their norm, gave a detailed assessment on their take on the state of the nation and published their take on what ails the country and issues they wanted addressed.
The reprisal was fast and furious and the political class associated with the president were quick to point out that the Catholic bishops should keep their unsolicited advice to themselves and attend to their laity.
The bishops were further advised to concentrate on saving souls for Christ and leave the arduous matter of running the country to duly elected and selected politicians who apparently knew what was best for the country.
The irony is that the bishops had correctly addressed their missive to the one group in Kenya that actually needs salvation. The political class in Kenya is an irredeemable lot and who certainly require prayers and divine mercy.
The backlash was so bizarre and bitter that Ochieng had to go back to the bishop’ s letter to find out what the bishop’ s had said that was any different from the constant complains that have been in the public domain for two years.
Ochieng realized that the offending statement was what the Catholic prelates called a culture of lies that had taken root in Kenya. Nothing annoys a politician more than being called a liar since words are his stock in trade.
Politicians in Kenya have been called thieves, charlatans, philanderers and some even murderers but that does not faze them and in Kenya these epithets are carried as a badge of honor and the bare minimum required to qualify as member of parliament.
For a politician to stand on a podium and be heckled as a liar and people actually walk out on him is to begin the slow match to political death. The sobriquet of a liar is a death sentence to any politician, a peddler of lies hates being called out by name.
A good indicator of a shift to totalitarianism is when the country exhibits a suppressive and intolerant attitude towards any criticism and dissenting voices are bombarded by a barrage of well-orchestrated verbal attacks by the leader’ s acolytes.
Some of the attack dogs accused the bishops of being ignorant of facts and advised them to do their homework before they speak. Ochieng is perplexed because he was unable to single out a single point in the letter that was inaccurate.
The bishops lamented the never-ending political wrangles and machinations that they believed were polarizing the country and creating unwarranted tension and diverting attention from the real pressing matters of development.
It is not the church that took the unprecedented action of impeaching the deputy president and it was certainly not the catholic church that anointed the president and his deputy to lead the country. As a church they prayed for the people’ s choice.
The alacrity with which the impeachment process was shepherded through parliament and upheld in the senate and finally at the courts speaks volumes of a well-oiled administrative machinery that totally ignored all legal thresholds to impeach.
What Kenya witnessed was a mob lynching of a person whose fate had already been determined long before the process began. It is particularly disturbing to realize that the law can be used so effectively to break the law.
It is also disconcerting to hear the beleaguered former deputy president threaten to spill the beans on how they stole the opposition’ s votes. It is confession time and letting Kenyans know that the present administration is in office by deceit.
Kenyans are learning that the democratic process by which they think they choose their leaders has long been hijacked by political thugs and those exhorting Kenyans to exercise their civic duty only want Kenyans to rubber-stamp their political crimes.
Since it is a given that there is no right way to do the wrong thing, then one must assume that anyone who is ready to use dishonorable means to achieve office cannot be expected to run the office in an honorable manner.
So again, the bishops are spot on when they claim that endemic corruption is the order of the day and that politics of self interest are paramount in Kenya. It is not the bishops that informed the public about the politics of shareholding.
On the subject of shareholding perhaps Kenya is seeing a karmic retribution for those who rigged the election because the present administration has had to accommodate their political opponents in the so-called broad-based government.
That cozy political arrangement came into being as a result of a bloody demonstration by the Gen-Zs that almost toppled the government if the present administration had not been rescued by the opposition from the brink of a political precipice.
That daring rescue all but wiped the huge political capital that Baba had garnered over decades as the voice of the mwananchi and exposed him as a master conman and a doyen of a dishonest and deceitful political class.
Baba, in his inimitable style, tried to hoodwink Kenyans into believing that as a patriotic Kenyan he was lending the government expertise from his party