We can turn a corner in 2026 by calling out greedy leaders

ODM acting party leader Oburu Odinga attends former Prime Minsiter Raila Odinga's memorial service at Sony Sugar Green Stadium in Awendo Sub-County, Migori County on November 6, 2025. [File, Standard]

Allow me some philosophical musing today. The passage of seasons invites us to reflect on the often futile passions that rule us. Could we turn a corner, and with that turn a new leaf, in the beckoning 2026 season?

Aged 29, in 1817, the English poet George Gordon immortalised the transition from the fading energies of youth to the maturity of adulthood in the poem, “So We’ll Go No More A Roving.” Aging and fading energy, at any rate, are twin realities that year-ends invoke.

Some may argue differently. However, they signify coming of age, at the very minimum. Maybe, from the feebleness and helplessness of the Shakespearean first age of life, from the infant, who is “mewls and pukes in the nurse’s arms,” to “the whining schoolboy.”  

All the way to the seventh age, Shakespeare does not seem to suggest that much good could come out of our aging. When we are not puking infants, we are whining schoolboys.

When not that, we are youthful lovers, saying nonsensical romantic things. We move on to become ill-tempered soldiers, and from that to judges with omnivorous eating habits. Our fat bellies show for that.  

The overfed fat judge gives way to a frail old man, in the sixth stage of life. A pathetic individual. He sinks into a second childish season. This individual lacks basic common sense. He cannot see, taste, smell, bite, or hear. He is unhelpful to himself and to others.   The seasons, in a sense, depict a cycle of futility.

From an infancy of helplessness to youthful foolishness, and from the foolishness to vanity and conflict in adulthood. From there, age is in decline, even as the number of years lived increases. Finally, the end is oblivion?  

Both Shakespeare and Lord Byron (also known as Gordon) invite us to confront the harsh realities of life, rather than the escapist, wishful thinking that we tend to embrace. “For the sword outwears the sheath, and the soul wears out the breast; and we must pause to breathe, and love itself has a rest,” writes Byron. 

The passage of time is a universal equaliser. No matter who we may be, in the palace and the streets alike, we are set to end up “without teeth, eyes, taste, everything,” if we are lucky enough to go through all “the seven stages of man.”

Most people succumb in the earlier stages. In essence, you are not defined by your role at a particular stage. You are only passing through the stage.   The big message from the two poets is that life is short. Life is passing. In the circumstance of the revelation, cruelty, greed, and vanity are useless drivers.

Indeed, cruelty and greed are laughable attributes. “How much land does a man need?” asks Leo Tolstoy in another eye-opener on the futility of greed.  

As the sun sets on 2025, the question transforms into, “What are you doing with your fleeting hour on the stage called life?” Are you in the class of grabbers, that is perpetually cutting across the national landscape, accumulating stuff that it will never settle down to enjoy? Are you exercising power without wisdom? Are you in the grip of hubris, enjoying a false sense of arrival?  

But even this arrival will come to an end someday. One of the things that the passage of time does is to bring the end closer. That is to say, the end of that which troubles you, if you are troubled; as well as the end of what you enjoy, if you are enjoying.

Both Shakespeare and Byron leave us at the crossroads of conscience and greed, the point where thought meets conscience, especially in Africa’s search for integrity in leadership. We are going to exit the stage, just as the year 2025, with all that it has carried, is exiting. Africa is perpetually in the grip of tragedy. Is it possible that tragedy begins when conscience closes its eyes?

The tragic individual may see the moral problem clearly. He may name it correctly. But then he chooses to close his eyes. The baser appetites have taken over. The brainwaves in the ODM party from the day they joined their broad-based arrangement would seem to speak to this tragedy.  

When you listen to Kenya’s political class in 2026, please understand that they are not daft. They just lack moral courage. They know when the election is flawed, when corruption is metastasising, and when violence has been normalised. But courage has been traded in for office. So, we’ll go no more a roving in the 2026 season, with our heroes of the past seasons. 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke