We are wired to live in an election cycle and the danger it poses

2002. 2007. 2013. 2017. 2022. 2027. 2032…

That is our national life. It is the clearest trend every Kenyan quickly identifies with. We have been wired to live in an election cycle. We plan our lives in clusters of five years and behave like everything stops and starts during and after a General Election.

And that is why our life as a nation is retarded.

VISION 2030

In October 2006, then President Mwai Kibaki led the country in initiating a process to seek and consolidate a growth path to some economic empowerment goal. The process that sought opinions of local and international experts as well as ordinary Kenyans from all walks of life resulted in a concept that “aims to transform Kenya into a newly industrialising, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in a clean and secure environment.”

They baptised it Kenya Vision 2030.

That is/was visionary indeed. And that is how a society ought to run its affairs if it is to grow. So far, I am not sure whether the secretariat and board of Vision 2030 exist and what they are doing that the newly created Presidential Delivery Unit isn’t doing.

But that is a story for another day.

The story today is that when a country decides to operate like an electoral commission, so many things are bound to go wrong. It gets worse when citizens of that country have been made to believe first in tribe and only a distant second, in country.

'TANGA TANGA'

Our leaders have made it a habit to start an election campaign immediately results of another are announced. It is pretentious to expect such leaders to think and develop any meaningful and long term policy when they are always on the road campaigning for future office. The current office, inadvertently, always remains without an office bearer because more than half the time the man or woman we elected is out there persuading us to elect him again in the forthcoming election.

And that explains why we have groupings like Tanga Tanga and Kieleweke barely a year after the last election. Unfortunately, this could also be the reason some are pushing the country towards a referendum. They are all different excuses for 2022. In the meantime, President Kenyatta’s Big Four Agenda, which was designed along the Vision 2030 aspirations, suffers because the people who are supposed to steer it are busy in the field seeking votes either for themselves or for their godfathers in the next election!

Though it is important to set time limits for goals, history in Kenya and outside shows that most projects designed with election time limits do live much longer than the election. Vision 2030 seems to have been forgotten as the custodians of our nationhood focus on the next marker of the magical five years.

It is difficult, for instance, to nurture a cohesive and integrated society between elections.

STAGNATE

Long term projection is required for national survival and development. It thus follows that if we continue operating on an election-propelled mode, we will either stagnate or die as a nation. It is only when we get rid of the five-year-election syndrome that we will be able to define, develop and defend the Kenyan dream.

Though important in making the masses feel like they own the country, elections should not define the nation, as they do now.

One sure way of liberating ourselves from this deception is believing in a single nationhood with a life that transcends generations and whose existence has very little to do with election winners and losers. Once we cultivate this status, we will be able to put in place structures for a strong and stable country that will not be shaken by the inevitable elective accidents.

We must dispense ourselves of deceptive electoral fundamentalism that has made us behave as life depends on a one day exercise that comes at regular intervals.

Benyawa is a freelance journalist [email protected]