Do away with politicians and maybe our country will be all the better for it

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By MUTUMA MATHIU
Posted  Thursday, July 5  2012 at  18:52

If you go to your garden, pick green maize, put it in a sufuria, boil it for an hour, what do you get? You get boiled maize, which some people like and some don’t.

If you go back to your garden, pick some more green maize, put it in a sufuria, boil it for an hour, what do you get? You get boiled maize.

If, for a third time, you go to the garden, pick green maize, put it in a sufuria, boil for an hour, what right do you have to expect spaghetti?

You need to be an individual of singular intellectual incompetence to expect to apply the same process to the same material and get a different product.

Since 1992, with the exception perhaps of 2002, all our elections have resulted in some form of violence or another. So rather than doing elections the way we always have, why don’t we try something different?

First of all, I don’t know why we bother to have different political parties at all. Maybe we like to pretend that there is any difference between them. What would that be?

Our political parties have no ideology. None has a consistent centrist, leftist or right-wing position. You might want to argue that ODM, for example, is a social democratic party. Well maybe.

But other than for a vague distributive instinct and efforts to provide a safety net for the poor, the rest is a whole load of rhetoric. I won’t even try to associate PNU with any uniform thought.

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Some political parties claim to be progressive and accuse their rivals of being reactionary/conservative. Some politicians argue that they are reformers and their opposite numbers are anti-reformers.

If you were to open and look into their hearts, you probably would discover there is no reform in there: just ambition for power and incredible amounts of money.

Not only are they bankrupt of fresh thought, but nearly all political parties are equally corrupt. They have within their ranks thieves, fornicators and maybe drug dealers. When the story of where political parties get their campaign money is finally told, Kenyans will go get a rope and hang themselves.

In politics, you can be a great leader and go down in history as a good man without necessarily having many ideas or being particularly creative. But you do need to have one or two big ideas around which you build your politics.

You can concern yourself with the economy, so you measure your greatness by it. Your thing can be jobs, or industry, or trade, or education. But you need to have a few ideas with transformational effect.

Many Kenyan politicians have no big or small ideas. In fact, they have no ideas at all. They have spent their careers creating space for themselves to gain access to power and public money.

Whereas some are true reformers and believe that change is good, many use reform as a platform con: they see no need to change the corrupt power structure.

Actually, they would like to inherit the imperial presidency so that they can have a ball.

In this good country of ours, there are many hard-working and public spirited men and women who have pushed Kenya forward. Some have been destroyed because they stood in the way of ambitious and ruthless elites.

Others continue to arrive in their offices at 4am and leave at midnight, working for Kenya. Some, on a daily basis, put their lives on the line of fire to protect you and me.

The only thanks they get are endless blame and criticism.

However, politicians, in my opinion, add very little value. They are rarely the cleverest, most honest or most hard-working people in their ministries.

If you remove the politicians, the country will still run. I would not be surprised if waste wasn’t reduced and efficiency improved by merely getting rid of politicians.

So if every election produces nothing but violence and politicians, is it outrageous to suggest that we rethink the whole thing?

One politician is nearly always as good as the next. Each party is just like the next. All of them want the same thing.

In point of logic, the answer is inescapable. What do you think it is?

mmathiu@ke.nationmedia.com