Kindly tell us the truth regarding raging row

I cannot stand the taste of sugar in my tea and so, even though I have several cups of tea each day, I hardly ever think about sugar unless I see it. Since our President came from Uganda, I have read about and therefore been forced to think about nothing but sugar.

Sweet as it is, this time round it is not its qualities that are at issue. It is not even the business dimension of it that is in question. Even that interest of the sugarcane farmers that we are being told about is not what the crux of the matter is.

That explosion we have seen since this sugar debate broke out is the reason why we are never able to shape our economic development as we should 52 years after independence.

Political rallies — involving common people who would otherwise be going about their business — have been held and others will come. They are organised just to provide the political class with a platform to address this matter without any regard to the damage they are doing to the local economy in terms of lost man hours.

Ordinary peace-loving Kenyans are pulled out of their daily economic activities to go and listen to a competition between political players from opposite camps. When shall we ever grow our economy?

One might even ask the question: Is the real truth being told in these “political” rallies? As we all know, the similarities between the people in our political class, no matter how different any two of them may seem, outweigh the dissimilarities between them in the ratio of 9 to 1.

In debates such as this, their logic is the same. As long as one is in the opposition, frame a possible negative attribute of performance on those in power in order to paint for the electorate — of whichever region and in this case Western province — an image that depicts disaster for them. The only difference here is that some are better at it than the others.

The debate coming out at this specific time in history does, in my view, help us a little because some facts are coming out. The Deputy President has told us why he was fired from the position of minister for Agriculture. Who were those sugar barons? Of course he and the then Prime Minister were together when they got into that nusu mkate government that was borne out of bloodshed and displacement. Only God knows what other interesting facts there are which the rest of us may never get to know.

Our “dear” politicians! You are not any different from the rest of us. Kindly tell us the truth.

Fr Wamugunda is dean of students, University of Nairobi; [email protected]