Why do our politicians trivialise every issue in the name of debate?

There is a cartoon that has been on social media for a while. It is about this woman who goes to a priest to confess.

When she confesses to killing a politician last night, the priest retorts that he is here to listen to her sins not her community service work.

It is, indeed, a very rude joke, but one that captures the unspoken feelings many people, not just in Kenya, but the world over, hold towards politicians.

When I posted this cartoon a while ago, a friend reminded me that there are some good politicians. And this is, indeed, true. There are some good politicians.

Many of them are distinguishable by their reluctance to be politicians and to operate as such. I have had the good fortune to work with some in a partnership that the African Leadership Centre has with the East African Legislative Assembly.

The bad ones embrace politics with enthusiasm and tend to politic at every opportunity. They are distinguishable not by their humility, thoughtfulness or desire to be led where their capacities are limited, but by their embrace of politics with alacrity and the need to foist their dubious distinctions everywhere.

They arrogantly seek and relish publicity and often exemplify the truism that empty debes make the most noise.

The good politicians are hardly properly networked; their effectiveness tends, therefore, to be limited by the limits of their voices, by the circumscribed contexts of their transformational ideas and the limited reach of their good deeds.

The bad ones are properly networked and financially oiled; even those we knew as poor before election instantly engage in conspicuous consumption upon election.

They seek and easily find publicity and use this to grow the dirt in politics. They are shameless and embody everything that is appalling about politics.

GET CONTAMINATED

Precisely because of the dominance of this vile crop of politicians, it has become difficult to sanitise politics and turn it into an undertaking that serves the broader good.

New entrants into politics often imagine they will sanitise politics, but the reverse easily happens. They almost always get contaminated by politics.

Sample those civil society actors who have joined government or politics since 1992 and make your conclusion.

The feeling of revulsion between politicians and citizens is mutual; the only thing is that politicians need followers and seek to pass as good people and responsible citizens.

Once elected, they secure politics as a dirty game; as the refuge of those who have perfected the art of public pretence and the forum for utter disgust.

Politics is most often the forum for turncoats to excel. If you have no capacity to support two diametrically opposed views simultaneously or in quick succession, politics is not your place.

The art of speaking from both sides of your mouth is a requirement for accessing the realm of politics.

VERY NOISY

The strategy of dirty politicians is to keep politics very noisy. When you join politics, you must immunise your eardrums against rapture.

Politicians sanitise noise by baptising it as debate. Debate, for me, involves canvassing a position while listening to and selecting the wisdom from other interlocutors. There can be no debate where the art of listening is suspended. There can be no position when there are no substantive issues to support it.

Debate must be based on substantive issues. Our politicians confuse issues with personalities. It is only in Kenya where someone joins Parliament to fight Raila Odinga. How shameless!

When issues are not trivialised in politics, we cling onto the doctrinaire. The result is that debate starts and ends with inflexibility on both sides. Such debate was obviously initiated to stall progress and maintain the status quo.

Our politicians are good at stalling or procrastinating. They initiate debate to keep us busy while they profit from our collective gullibility. Kenyans can change this situation.

Godwin Murunga is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. [email protected]