is sheer folly to elevate a fool into a position that is way beyond his capacity because such a person, who is likely to be a person who listens to no one else may cost you everything to bring him down.
Trump is trampling democracy; operating in brazen corruption and has surrounded himself with a coterie of a compliant cabinet whose main duty is to be members of a choir that praises the glorious leader’ s many talents and accomplishments. It is government of one.
We also have a government of one and all country affairs are micro-managed by one individual to the point that we have even forgotten that we have a cabinet post called the Prime Cabinet Secretary who we no longer know what he does.
The ability of our leader to morph into different identities is what has singled him out as an astute politician and a person who believes that every man has a price and all he has to do is quote the right price and the person is bought.
Ochieng thinks that even God in Kenya seems to have a price, since we are always bribing God. There are presidential minions whose main job seems to be crisscrossing places of worship donating obscene amounts of money to influence prayers, blessings and of course silence.
But the clincher in the Kenyan case came about through the current president being able to pull off an incredible feat of convincing a whole tribe to turn its back on its own kingpin, who was a sitting president and throw its lot with the rebellious deputy.
As unbelievable as it sounds it actually did happen and the current gnashing of teeth within the community is led by a man who led the community, to a man, to vote for the rebel but was later humiliated and finally impeached and shown the door.
Ochieng remembers when Trump was on the campaign trail, he promised Americans that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would stop on day one of his presidency and that he shall not get involved in external conflicts, he was the peace president.
The peace narrative was pushed so hard that he openly campaigned to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was not awarded but snatched from its rightful owner in the process of committing an aggressive act of abducting the Venezuelan president.
In his mind he has stopped ten wars, none 104 MAL72 / 26 ISSUE of which he can name, but that does not deter him from the claim, interestingly he does not talk about the wars he has threatened to start including the ill-advised one against Iran that has spectacularly back-fired.
Our president like Trump is a dream merchant, he sells promises that he has either no intention to fulfil or has forgotten but his many country tours have been platforms to make more promises that contradict previous ones or repeat them at scale.
Kenyans are now comfortable with Kasongo lies that we have started to enumerate them to see just how many he will make, all the while telling Kenyans that they are lucky to have him as our situation would have been worse without him.
While our Rwandan neighbors are seeing real progress on the ground, a state-of-the-art conference facility and a major airport is being constructed, in Kenya we have dubious private arrangements where international conmen handle government projects.
Everything is so opaque in Kenya with a tone-deaf president that Ochieng wonders when we became francophone as to host a French summit in Kenya just when West African countries are trying to throw off the yoke of French hegemony.
Rather than joining hands with other Africans to kill off neo-colonialism, we have a president that is trying to sell us the narrative that we can export labor to the first world and he is trying to earn brownie points by being the West’ s poster boy.
This Uncle Tom syndrome seems to be part and parcel of his political strategy where he is willing to sell off Kenyan’ s economic interests to the highest bidder. How does one explain the selling of a strategic oil pipeline to‘ another’ country.
We have a president who is behaving as though the country is personal property and like his American counterpart, he has made the refurbishment of the state house a major national project as though he intends to reside there permanently.
He sold Kenyan a fable of stable oil prices, citing a supposedly superior government to government arrangement that has seen oil prices skyrocket amid verifiable corrupt oil dealings that have caused the importation of sub-standard fuel.
Interestingly, when the officials resigned after the scandal, they handed over their resignations to him personally, Ochieng seems to remember that there was Cabinet Secretary who has a petroleum docket to handle.
While countries like Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique are proud to declare that they have a zero-debt status, Kenya has accelerated its borrowing mechanisms and the man who previously castigated debt seems to have an insatiable appetite for debt.
The disturbing reality is that the country has very little to show for the heavy borrowing and the tandem heavy taxation that has reached a level that will again spark unrest as this regime seems to have a lopsided believe that a country can develop without disposable income.
The country cannot develop on sheer promises and lies and it is quite clear that Rutonomics are not working and his finance secretary’ s assertions that the economy is doing just fine totally ignores Wanjiku’ s lived reality.
Ochieng was once told that the primary objective of a politician is to sell hope, since people will endure a great deal if you can give them hope. But hope is also what religions sell and they have an advantage in that no one has ever returned from the other side to give a report.
Ochieng is equally aware that hope is neither a strategy nor a blue print for development and the last word is that there is a fine line between selling promises and telling lies and at the moment Kenyans would appreciate less rhetoric and more integrity.
One cannot blatantly hawk promises as though they were peanuts on the streets and completely be oblivious to the genuine cries of a struggling electorate. The Wantam chorus is a verdict of the people on how they feel about poor leadership and a poll indicating that exit is imminent and overdue.