the man was generally unapproachable. One day he made the mistake of saying he has set up traps all over State House, such that any wannabe political opportunists would be trapped and made a meal of, probably by resident hyenas.

He never knew that he would be the first victim, and the hyenas were all teeth, waiting to have him for dinner. Now, he’s determined to throw as many rocks and other projectiles as possible into the house on the hill hoping that they will hit somebody, anybody, anything! Perhaps that is the reason they spent a couple of billions securing state house with a flat roof.

But I digress. We were talking about power getting into the head of otherwise normal human beings. I recently met this chap who was the most powerful Cabinet minister a couple of years back and was totally untouchable. He used to call the shots in a lucrative ministry. Now, as much as he had amassed a lot of wealth, you can’t recognise the man from the villagers whom he has since become part of.

Going up further up the food chain, I look at the journey the President has taken to where he is and I cannot reconcile myself with some, if not most, of his recent pronouncements.

He loves reminding all and sundry how far he has come, the son of a poor farmer who pulled himself up by the bootstraps to reach the pinnacle of power. How he used to hawk eggs and god-knows what else to make ends meet.

Yet, now that he has made it, he instructs the police to round up all foreign small traders to make way for locals.

I have a problem with this. If our young people were not generally lazy – they prefer to hang around matatu stages, collecting ten bob from every matatu, failure to which hell shall be unleashed on the offender – the Burundians would not be doing what they are doing.

Let us not go the South African route. The head of state should be frying larger fish instead of triggering xenophobic hysteria. For instance, his statement during a gathering arranged by the American Chamber of Commerce and read like fiction. The people who author such speeches should be put to task for lying to the President. The words are beautifully stitched together but that’s all there is to it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were falsehoods but there were many untruths in the statement. Nobody was convinced. In fact, the same day, many of the potential and existing investors were heard murmuring – rather loudly at that for the media to pick up – that the impediments to doing business that the President had pronounced as having been sorted out were still there.

The President waxes lyrical about how in four years, his government has delivered on all his promises. The ground has a different opinion. Only the election next year will tell.

 

-The writer is a communications consultant