Leading Kenya today is no walk in the park, President Uhuru told

President Uhuru Kenyatta (Photo: Courtesy)

Sir, you may already have a gist of what I am going to say here but allow me to address you thus. Compared to many African counties, Kenya stands unique as perhaps the most intriguing fusion of political and economic vibrancy. Our country radiates prospect. Kenyans are also avid consumers of new information as reflected in the high levels of awareness on world events and trends.

However, governing such an info-savvy citizenry also happens to be perhaps the most treacherous job for a leader. On March 10th 2014, you attended the one day national debate on the public wage bill sustainability at KICC. I stood before you and with live television cameras rolling I presented a paper entitled ‘Transformational Leadership and Wage Bill Management’.

In that paper, I opined that leadership blossoms best on the unanimity of opinion on the part of the citizenry. Yet therein lies the litmus challenge for you as the leader of modern Kenya. How is it possible to achieve harmony of opinion in such a polarised nation?

In that paper, I quoted Lao Tzu the founder of Taoism who stated that “If you fail to honour your people, they will fail to honour you; it is said of a good leader that when, the aim is fulfilled, the people will say we did this ourselves.” Mr President, the import of what I penned in that paper was that the presidency in Kenya is undoubtedly a thankless job and that because whatever novelties you breeze into the presidency, credit will never go to you. In Lao Tzu’s framed conception, the total sum weight of all your remarkable achievements will be taken away from you and rubbished at every opportunity. Yet the nobility of your legacy will years later be recorded by historians as those moments when Kenya took the leap to its next stage of evolution where electricity no longer was a luxury and child delivery became a no-worry.

Ethnically stratified

Your Excellency, my point is that the only way to succeed in governing modern Kenya is for you to successfully ventilate public opinion so as to favour you in your endeavour to drive the economic, social and political agenda of your presidency.

In this country, the most arduous task of any leader is how to manage the vituperative excesses of Kenyans on social media and other interactive platforms.

There are many nations across the globe that are more ethnically stratified than our own yet here in our homeland, we somehow manage to make it appear as if the quakes in our ethnic mountains are more lava-laden than the volcanic Mount Vesuvius.

Former President Moi used to tell a favourite tale about how leading Kenya is akin to driving a bus whose passengers include the village madman, the local night-runner, the suave pick-pocket, the self-declared masochist and many other variants of deviant personalities majority of whom are hardly even aware of their destination but keep screaming incoherent instructions to the driver on how to steer the bus.

Whenever I teach Sociology of Ageing, I rank being President as perhaps the most potent and catalytic accelerator of premature ageing. In my considered assessment, being President in Kenya is a taxingly hazardous adventure. Take the recent hullabaloo about you electing to skip the Presidential debate. The amount of venom and vitriol that was subsequently spewed on social media would make a visitor imagine you had committed a treasonable offence.

Yet your erstwhile competitor Raila Odinga had disdainfully and contemptuously skipped a national prayer breakfast (a global political tradition), an inter-denominational peace pledge at Uhuru Park, a Kepsa round table initiative but was never subjected to similar scorn.

Kenyans are a wily lot. My advice to you is threefold: retain your charm, remain true to yourself and give it your best shot (despite the odds of prevalent economic and political rumblings). It is only a few days to the election. Those of us who have known you over the years are persuaded to believe that yours is a naturally likeable persona that does not belong anywhere near the desperado mindset. Kindly keep your head high and remember that ‘The Nation First’ mindset is the quintessential rule of governance.

Finally, remember that even in greatly evolved democracies such as that of the Americas, the President always occupies the unfavourable tail end of raw, butt-itch jokes and degenerative memes. These must not deter you as you seek a second term in a few days. Then and only then will Kenyans say ‘WE DID IT!’ despite having no idea what you had to go through.

- The writer is a Sociologist at the University of Nairobi.

[email protected]