IS IT A REVOLUTION OR WAR OF WORDS?

By Obilo K'Obilo


The more days I spend around this campus the more I applause iconic former South Africa President’s say that “Everyone under the sun ought to believe in something and stand for it in thick waters or dazzling rays of enjoyment”. Everyone amongst this mosaic intellectual fraternity ought to hold strongly a belief even in rarity of sycophancy and hangers-on.

You don’t begin to truly live until you find an immovable centre within yourself that you egocentrically protect. This is a no go zone. You stand by it firmly and very soon the whole world recognizes it and begins to see your point of view. To me that is the hallmark of informed leadership.

This week’s events have taught me to hold firm on this particular belief which might be running against the grain for a portion of this community. It is a week that has been cavorted with politicos of mercenary extraction. It has exposed a leadership that believes in nothing. That holds nothing in sacrosanct and above all that holds no institution sacred not even the electorates. True to the words of seasoned philosopher and playwright “A minority may be right but a majority is always wrong’, consider the following:

The Sec Gen posted an ‘opinion’ on the Facebook wall of this media house to the effect that Hostels A, B, F and E should accommodate three students in each room to solve the accommodation crisis. Comments followed, egos massaged, apathetic vitriol arsenals left loose and praises showered. He did what I expected from him-He’s the Sec Gen of Main Campus and his word is...Then this one followed.

“The security and accommodation office wishes to detach itself from any communication implying that senior hostels will have more than two occupants. My office maintains that the mentioned rooms will have ONLY two occupants. Any information concerning the rooms will only be communicated from this office. Meanwhile we are working on hostel M to curb the problem of shortage of rooms. DIR. OGEGA ENOCK.”

The outgoing Chairman never disappointed me he acted stiff as an electricity pole, unemotional as a wooden table, unsmiling as an hungry cat and as mean as a proverbial church mouse claiming that he was once approached by the same idea in the beginning of his tenure but he rejected. He went further to call for sanity, brevity and soberness in the course of the debate urging the parties to desist from being personal. What he failed to tell comrades was who approached him with this idea and what happened after its rejection.

A message was later sent by the Sec Gen to the former Assistant Sec Gen-Victor Mairura who claimed to have been offering a candid opinion as a comrade reading in part: “My friend today, you only have to accept the reality that I’m the Sec Gen. You may have issues with it but I am. And I’ll give my honest opinion to any issue in any docket without people like you who think main campus is GUSA (Gusii University Students Association) or Musau”. Now what relates this text to the accommodation crisis debate? I wonder!

I want to heed the advice of Socrates by accepting the limitations of my mental faculty: I don’t monopolize the truth and my word is not a gospel fact. It’s totally acceptable for “leaders” to disagree but to bring their supporters while personalizing the whole confrontation is an act of abrogation.

From such kind of political cross-fires, are we fighting ourselves over the accommodation crisis which we never created? Can we as well claim the person who proposed the idea to the outgoing Chair is the same one who sold it to the current Sec Gen? If such kind of personalized tongue-in-check exchange is what we term revolution in Main Campus… lets revisit Robert Green’s rule No.9 in his book Laws of power: “Any momentary triumph you think you’ve gained through argument is really a pyrrhic victory. It’s much more powerful to get others agree with you through your actions without saying a word. Demonstrate don’t explicate.