History will judge leaders harshly

Kipkoech Tanui

Over a decade after I left my history class, I still find the subject fascinating, spellbinding and timeless. The difference is we are living it. That is why the English say: "Today is yesterday’s tomorrow." The reverse is also true: Today is tomorrow’s yesterday’s and, as is said of technology, today’s goal is tomorrow’s starting point.

We are living history and it is not just about the malfeasance our power-sharing formula has become — strong on paper but a near mathematical impossibility with too wide a space for abuse and cunning. That is what 50-50 per cent power sharing between President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga taught us. The sad chapter in our history is already being Xeroxed by the likes of the villainous Robert Mugabe.

The history I have in mind, however, is not fashioned around historical events like the death of the Narc dream in President Kibaki’s first term and how it has continued to influence our political rapprochement and splintering. It was a boundless dream of a better tomorrow, smouldered on altar of post-mortem politics. Our leaders spewed so much oratory on Kanu’s sins but, as time was to unravel, they, too, had the eye on the till. The trick was how to steal stealthily, while singing patriotic songs and condemning corruption, while ensuring not a crumb was left on your lip. Those on whom we found crumbs are footprints that could lead us the ‘faceless’ Anglo Leasing ghosts.

History tells me I was born the year Tom Mboya was killed and first man landed on the moon. Every second is a line in the history book of our lives, every day a chapter, every year a volume.

Failing State

The folly of history, however, is that we tend to always look at it as the past. But it is, for example, to us the transition from Kenyatta to Moi, and Moi to Kibaki, which we witnessed. When we recount it, it is on a first-hand basis. America’s prolific author Edgar Lawrence put it thus: "History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth."

If history then is about ‘us’ in the future, we could ask if our leaders, first learn from history and, two, if they see themselves in history books — which these days are written and re-edited while we are still around.

I ask so because even Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French military leader, who after a series of conquests followed by chain of blunders in strategy, was vanquished at the Battle of Waterloo (giving us the expression), said: "Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes." Today, he is recalled as a brilliant historical leader and skilful military commander who haughtily thought he could do no wrong — until the thud of his fall resonated across the world.

Mao Tse-tung of China is another tragic historical figure. To the Chinese he is a great revolutionary, political strategist and military genius. However, what is often lost to historians is the fact that his Five-Year Plan — called the Great Leap Forward — was disgracefully unsuccessful. It was an alternative agrarian economic growth plan to counter Russia’s heavy industries. In the end, officials and peasants, in a bid to show their regions had recorded huge harvests, exaggerated their records, giving the picture the country’s granary was full, even as people died of famine.

Because history audits and interrogates today’s actions tomorrow, we could also ask if our leaders care about it. We must ask ourselves if, in the least, our leaders worry about their legacy once they irreversibly bear the titles former President, ex-PM and one-time minister… This starts with Kibaki, who is sure to be former President in three years.

When the historian knocks on the door, it will not be so much on the barriers to admirable legacy, but how he tried to rise above pile of filth in our political landscape. It is, after all, on his shoulders, not the purveyors of political falsehoods and ‘typing errors’ in the Budget, that history controversially vested executive authority on December 30, 2007.

History will not also spare us, the governed, for those who rule us, even if drooling, detached, cold and calculative dictators, do so on our accord. America’s First Lady Michele Obama could have been speaking to us when saying: "Barack, like any leader, is human. And, you know, our challenge in this country isn’t finding the next person who’s gonna deliver us from our own evil. Because our challenges are us. The challenges that this country faces is how are we, as individuals in this society, gonna change? What are we gonna do differently?"

That is the question for us today as we dance in the arena of history.

The writer is The Standard’s Managing Editor, Weekend Editions.

ktanui@eastandard.net

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