Manifestos are just marinated falsehoods

When President William Ruto launched UDA's Manifesto in Nairobi on June 30,2022. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

If words could move mountains, then, as a country, we would have mountains all over the place. We have had fellows making all manner of promises – we will build you this and that, give you this or that, provide you with this service or that – that we have built an immune system against these falsehoods.

That’s part of the reason I don’t watch TV anymore, not even when the whole country is supposed to be glued on it for some state of the nation address.

Our leaders are very good at making promises – both written and verbal – about what they will do to make this country better. The delivery however is another matter altogether. Our politicians promise us elephants, but they deliver a mouse, if anything.

Let’s start with the basics – manifestos. I can guarantee you that if we engaged the drafters of the last manifesto for the current government and asked them to name but five key takeaways from that document, they would be hard-pressed to name them. This is because these documents are prepared by academics who are good at preparing documents for their thesis, knowing too well that such documents will be filed in some dark room and will only be occasionally retrieved for reference for yet another thesis.

I was having a discussion with a certain friend over the worth of these documents that are supposed to drive this country to the next level of development and he reckoned that they are nothing more than false election promises with a small caveat: the ones that are fulfilled are the big ticket ones where the kickbacks are enough to ensure their children and their offspring are taken care of for generations to come.

Nobody really cares about you and me – it is about their insatiable appetite for public resources. We agreed with my buddy that one of the few documents that made sense - and which was well thought out – was Vision 2030, which is about to come to an end. It was a realistic and impactful document that, had we been serious about it, would have made a huge difference for our people.

But have we achieved even a quarter of the promises contained in that document? I doubt but at least we have gone some way in some critical areas. To name but a few, we had an entire generation of kids who went through primary school as part of the free education policy.

We had a semblance of improvement in health provision, remote parts of the country had electricity for the first time and a smattering of tarmacked roads were built.

What I wonder is – why can’t we do better than this? Will we forever be weighed down by false promises laid out in fine documents for political expediency?

I looked for a summary of what the Head of State said last week in his ‘State of the Nation’ address and my take was that his was not a true representation of what is on the ground. The nation is not in a good state. Yes, the government has built a couple of ‘affordable’ houses (which are not affordable at all) and done a stadium or two at a horrendous cost but that, to me, should not be a measure of success.

In fact, if the country was a business, the CEO and his top executive committee would have been sent home long ago by the board (we, the people). During the interview, the CEO and his Exco fed us numerous fibs about what they will do for us. Little has come to pass.

As many promises are made by politicians, people have become used to the lies that they now just laugh them off. Can anyone explain how a certain fellow who was a tout (yes, tout) just the other day is now showing off in a fleet of S-Class Mercedes Benzes and riding choppers without having engaged in any known economic activity?

I would be the first to celebrate a tout who has made his money through a proper hustle but not this kind of clown who has become adept at looting public resources.

 -The writer is a communications consultant