Busybody MPs should allow all from governor to bodaboda to fly the flag

One of the good things about Kenyan politicians is that they are as easy to read as an open book.

The debate about whether governors should fly the national flag on their vehicles is about one thing only.

MPs, and especially senators, did not read the Constitution carefully before the last election.

As a consequence, they did not make a clear-headed decision about which posts to seek.

The title “senator” sounded very attractive. In America, it is the silver-haired wise old men and women who sit in the Senate.

They call their chamber the “world’s greatest deliberative body” and sit around deciding major issues of war and peace.

This is because America is a superpower and decisions by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for example, can determine whether your country will be bombed back to the Stone Age.

In Kenya, on the other hand, senators seem to have discovered too late that they campaigned hard for an office that is not so attractive.

The duty of “protecting devolution” kept them busy in the first few months, but with no formidable enemy of devolution emerging, that battle lost its steam.

Now the senators are stretching it. The proposed law to ban governors from flying the flag on their vehicles is a spectacular waste of time. (READ: MPs step up fight against governors)

And not just because it is exceedingly petty. Senators and MPs should learn to live with the fact that governors are the most important players at the county level.

In one office, you have the natural successor to the old Provincial Commissioner and the all-powerful District Commissioner.

The governor controls a lot of money, a fact the other waheshimiwas don’t like. But the legislators should concentrate on their new duties of enacting legislation and leave the job of running the counties to the governors.

If they don’t like this state of affairs, they should bide their time and run for governor in 2017 rather than mutilate the law. More to the point, the debate on whether just anyone can fly the flag shows how little we have progressed from the colonial days when the State was the enemy of the people.

The flag belongs to everyone, not to the government. It is one of the most potent symbols of national unity. Many countries use it to rally people around the idea of their shared destiny as a nation and as a people. In America, despite their fierce ideological debates and divisions, you will find a car wash flying a giant American flag bigger than the Kenyan flag at Uhuru Park.

Party affiliation or rank never come into play on this issue.

It is a backward and retrogressive mind-set to try to limit who can fly the flag. That stance reinforces the confusion between the government and the state.

Governments come and go, but the nation and the State should endure. The flag belongs to all. Let it be flown everywhere from the President’s limousine to the humblest bodaboda.

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Death is a cruel thing. Abednego ‘Kastarehe’ Mitine was one of the youngest MCAs in the country, having come from nowhere to run a determined campaign and clinch election as county ward representative for Maua, the biggest town in Meru North.

He was one of those fellows who had few enemies. I would never have marked him out for a career in politics because, as his nickname suggests, he was so easy-going you would not have expected him to thrive in the rough and tumble world of elective politics.

Before he could mark the first anniversary of his hard-fought election, he died in a car crash at the Subuiga black spot. It’s a major tragedy for his family and the people of Maua. His death should trigger action on a stretch of road near the equator just after Nanyuki that has claimed too many lives because cars seem to mysteriously gain in speed when they enter it.

The single sign warning drivers of a black spot is not sufficient. It should be redesigned and screaming huge signs erected every 10 metres to stop the loss of promising young Kenyans like ‘Kastarehe’ and, before him, the children of Loreto Msongari who died on that very spot in July 2011.

The writer, an editor with the Sunday Nation, is a Chevening Scholar at the London School of Economics. [email protected]