Nandi County: Get sense in your next election.
I am a proud villager, a true Kenyan and a Pan – Africanist and I think I deserve a couple of pages to enlightened my county of Nandi, I will recommend a view other counties to take notes on the same. From what we have at the moment even though it is still early to criticize devolution, I believe strong leadership is required to allow this cute baby called county government to grow. It is time to lay off the power brokers and stop them from molesting the baby and inflicting unnecessary traumas. It is ‘WE’ the people who are the rightful owners of the government and we are to be blamed if we put retirees, sensationalist, drama queens, mana babies and some diaspora persons to run our affairs willy-nilly.
Top on the list are the brokers and their ‘BEST MAN’ for Governor, they always come up with the most malignant governor with ability to metastasize and attack almost all the organs vital to county development…. Schools, hospitals, water etc. If you have been to Kapsabet, you will always find this type of cartels outside Generation hotel or behind Jubilee Wholesalers with a group of familiar faces, I meant the group that run almost every meeting held in Nandi and partially Uasin- Gishu. They are always in the CDF committee, sometimes part of women groups, Kass marathon officials, and they belong to almost every political party. In- depth analysis might prove that they are among those who allowed the cutting down of ‘Tendonik’ in Danger forest. If this group successfully enable one of their own to power, it will be their time to eat and they will award themselves all sorts of tenders, projects and positions in the county
Secondly are the retirees, who make up majority of the elected positions in Kenya. They are very good patriots I admit, especially in offering guidance and direction in leadership. On the contrary, I do believe they are too damn exhausted to execute high pace managerial and administrative positions. In Agriculture, which everybody in the county is an expert, there is a concept of peak productions levels. Humans do also have their peak times to effect necessary outcomes and I beg to presume with allowable degree of disagreements that majority of retirees are past their peak productive periods and should stay away from active duties and over advice. In fact, they can make good village elders, school committee and cattle dip chairmen only and only if they can get over their ‘I am rich ‘attitude. Leave the retirees alone and let them stay away from county positions, especially if they have a screwed past or they have been in the Government of the ‘Mzee.’
The third group are the Sensationalist, drama queens and manna babies who don’t make and will never make good governors or leaders. These are the group of persons who spring out of the jungle and all over sudden they are dishing out cash like ‘mabarua ya sherehe’. You struggle to make to the next meal and what you want to see last is someone throwing away money. I will consider them suspects of major scandals, with exception of being the ‘Mana Baby’ I mean ‘mtoto wa Mdosi.’ What we need to ask ourselves is where they get the money. The sensationalists whom we often elect, are the worst of the kind. They show up about 2 years to election, with a lot of irrelevant projects, tournaments, youth groups, selfies, proposals and harambees but they won’t tell people exactly where they come from and what they do. They are very eloquent and generous, within no time they will have consume the entire society like wild fire. The good-for- nothings drunkards will soon sing their praises because they get bribes for a bottle of changa’aa. Eventually the all-county is drunk and blindly praising mediocre who has been begging around parliament buildings in Nairobi. Soon after elections, he will buy land build his house and disappear to the city to reward fellow conmen. This is the worst group and we need to search for them and get them marry a village women and stay at home where we can monitor them as bear parental responsibilities. Be careful with them because they happen to be the political projects of certain big politicians or NGOs funding for specific foreign interests ‘Wachana na hawa’.
Lastly is the diaspora , and I am very specific to those who have gone out of the country for over 15 years and they are yet to marry and build a house. They share similar fate with retirees, the only differences is that they have wild imaginations and fantasies that, change that took 239 years in another world, will take them 5-10 years to do. Let them settle for volunteer duties or absentee assignment not elective position. It is very basic that if you’ve have been away from a place/country for over 10 years, your brain slowly loses touch with reality at ground and sooner you will have some weird quiz i.e. why do people walk without shoes or why don’t have cars and bla bla bla . They become ignorant and soon will differ with Abbe’ de Condillac view on poverty and wealth that “it is not being poor to lack a type of wealth of which one as not acquired a need, and which one does not even know”. They are exceptions to this category for instance ambassadors, student (all levels) and the exiled but this does not give them a wild card to evade certain questions: where were you and what were you doing? What did you achieve and how have you been helping the county develop?
I will end by saying that this my basic judgement on what I would consider in my voting criterion. It would be wild for me to categorize all persons under the above discussed personalities, but I believe commonsense and instincts carry more weight in having moral judgement pertaining to that which is good or bad. I only adopted a simple rule of average to arrive at this near accurate probability. It is a fact that most of our failed leaders have come from these peculiar groups but still there is a room for the outliers. To have a good leader is a collective responsibility and it requires every individuals input in writing or dialogue and sometimes the extreme is necessary to force those with proven records to take up leadership from the greedy political masqueraders who want everything for themselves. Saiseree.
Mshamba Abroad 