Why Uhuru Kenyatta's simplicity could be misleading

There is something nice common to leadership, in particular the Presidency, and our brothers and sisters.

Those who come later learn from the trailblazers. In a family set up as we know, the younger ones discerningly look at their older siblings and pick the best lessons from them.

Personally, being the first born, I often tell my last three younger brothers to try and look at those of us older than them and try to do better than us in life by just avoiding our failures whilst perfecting our success traits.

This does not mean however that there aren't leaders and younger siblings who pick up the worst habits of those who came before them.

This is not also to ignore the fact that older siblings and leaders who came before may have bequeathed bad habits to the younger lot. You see the opposite of this in homes where younger brothers and sisters probably came to know how to navigate the smoke of bhang and cigarettes around their air circulation organs starting with the mouth and coming out through the nose, in seconds without choking.

This analogy came to my mind as I watched our President step out once again in his military fatigues, pictures of which were quickly funneled by his friends and supporters through Twitter and Facebook.

The President also graced newspaper pages and television screens. Yes, the President is the Commander-In-Chief of our Defence Forces and is entitled to this regalia, especially in ceremonial occasions.

He can also choose to throw away the matching suits, shirts and ties he donned with his Deputy President William Ruto in the early days, and step out in military drills every day.

This week the President was in military functions and being the Commander of them all you have to look like them. I mean you all know the chief mechanic cannot step into the service pit with his suits, but has to don his overalls. Indeed the military is one of the most prestigious, colourful and symbolic units of our nationhood.

I remember how as a young boy, my father hoisted me and my brother on the shoulder during the last Nakuru Agricultural Show that Mzee Jomo Kenyatta presided over, so that we could have a glimpse of him as he inspected the guard of honour, accompanied by the old rendition Twahenda Safari.

Young as I was, I just made a vow to myself that I would want to be a soldier when I grow up. To date, one of my favourite pastime is watching the footages of militaries, especially the Chinese, Russian and the Koreas doing complicated formations and even silent drills.

So you can imagine how I enjoy watching the transition in terms of look, of our President from T-Shirt and jeans, to suits, and then to military fatigues. Awesome you may say so.

But being an African, there is a time I get uncomfortable when the Commander-In-Chief side of the President is amplified over the simplicity and humbleness he has cultivated since he took office.

Yes, he simplified and demystified the Presidency to the point some of us cried out he must not make it too casual, particularly with high-fives with his deputy on the podium.

On return from attending the Status Conference at the ICC in The Hague last week, pictures of him and his deputy riding in an open-topped car taken by civilians on flyovers, exposed how casually they had lowered the premium of their own security in pursuit of the tag 'digital leaders' with a common touch.

In fact on social media, many Kenyans thanked God that he protects those who fail to protect themselves.

The point is that in Africa leaders who donned military fatigues and retained the imperialistic tendencies of Her Majesty's dynasties slowly transformed into vampires, and finally died either by the gun or the bayonet, or even fled and died miserably in faraway lines.

Today, the fertility of the soils of some of the countries they left could be related to the corpses that lay rotting on it and the rivers of blood shed as they strove to hold onto power till the onset of death or were chased away like dogs.

The exploits of their misadventure is well mapped out in the book The Africans by David Lamb, former bureau chief of Los Angeles Times.

To get an idea of what it says, here is a line written about it: "Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it (book) is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering."

Yes, as one who came after his father, former Presidents Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibaki, he should restrict his public interaction with the military and their regalia to the limits these three did.

But power is like a weed and if one smokes it meticulously, it goes like all those things we know, directly to the head.

That is what happened to Jean-Baptiste Bokasa, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, Siad Barre, Megistu Haile Mariam, Jaffar Numeiry, Samuel Doe, Sani Abacha and some two chaps on international crimes list: Charles Taylor and Kenya's friend Omar Al-Bashir.

But Mr Presidet that is not to say that is where you are taking us, no far from it, you look to us a nicer guy, not the buffoon that those chaps demonstrating at The Hague want to make you seem to be.

But again, it is also true that is the sad heritage the men of mufti left us with.

So each time they pass on the hanger with the nice gear with epaulets, just for a second remember the other side of the African military and steer our soldiers far away from the orbit of politics and power.