Politicians, albeit unwarranted, have the right to be brazen, wild and audacious, but Kandara MP Alice Wahome has abused this privilege, something that has not come as a shocker to me.
I am talking about Ms Wahome’s recent outburst on social media, when a concerned Kenyan citizen took her to task over the sorry state of toilets at Kariguini Primary School in Kandara Constituency.
If the photograph on Twitter is anything to go by, then the Kandara MP ought to be ashamed. The pupils of Kariguini barely have toilets, the latrines are falling apart, dilapidated and pathetic, to say the least.
It was at this moment that the MP totally lost it and responded in a rather interesting manner: “That is the shame of school infrastructure in Kenya. Not just Kandara. Jingawewe.”
What an honourable response. You would think that a leader — a sane, proper, self-respecting leader — would first apologise for the pathetic state of the school toilets and follow it up with the usual line, “We are working on this.
But Alice Wahome, like nearly all other leaders we have elected today, chose to do the unimaginable – insult the electorate.
You would expect that she would take this opportunity to tell us about other successful projects she has completed in her constituency, perhaps to seek atonement for this rather embarrassing situation.
But these leaders seem to not even care about looking good before the electorate. It is a shameless orgy of insults, disrespect and a typical mtado (what will you do?) attitude.
Alice Wahome thinks that because this shame is common in many public schools — which is true, sadly — that it is not in her remotest mandate to do anything about the situation in her constituency.
Because, for our leaders, poverty and poor services are the norm, so why should they do anything about it?
The beauty of social media, besides the unlimited access to our leaders, is the fact that we can now finally see our elected leaders for who they are.
We can discern their temperaments, their anger management issues, and we now know exactly what they think of us: we are a bunch of fools.
Gone are the days when our leaders would at least pretend to hold the electorate in high regard.
Today, all you need to do to earn an insult from an elected leader is to ask them a sensitive question — such as why they are sleeping on the job — and they will deliver a slew of insults in the worldwide web, which never forgets.
Of course, Alice Wahome is not alone in this shameless public outburst of insulting the electorate.
We have had other politicians engage the public in disrespectful ways, including a former governor who asked the female electorate to queue neatly in a certain manner that I will not repeat here, so as to receive their daily dues.
But, as much as I would wish spend nearly an entire column criticising our leaders, I am also tempted to say a rather uncomfortable truth.
Alice Wahome and all other leaders who have taken it upon themselves to be honest about their feelings about us are indeed right. We are a bunch of fools, well, sort of.
We are fools for electing governors with barely any qualifications and careers to talk about as our leaders.
We are the fools for electing people who we are too timid to question their source of wealth, because we all know too well where all that came from.
We are fools for treating them like demigods, allowing them to our pulpits and public functions to spew nonsense while we remain docile.
We are also fools to expect too much from people who have absolutely no intellectual capacity to think beyond their stomachs.
So yes, Alice Wahome was right in many ways.
I am no psychologist, but I think there is a certain mental complex that we as a people must possess to think of ourselves so low that we do not deserve decent leadership.
That we think the clowns we elect are the best we could ever have; that we do not think of ourselves as deserving of better leaders who could at the bare minimum respect us.
But all is not lost. We could use this as a teachable moment and vow to ourselves to do better and get better leaders next time.
That this will the last time a leader will call us fools and be right about it.
Ms Chege is the director of the Innovation Centre at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications; [email protected]
