It's never about people but what leaders can share among themselves

Leaders, therefore, must be endowed with vision, empathy, manifest integrity and have effective communication skills. The tragedy is that these attributes are in short supply. Leaders have only become adept at playing the ethnic card, positively or negatively, as the situation may demand.

Hence, a day after Raila Odinga’s bid for the AU chairmanship was launched, President William Ruto and an entourage of erstwhile Railaphobics camped in Nyanza, promising an array of development projects in the region.

It is quite telling that it took the government’s nomination of Raila to contest the African Union Commission (AUC) chairmanship for the top Kenya Kwanza leadership to feel emboldened enough to visit Luo Nyanza and try to inveigle the Luo community into trusting them with focus on the 2027 presidential election.

Were Raila to bequeath his support base to Ruto while away in Ethiopia as AUC chair, the latter would be sitting pretty for 2027. But only if Raila succeeds. This new-found camaraderie and confidence ride on the momentary excitement of ‘our son’ is in government mentality; a herd mentality that has for long clouded the people’s perceptions and closed their eyes to the reality of political deceit, exploitation and unfair manipulation of the masses.

Because the Luo community identifies with Raila, recent occurrences in Nyanza are an example of how affinity to tribalism is being canvassed to win a people’s support.

While this is not entirely wrong, the long and short of it is that it is never about the people, but what leaders can share among themselves after creating the illusion of identifying with, and caring about the people.

It is both a societal and leadership failure that development projects are pegged on the President’s largesse which, in turn, is determined by the support the President gets in a given area.

This has been the Achilles’ heel of successive governments and has resulted in some areas being deprived of resources and development. Central Kenya and the Rift Valley are perhaps the most developed regions in the country, thanks to having produced all the presidents Kenya has had so far.

Kisumu owes its status to Raila’s bullish nature that has seen several governments kowtow to his political machinations. He is a shrewd operator who takes the spoils home.

Raila’s AUC bid was launched at a time when primary and secondary school teachers, doctors and university academic staff were demanding better remuneration in line with a 2021-2025 CBA, timely payment of salaries and release of statutory deductions to relevant institutions.

Raila’s bid will cost a lot of money. Records at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs show that almost Sh0.4 billion was spent on Amina Mohammed’s bid for the post in 2016.

This evokes the question of justice. Is ours a just society; spending much money on an individual’s campaign, whose outcome is not guaranteed, when workers’ rights are trampled upon, when millions do not have access to food, health, education and shelter, when human rights are abused through abductions and police atrocity? One wonders; is there more to Raila becoming AUC chair than just the bragging rights for Kenya?