This clamour for referendums shows just how bankrupt of ideas we all are

I will not be surprised if one of these days we are asked to vote on a referendum to declare that the earth is flat and that the sun circles round the earth.

We already are trying to make sense of two separate referendum drives trying to canvass pretty much the same issues — the Okoa Kenya drive pushed by the opposition Cord alliance and the Pesa Mashinani campaign mounted by the Council of Governors.

As if that overload is not enough, we now have the idle members of the Senate demanding their own referendum to give themselves something meaningful to do, and meddlesome members of the National Assembly threatening a counter-action for abolishment of the Senate, which of course would require a rival plebiscite.

The clamour for referendums has become a tool for bankrupt politicians to hide their own inadequacies. Instead of doing the work they are supposed to do, whether that is pushing the government agenda, watching out for the public interest, or driving policy and implementation from the governor’s mansion, they are busy with diversionary campaigns that have little aim or focus.

Okoa Kenya is all about an opposition that has been flailing about like a headless chicken looking for relevance instead of doing its job in the National Assembly and the Senate.

Pesa Mashinani is largely about securing money and privileges for our new version of village tyrants.

Senators who negotiated themselves out of relevance at the Naivasha constitutional talks have belatedly realised that they need proper job descriptions.

And another lot from the parasitic classes, members of the National Assembly, are simply asking us for a vote in their pissing contest with equally brain-dead members of the Senate.

Why don’t we abandon all these diversionary referendum drives and go to the real crux of the matter? The Cord alliance tried to address it very well at inception with the push for a national dialogue on all the things that divide Kenyans and condemn them to poverty, crime, insecurity, corruption, unequal development, and skewed allocation of resources.

Instead of pushing the campaign to fruition, the promoters found the earliest excuse to end it prematurely and push for a political showdown in the form of a referendum.

For a moment, some of us held hope that the referendum would be premised on serious issues, until it was reduced to offering freebies at taxpayers’ expense to all the looters that make up the political classes.

No wonder the drive started spontaneous abortion barely after it was conceived, and the same goes for Pesa Mashinani.

So why don’t we as a nation step back to first discussing the issues and seeking accord? Because of dire lack of leadership when everything is programmed towards the next elections.

It is in that vacuum that the Jubilee administration finds space for return of grand corruption.

*****

Dear Inspector-General  Boinnet, I know you have your hands full with terrorism, banditry, cattle-rustling, armed criminals, narcotic trafficking, poaching and smuggling of game trophies, ethnic wars, and other serious crimes that make Kenya a classic case of a mafia with a country rather than just a country with a mafia.

I have not even bothered to mention runaway corruption on the Goldenberg scale because that is what we elect our leaders to do, and cry ethnic victimisation when they get caught with their greedy fingers in the till.

I do not suppose you have the time, resources, or guts to tackle the level of crime that would bring you in direct conflict with your employer.

However there are some “little” crimes being ignored by your men and women that you might want to pay attention to. Some of these crimes are being committed right under the noses of our police officers, so I presume the laws were scrapped while I was away.

Our killer roads, for instance. Please let us know which laws exempt Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking officials, foreign diplomats, boda boda taxi riders, matatu drivers, and those unguided killer missiles ferrying miraa from observing the Traffic Act as well as the courtesy and good manners expected of everyone on the roads.

And also let us know when the office of Chief Traffic Cop was abolished.

[email protected]. @MachariaGaitho on Twitter