Leadership should drive nation’s renewal

A friend bemoaned the skyrocketing land rates in his county saying he was paying three times what he used to pay for his parcel of commercial land. In his opinion County Governments should be scrapped since he cannot see what development has come to his county. As my rates compliant friend mused, billions of shillings that his county has received have left very little evidence of ever having landed there, like a desert mist that dissipates without trace. It is not a thought present in many people's minds. I have heard some advocating for the scrapping of the senate as well.

Yet in theory, ours is a good Constitution which was specifically designed to avoid concentration of power at the centre. When things were not working, we thought it was because there was a structural problem with the system. Some went as far as reducing the problem to one man.

We thought a different person with another constitution would do the trick. While in most countries constitutions are made during what the late Prof Okoth Ogendo used to call 'constitutional moments', ours was passed after a protracted political process and did not have the impetus of a revolution behind it. We therefore ended up with a document that was by most measures broadly inclusive.

Yet somehow, things are not yet working at the level where people feel that we are generally headed in the right direction, in fact quite the opposite. Apart from the fact that these things need time to work, and a certain persistence of memory from the central government that makes it continue to cling to functions that are constitutionally devolved, one has to say that all in all it now appears that the problem was not entirely with a weak system susceptible to abuse.

Our deepest and worst suspicions could after all be true. That it is not the system but the software. The people in the system are apparently the problem. Offices created for purposes of oversight have instead turned to consumption behemoths with appetites that cannot be satiated. Is it possible that the very fabric of society has been degraded to such an extent that no matter who is elected to office the only result will be a chicken feast? Are things that bleak? This would indeed be a disaster as it would mean that help was not at hand and that it would take a generation or more before all the rotten apples fade away!

I am not a believer of this view. I am of the conviction that there comes a time when exceptional leadership is required. One of the easiest ways for the Jubilee Coalition to win a second term would be to jail the plunderers at its core, but they are not about to do it. The reason is quite simple. There is a certain calibre of persons who possesses overwhelming personal force and charisma, difficult to describe but unmistakable when present. Sadly for Kenya such a person has still not emerged.

In evidence, we all remember the events post 2002 elections when citizens simply marched to KICC and the building was repossessed by 'executive order'. We also recall how an instant vigilance meant that traffic police were unable to extort money from public service vehicles on pain of public fury. Such are the events that linger on in the mind and confirm that with strong leadership, nothing would be beyond reach.