This is the person who should succeed Uhuru

For most Kenyans, it is as if the world will come to an end in August 2022.

Focus on our candidate versus the other candidate has wholly blinded us on what we want such a person to do.

Our candidate winning is the be-all and end-all of 2022. For this cause, we are willing to lay down all sanity.

We are so engrossed in picking a candidate that we have forgotten that such a person has a crucial job to do.

The year 2022 is not a beauty contest in which winners are expected to smile and wave endlessly or to catwalk from podium to podium giving speeches to impress and not necessarily to change the nation.

It is about life and limb; about the soul of our nation.

Whoever wins in 2022 will determine whether we will pay back the debt we have or not.

The president of 2022 will likely inherit a Sh9 trillion debt. We need a fiscal genius.

We will need someone who knows how to stimulate the economy and ensure the projects President Uhuru Kenyatta has started are completed and yield desired results.

If we vote in a leader who is good at growing his pocket and not the nation, we will have bought ourselves a ticket to hell.

On top of that, the winner of the 2022 contest will most likely need to manage ethnic tensions and expectations that will arise.

We must think carefully about who can unify the country.

We need to identify today, leaders who are interested in having a united country and those who want power for power’s sake.

A leader for 2022 must be one who can articulate issues that cut across the tribal divide.

He or she must rise above tribal vitriol and mathematics and be nationalistic in his/her thinking.

The other issue we will have to contend with post-August 2022 is the fight against corruption.

We must choose wisely so that whoever we vote in maintains the anti-graft campaign. S/he will determine where the fight goes; whether it continues or stops.

If your leader is surrounded by and defends the corrupt, can you imagine what he will do when he ascends to the highest office? 2022 could mean the end of the fight against corruption.

Corruption could rise again and like a monster, devour us all.

The nation cannot afford to relent in the fight against corruption. The next president must loathe corruption.

He must be a paragon of virtue and beacon of hope in the fight against corruption.

If we find out that s/he once swindled a kilo of meat from the local butcher, we should not give him or her even one vote.

If whoever we choose in 2022 is a charlatan, be sure s/he will have a cabinet and kitchen cabinet of sycophantic cronies.

Our nation will be swallowed whole and we will have ourselves to blame. That is why we must choose wisely.

Whoever takes over will be charged with taking the country to the next level. The Big Four agenda and Vision 2030 will be reviewed during his/her term.

It is his vision that will guide Kenya for the next two or three decades.

If ever we needed a giraffe to see into the future it is now. President Mwai Kibaki did well in giving us vision 2030. Uhuru has given us the Big Four, the unity of our nation and the fight against corruption.

The next president has the job of finishing what the other two started while at the same time vision casting for tomorrow.

My worry is that most people running for office do not speak of these things.

They insult each other and curse Building Bridges Initiative (BBI). Yet when I look at the BBI, in its raw politicised form, it is good for our nation.

Our national ethos, fight against corruption, unity and electoral justice are its key concerns.

But our short-sighted politicians want to butcher it for personal gain.

The year 2022 should be about the future, not about a person. It should be about many decades to come and not the election day.

If we keep looking at 2022 as an end in itself, we may end up ruining ourselves and our nation.

Our future depends on whether we take action and make the right choices for this great nation.

Our thinking cannot start and end in August 2022; we must think of 2030 and 2040 and what impact the candidate we pick will have on Kenya two decades on.

We must choose wisely or we will die from choosing on a tribal basis, blindly and selfishly.

Mr Bichachi is a communication consultant. bichachi@gmail.com