The Kenyan Politics of Infatuation and Propaganda.

I read about a story of a man who didn’t believe in love. To him, love was overrated; in fact, it didn’t exist. He had tried loving again and again but had seriously failed. So, he resorted to living alone without ever thinking that a woman in his life could ever bring any meaning.

I now recall the numerous encounters I have had with many people over the recent past who, like this man in the story, believe that politics is just overrated. They take the whole hype surrounding politics to be the equivalent of infatuation with love.

And they are not wrong. Like matters to do with love for a young person, the rush in the blood is always confused with the ‘chemistry’ in most cases. But as we shall see, all that pertains to our politics is a result of long periods of complacency on our part regarding reacting to bad politics.

At the height of the holocaust, Adolf Hitler had already realised what the power of the masses could do. He tried propaganda and saw how marvelously it worked in hypnotising the masses to a point where mobilising them for evil causes, such as the holocaust, was never going to be a big deal.

History has been used to offer direction in certain matters of our lives. Still, history has also been used to offer critical lessons upon which people can improve to fit their present situations.

One of such is the power of infatuating and feeding people with propaganda, and how effective it has proved over the ages in defining political destinies of countries and people in equal measure.

Let us narrow ourselves down to the specifics. If we asked ourselves what the development agendas, and sound ones for that matter, are for our key political contenders, who can raise their hands and say it point blank without a second guess? If we can’t, it means we are infatuated by vain words.

As the man who didn’t believe in love later discovered, real love is built upon principle. This was such a great discovery for him and for us by extension. Mature politics in mature democracies are played upon principles. In those democracies, it is the people who rule. The majority of the people.

People there often reason with a lot of sobriety. They are not moved by emotion. They look at the contenders wholeheartedly. Although the fact remains that politics is politics, the contenders have to show respect to each other, respect for the electorate and respect for each other’s ideologies.

In our case, it is the case of a snake spitting their venom on another snake. And then the two snakes decide to spit their venom on the people. This venom, when spit, charges the animosity in the populace, and they stand against each other. No wonder I see people abuse each other seriously to the point of fighting because of some politicians somewhere who don’t even know that the fighters exist.

The reason for such animosities often does not have any basis. Principle should be understood to mean looking beyond the person’s tribe, race, economic power, but not moral integrity and issues touching on character. Those ones must be carefully considered.

Unfortunately, propaganda sanitises us to lose reason for what should be considered important, and we end up being serious about those that don’t matter. Like the case of the young man who goes searching for love, and because he doesn’t know exactly what he is looking for, he settles for the woman with large breasts.

Later, he realises that this is void of something more he longs for. He settles for the woman with larges butts and he realizes that even that too is void of his longing. He goes around basing his search on physique alone until he discovers whatever he is after is not physical, maybe, and somehow, it could be abstract.

That is how we go about considering the best politician to assume office, and we go looking at the man who comes from our tribe or clan or a certain political inclination identified with us. Over time, we learn that that wasn’t the right criterion after all.

By the time we wake up from our slumber and start looking at the person’s track record, performance rating, integrity issues and other key issues, it is often too late. That is how we resort to our fate year in and year out.

It happens that once we gain our sobriety and vow never again, the political heat waves come ringing deep into our emotions, and we find ourselves singing to the tune of the masquerade as always. Not that we chose to, but we were influenced, and our intuition or personal resolve wasn’t strong enough to stand against it.

For your information, the man who lived saying that after all love was full of infatuation met a certain woman in a park in a certain town. They shared a lot of things, from their interests to the belief that love was like an addictive drug, which didn’t give its owner any opportunity to dictate its course, but instead, it is love that dictates the course of the individual.

But soon they realised they shared a lot in common and began spending more time together, and before long they were in love. When they looked back, they both agreed that maybe there existed or exists true love after all.

In the Kenyan political case, when politics are not in high gear, we are sound and wonder how we found ourselves in certain messes. But come the next political season, we lose our serenity and the propaganda that once irritated us begins to excite us. We become infatuated by the falsity of the entire season and false promises.

When it is over, we look back and start saying that magic does exist for real. Anyway, who plays the role of the magician in this mix if not we who experience, get entertained and fed with propaganda, and we allow it to overcrowd our faculties of reason.

No wonder we behave like dogs who keep going back to their spit under the lame excuse that there is nothing we could have done.

End.