Opinion: NASA and its politics of great deception

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle. To discuss the politics of NASA properly, you have to think like a traditional hunter.

They needed something shiny to point in the eyes of the prey and blind the animal, preventing it from pouncing.

Now consider the current NASA battle royale pitting Kalonzo Musyoka, Raila Odinga, Moses Wetang'ula, and Musalia Mudavadi.

These figurative devices, "shiny objects", rely on the same principles of distraction, outrage, and misdirection. They also involve a hapless dupe in the middle of it all — in this case, Kenyans and Jubilee.

There is pandemonium in the squared circle of public life. Pretty much every day someone will hold up some bright, shiny object.

That increasingly popular metaphor is an apt one because the various images it conjures up — an intergalactic body glowing ever brighter as it moves closer to dumbfounded people, a ball on a string held by a hypnotist, a mobile hung above a baby’s crib — all, to varying degrees, seize attention. In politics, a shiny object is the preoccupation of the moment. On American website, Esquire, Charles P. Pierce wrote that he had expected that Scott Walker would do better with the Republican electorate last year.

"What I did not anticipate,’’ Pierce wrote, "was the rise of the shiny object that is The Man Called Trump.’’ Donald Trump was the brightest and shiniest of all the bright, shiny objects.

The Republican Party had all along planned how to ensure the election of a Republican president in 2016, even by a minority popular vote, through a legal legislative strategy.

In strategic preparation for the 2016 presidential election, at least one key state in the north – Michigan – that regularly votes for a Democratic presidential candidate, considered a Bill that apportioned the state’s electoral votes based on the gerrymandered congressional districts. Indeed, later, Trump became America’s President.

Subtly put, political reporters have attention-deficit disorder. Media bosses demand a constant flow of material, which ensures that much reporting remains undigested.

Customers want speed or will click elsewhere, competitors spew their own undigested news, and campaigns are only too happy to concoct it, or their opponents will. Shiny objects become tools of least resistance. Meanwhile, a new class of political figures has built careers almost entirely on shiny-object status.

It is more fun than writing policy treatises and much easier than actual governing — and it pays better too. Having said all that, the happenings in NASA could all be a distraction.

Tell me, if you can, do you really think the NASA principals do not know who the flag-bearer will be? My gut tells me they do, and are buying time.

We are being treated to what is obvious, simple to look at, and digest and without much critical thinking – it is how the human mind works.

In the meantime, the shiny object is Kalonzo. The one man we expect very little of is at the centre of the blitz, causing all sort of fears, rumours, and misdirection.

His performance at the Kitengela rally was eccentric, to say the least. There is renewed vigour in him, a fighter whose fists are clenched, and a tiger with its claws out.

While other principals submit papers to their parties in silence, Kalonzo holds a press conference to announce this, knowing all too well the sort of rumour it fuels.

He does it anyway, and goes ahead to insist that he will never join Jubilee. His cronies from the eastern region - the ilk of Kivutha Kibwana, Charity Ngilu, Wavinya Ndeti, and Francis Nyenze – all say that for them it is Kalonzo or nothing. Then Kalonzo goes on to say he will support anyone who gets the NASA ticket.

All the while, Raila looks unbothered. He flies to South Africa then to the States. He has been away for two weeks, but there is enough politics going on in his NASA to keep Jubilee active and happy.

The distraction and misdirection has had even ODM supporters trash-talking their colleagues from Wiper. It is all too spontaneous, but then again, too simultaneous to be ignored as "just politics".

Kalonzo is the shiny object at the centre of NASA’s politics of distraction: There is a deliberate redirection of attention from critical thinking on their side, to the very obvious simplified chunks to keep us all excited and quiet.

Two weeks ago, some of the opposition politicians were implicated, however mildly, in a hacking scam targeting the electoral body.

Their response has been muted, the story long forgotten, and so far we are all just deep into the frenzy of who will be their flag-bearer. We are being distracted. Question is, from what?