WERE THEY EMPTY PROMISES?

By Moker Mokaya

It is meaningless feeding a toothless bulldog heavily yet it may never bite just as it is a waste of time participating in a rounder’s chair dance then end up not sitting on it. I must now confess that I am tired doing all this with the hope those things will change when they are stretching from bad to worse. It has been an obvious thing that each time we have elections Kenyans have to choose which knife will stub us though we all know that none can do any better for us. This is no different case in our campus. As the TSA campaigns come to an end, they draw a vivid memory of what we all had witnessed about one month ago – except the freshers who are yet to wet their heads anyway and prepare for that painful shave by their fellow comrades cum politicians, shopkeepers.

The part I like about this campaigns is the type of slogans that this politicians use. To substantiate the irony engulfed in these slogans, we will first have to analyse the slogans used by national parties in what I term as the mirror of the moral decadence that exists in our society. When KANU party came to power as an African party they adopted the symbol of the cockerel probably to imply the dawn of a new nation- yes really a dawn but for the few. These became rife during the nyayo era though the nyayos were a whole different thing anyway - to continue advantaging the few, a very different meaning from the image that was painted in rallies. Kenyans took it in for 24 years. Yes they did. Then there came the mwamko mpya slogan by the then NARC coalition. The mwamko mpya was to bring in radical economical changes and making sure that the common mwananchi who was slowly awaking and smelling the coffee was knocked out of the system by hard economic times, inflation and corruption which was now given a whole different meaning depending on the perspectives you looked at it from. This was further natured by the kazi iendelee slogan but which work was to continue when up to now we have Kenyans living in IDP camps yet to be settled? That is to state a few and the ugly image hidden behind the well painted curtains.

Coming back to our own moi university, “main campus” was the thing to walk by if you wanted to survive the huge political waves of last semester. When that noise goes down is surely when leadership begins, I now fully understand what that line meant Mr. Secretary General. If the kind of leadership we are experiencing now is what you really meant, then I can simply term that as a paradoxical juxtaposition of ideas. Another amazing slogan was that of the children of god we shall overcome but turning onto the other page and reading in between the lines of reality, we have surely been overwhelmed if the current economic state of comrades is something to go by. Mr. Doghana, if you could have surely and genuinely represented the plights of your fellow comrades to the finance department, then they could not have used what they had in their pockets to pay for the fees yet helb could have catered for that debt. Other slogans include the Ole Nakola’s vigilance and accountability if I may rephrase it but the vigilance we are experiencing now is a chain of scandals including the MUSO computer packages ‘scam’.

Slogans like bringing back the spirit of comradeship, leadership for purpose, tranquility and integrity in leadership among others only bypass my eyes as a group of well arranged words to convey fallacy of reason while concealing the reality of intention from our eyes. Comrades it is high time we chose leaders of substance and those that have comrades’ interests at heart.