When verbal insults form political fodder, we risk losing our nation

The verbal insults in the political class have reminded us that we are a society whose values a moth has eaten. The moth does not tear cloth apart in a single violent act. It works quietly. It is persistent, almost invisible. That is until one day the fabric simply gives way. That is where Kenya is. 

We are not necessarily at the start of moral decline, but somewhere deep into its consequences. And, in any event, we elected William Ruto in 2022 to stem the tide. He instead elected to deepen the chaos. Kenya’s problem is not that we lack values. We have learned to suspend them because they are inconvenient. 

There is evidence galore. The political class increasingly stages scandalous spectacles. There are insults, theatrics, open defiance of the law and common decency. Yet do we recoil? We laugh. We clap. When a few citizens still capable of being shocked demand apologies, they are met with pride and misconduct from high places. “You have not seen anything yet,” President Ruto says. And the audience cheers. Really?  

This is not merely a failure of leadership. It is a failure of restraint across the entire national social order. The clergy condemns the rot, then yields its pulpit to the very villains it decries. The academic, trained to interrogate power, bends into the role of apologists, defined along ethnic lines. The tribal professor’s multiple PhD counts for nothing. 

We too, in the Media, amplify the spectacle. And the citizens, increasingly, participate. Politicians, citizens, religious leaders, academics, Media, business community; who will save us from ourselves?  We have become available for hire. We are all goons. Physical goons with crowbars. Police goons with guns. 

Goons in the Judiciary. Digital goons with keyboards. Spiritual goons in sanctuaries. Intellectual goons in lecture halls and television studios. The forms differ; the logic is the same. Citizenship has been monetised. Conscience has been subcontracted. Goons here, goons there, goons everywhere! 

At the centre is a simple truth. The only reliable value in Kenya’s public life is money and what it can procure. For it, we will assemble crowds, suspend judgment, rewrite truth, and applaud our own violation. This is how norms die. They are negotiated away, one at a time. 

We did not arrive in this tragedy overnight. Years of elite impunity have taught Kenyans that laws, regulations, rules and norms are elastic, especially for the powerful. A political economy built on patronage has trained citizens to seek favours, rather than demand their rights. We compromise for survival.  

We have perfected ethnic mobilisation as a moral cover. We have made integrity ornamental, and enforcement of law optional. The Constitution promises integrity in leadership. It is supposed to be a moral anchor. But the political class treats it with contempt, and citizens applaud this. In the process, are we abolishing capacity to feel ashamed?  

A healthy society must feel ashamed sometimes. We must be ashamed of bare faced leaders who shout to us that they cannot apologise for engaging in common indecency. A decent people will attach consequences to indecency. They stigmatise excess. They punish abuse. Kenya is drifting toward the opposite. Notoriety enhances visibility, and visibility enhances power. Scandal is no longer disqualifying; it is a strategy. 

Can we exit this condition? I don’t know! There is belief in some quarters that the youth could save us. That a new generation, by virtue of being new, could be less compromised, more principled, more demanding? 

Maybe. Urbanised Gen-Zs and Millennials have been less available to the political class. Their online exposure to functioning systems elsewhere has opened up their eyes and minds, we would hope. We have witnessed some level of sharp civic assertion. Yet, we must remain realistic. Have we not seen some of them bought back by the same order they protested against?  

This same generation is also being socialised, early and efficiently, into transactional politics. Upcountry, especially, and in the slums, it is mobilised for pay. It is recruited in towns for the role of digital propaganda, and absorbed into networks where loyalty is rewarded and independence penalised.  

The tragic reality is that economic distress sharpens the temptation to be bought. Then there are the cynics who laugh at “the naivety” of refusing to be bought. And so here we are, looking up to the children to save us! But genealogical generations do not necessarily redeem societies. Salvation resides in generation of ideas. We must all be involved, or lose the country. 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.