This greedy crowd seeking your vote won’t change a thing

Not a very long time ago, I jeopardised my whole life-time reputation by publicly, and almost single-handedly, campaigning against a constitutional proposal to remove a whole chunk of power from Kenya’s central government and give it to the individuals now called governors, almost each one of whom has, with a head more swollen than Mister Toad’s, gone ahead to declare himself “My Excellency”.

But I repeat my question. In what exactly are our county governors “excellent”?

I ask because, ever since my country ignored our warning — ever since all Kenyans were mentally forced to bow to “the will of the majority” — the local Naboths have proved excellent only by their gaudy living and, to finance it, by their raving greed even for the little that remains to the mass.

EXCELLENT DEMOCRACY

That was how I came to know that — as the expression of “the will of the majority” — democracy is excellent only because it enables a few Nebuchadnezzars to behave like maggots in a human colony.

Though almost all of them are males, females have since proved equally adept at the game of convincing the mass to support their own individual craving for lucrative filth.

We are now preparing nationwide to go to the polls again to “elect” the lot that will next, through Parliament, make our democracy ever more manifest to the universe (especially in the perennially self-seeking and ever jaundiced eyes of our Western European and North American “observers” and “donors” of “development aid”.

The question, then, is: Who will stand? Will it be possible to characterise the individual candidates by their moral convictions, by their altruism, by their care for the majority of Kenyans who barely eke out a living and have to languish on the edge of human life?

As a perceptive English poet might have put it, it will be as if anything can be called life when — like the vast majority of Nairobi’s Eastlanders — you merely exist.

FIND JOBS ELSEWHERE

Will the appalling way in which you live ever really worry any of those moneyed nabobs who will soon be campaigning for your votes?

Shouldn’t history have by now convinced every Kenyan that no Kenyan individual ever seeks to join Parliament with the aim of losing any sleep about the appalling manner in which his or her electors live?

No. In most of the world, individuals seek to enter the legislative house only because that is the only way in which they can make a certain level of money.

Indeed, our Parliament includes many individuals who have neither the skill nor the education to enable them to find jobs anywhere else in the national market.

For extremely few of the Third World’s law-makers are individuals with any knowledge or skill in any of the fields — technological and even purely mental — that will cut any social ice.

SKY-ROCKETING PRICES

As a matter of fact, in terms of the individual’s ability to afford the sky-rocketing prices of all consumer goods in the shops, our Parliamentarians always campaign only for their own ability to buy consumer goods that no ordinary Kenyan ever dreams of being able to buy.

Our Members of Parliament are the world’s only human beings known to live celestial lives without having to pay for it from their own properly earned savings, the only known human beings who indulge in luxury of the kind that will put them on a par with their European, Japanese and North American counterparts.

That is the REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM to your MP’s claim that he or she represents your interests in the “august House”.

No, what he or she daily campaigns for in that splendid city building is only how to increase his or her ability to exploit the public’s financial granary.

Parliament is among the most ignominious of all the myriad of institutions that our nationalists were duped into inheriting from Western European colonialism.

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