Dear mr. Politician...

Usikubali kucheswa tena?

Kenya is bigger than poll winners and losers. Nothing should be hoisted above the greater interests of the country. Unless the end of the world was scheduled to take place on or before August 8^th 2017, nothing else should be allowed to lead to the uprooting of Kenya from Space.

Neither the protestations of losers nor the merry-making by winners of elections should be allowed to stop Kenya’s clock for a second. And any display of unfounded protesting or revelry by political camps must be stopped from returning Kenya to the brink of an apocalypse post August 8th.

The dreary but man-made dooms-day cult atmosphere being forced onto our political scene by politicians seems to suggest that Kenya will explode into a huge ball of fire if one camp wins and the others lose. The folly of this mindset is that in any contest there must be winners and losers anyway. Commonsense should dictate that winning and losing are two sides of the same coin.

The reason the end of political contests turns ugly is all about lies peddled about imagined gains lined up for grabs for the supporters of a party or a politician.

Yet, often times, when wananchi join political contests, they hardly acknowledge that besides having the power to hire and fire politicians, they are mostly reduced to bystanders in duels that hand them very little in return. The same gullible wanjikus get duped into lighting bonfires and erecting roadblocks all over.

The 2007/8 post-election mayhem should have taught us that it is dangerous to elevate partisan political interests – whether expressed by individual politicians or political parties – above the more supreme interests of the nation.

Whoever could be leading Kenyans down the same cursed path the last election culminated in is not worth the political position he or she is seeking.

But why, pray, do we so easily agree to be blindfolded by political competitors? There must be numerous reasons for this but five, for me, seem real in our situation.

One: We seem to literally believe that an election is a matter of life and death. While the taunting of winners in a political contest can irritate losers, it is immaturity or greed or lies that can make losing fatal. Put otherwise, it is outright silly to make big business out of losing or winning an election.

Two, we don’t realize that ours is predatory politics. So just like in the jungle where the highlight of the hyena’s triumph is in snatching of a piece of bone from a lion, so is our political culture.

And assuming the rest of the country is the gazelle that the lion is making dinner out of, there is really nothing at all for the gazelle whose time has not yet come to celebrate on account of the presumed victory of a scavenger.

Sweet nothings promised

Forgetting that our politics is primarily driven by self-interest is essentially forgetting that wananchi should never peg their hopes for the future on the sweet nothings promised from campaign platforms.

Instead, wananchi should be more concerned with what, for instance, Vision 2030 or the Constituency Integrated Plan for Development (CIPD) or the new Constitution and not on politicians’ theatrics or empty promises can do for them.

Three, none of us is immortal and one day the country we are so ready to burn will belong to our scions. Therefore, should Kenya survive till, say, 2082, it will still have politicians.

And guess what? None of them is born yet but whoever they will be, they will need the space we call Kenya to practice their trade. So behaving as if Kenya should evaporate as camp “A” lost to camp “B” on August 8^th 2017 is willful idiocy.

Four, we believe the lie that there is something real for many of us in the so-called “being in government”. This is a sick fallacy. The truth is that only a handful of political supporters end up seeing the real inside of the government. A few wheeler-dealers may take occasional peeps through the perimeter fence but that is the closest they can get.

Five, we wrongly tend to believe that our messes of today will be cleaned by the generations to follow.

There are no guarantees that after a five-year cycle culture of razing down buildings, uprooting railway-lines, maiming and even killing our competitors, we can simply say abracadabra and voila!… Every mess is fixed pronto.

Nothing should be hoisted above the greater interests of Kenya. Not even political duels, whoever the kingpins are.