MPs targeting nominated colleagues is akin to pursuing paradise of idiocy

By Barrack Muluka

The essence of idiocy is self-absorption. They said in ancient Greece that everybody was born an idiot. Some, however, went on to become citizens. The rest remained idiots.

The distinguishing factor was the ability to focus on the public good or, conversely, the lack of such capacity. The self-focused fellow was the idiot. The one who thought about society was the citizen.

It was not about being wicked, or something that degenerate. It was simply about being intellectually disabled, in a nice silly way, an innocent dimwit. You may be a dunce, totally incapable of learning or telling the difference between what is good for you and what is harmful. Your selfish focus is in the end counterproductive. If you focused a little on public good, if you could just cut some thin slack for someone else, you would end up doing yourself a lot of good. However, you live in a permanent state of natural ignorance. You were born in that state and you have no ability to learn. You are not, therefore, capable of redeeming yourself from the Slough of Despond that is the Paradise of Idiocy. You therefore perish and everybody around perishes, too, as an outcome of your chronic stupidity.

You must get the impression that many a Kenyan legislator lives in that paradise. The debate on the public service wage bill conjures up reflections on the Idiot’s Universe.

You have heard of Members of the National Assembly who agree that something has gone awfully wrong with the public service wage bill. And they think that the solution is in getting rid off of someone else’s job. They are targeting the nominated MPs in the National Assembly, in the Senate and in the County Assemblies. They are saying, “Take away his job. But leave my pay package and me alone.”

It is a dog’s world, indeed a dog-eat-dog world. In Athenian democracy, you did not allow such a “dog” to rule, unless it first migrated from that universe. One migrated from the world of idiocy to that of citizenship through formal education. So you are born a self-seeking idiot. You announced your arrival into this world with a venal loud yell.

You drew the attention of the world to the arrival of one more idiot, by screaming. And they expected that you should do so. For, if you forgot to scream, they reminded you with a heavy slap on the back. If you still did not yell out your arrival, they consigned you back to your sender. And so you lived on, focusing on yourself rather than on the world around you. Formal education was supposed to redeem you from that world.

Did the Greek citizens get transformation? Certainly not all of them. Refer back to the dictum “Everybody is born an idiot. Some become citizens. The rest remain idiots.” Members of the Greek academy had no illusions on this. They knew that some fellows would abide in the domain of idiocy from the cradle to the grave.

This was regardless that they would be dunces, irredeemably incapable of learning, or that they were only ignoramuses – capable of education, but still uneducated and ignorant.

Good old Plato thought that the dunce and the ignoramus should never get into management of public affairs. The Greek republic was the “thing of the people.” That is to say “res” for thing and “publica” for people. And so you had the republic as the people’s thing that should be in the hands of those who had been transformed through formal education from idiocy to philosophy.

The philosopher-king became best suited to lead – and for many reasons, too. First, he had transcended from thinking about himself to thinking about the public and public good. Second, through the knowledge of philosophy he knew how states should be governed.

Third, being an intellectual and a master of nobler causes, he detested the thought of being thrust into government. He could therefore be trusted to rule well and only for a limited time. He would quit when people still desired that he should continue governing.

A society that preponderates with elected leaders in pursuit of the Paradise of Idiocy is to be truly pitied. Civil society activists have called them derisive names, from “MPigs” to unmentionable things. They really don’t care what you call them, or even what you think of them. Yet, alone in the world, their self introduction strangely begins with the honorific, “I am Honourable So-and-So.” So what is honour among pigs? Does the pig even know that it is a pig? If they were like Chinua Achebe’s Chief Jonathan Nanga in A Man of the People, they would probably add on a rider. They would say, “I am Honourable So-and-So, Minus Opportunity (to be honourable).”

The same Chinua Achebe has wondered about the corruption of the African psyche – the distortion of the nobility of the man in high office – despite his high learning. “We have given him our education. But of what good is it to him,” Mr. Green quips in No Longer at Ease. For, yes, even when the Member of Parliament craves an obnoxious pay package, he is not just another unlettered hyena in the Mara. He has been to school, sometimes even to a good school. Yet the idiocy that is self-absorption never left him. What he learnt in school was how to score the grade we call “A.” But that was about all school ever did for him. It gave him the grade “A.”

But I could be wrong. School taught him something else – that since he had been to this place and excelled, he should go out there to conquer the world and put it in his stomach. High earning prepared him to come out and eat the world. Where the Greek Academy tamed the wild animal within the individual, the Kenyan school hones the wild instincts within. The learned dog comes out ready to use his learning to swallow every other dog in the street.

It is a dog-eat-dog society. And so as the debate on the national economy rages, prepare to hear a lot of dog-eat-dog solutions from dishonorable individuals who have no idea just how low they have sunk. They have lost the capacity even to recognise that they stink than the skunk. Such is the tragedy of residing in the Paradise of Idiocy.

The writer is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations