ON THE JAMUHURI DAY CELEBRATIONS:
By Michael Okoth
Listening keenly to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech at the Independence Day Celebrations at the Nyayo National Stadium, one gets the feeling that it’s just one of those hot rhetorics he keeps spewing in political rallies in his backyard of Central Kenya.
President Uhuru’s speech writers obviously have a long way to go in drafting more sober speeches;speeches with the right tone,mood and attitude that would make them sound more serious and presidential,or at least show some little respect for the office of the presidency.
You don’t draft a speech that sounds like that of a rejected lover shouting his frustrations out while drowning his romantic miseries in bottles of illicit brews in some dingy bars deep in the slums of Mathare,and hand it to the president to read to the public on a national holiday like Jamuhuri day!It’s worse when the said president is too busy on the campaign trail throwing epithets at his opponents to even go through his speech in advance before reading it out!
With the current state of affairs in the country,the least we expected from the president today was at least a series of concessions about failures of his government, accompanied by an apology, not the kind of verbal stupor he treated us to at the Nyayo Stadium. One would even expect a sober president to realize that 53 years after Independence, Kenyans still don’t have much to celebrate over.
It would even make more sense to channel the millions wasted in organizing the Nyayo Stadium rally into cleaning up the streets of our major towns than in marveling at the coordinated marching of our soldiers and listening to the tired lectures from the president.
How else does one explain the fact that a president who already shamelessly threw his arms up in the air over his inability to tackle corruption, still affords the effrontery to face millions of Kenyans and furiously rant at those he admits are continuously pilfering public resources claiming they won’t go unpunished yet his own deputy,his close relatives and senior figures in his government and his party have endlessly been mentioned in corrupt deals involving billions of public funds and all he does is to mobilize his political troupes to mount a political defence?
How else does one explain the fact that a president who himself and his government are the very epitomes of division and ethnic exclusion in this country,still affords the guts to face the divided Kenyans and in a very divisive tone,harshly condemn politicians who allegedly thrive on division and manipulation?
How else would one explain the fact that a president who ascended to power through the courts with many unanswered questions left buried in heaps of affidavits, still faces us to harshly condemn some imaginary external forces that he feels are hellbent on circumventing the democratic will of Kenyans at the next ballot?That he goes ahead to for the umpteenth time remind us that Kenya is a sovereign state capable of handling its own elections and electoral matters,and that people must respect election outcomes should worry us.What does the president know that we don’t, and that he’s not so keen on sharing with us?
How would one explain the fact that a president whose just 4 years of reign has seen public debts hit the roof,amounts of public funds lost through corruption in just 4 years of his presidency almost going into 10 times the amounts ever lost through corruption in 50years of our Independence before his government happened, thousands if not millions of our youths stampeding into joblessness and despair with graduates roaming our streets with banners begging for any job,ethnic divisions boiling furiously underground waiting to explode at the slightest of provocations to name just but a few, still affords the temerity to face us on an Independence Day celebrations and shamelessly express his hopes that we are going grant him and his inept,corrupt and tribal regime another term in power?Isn’t that madness?
While I honestly do not know who will liberate this country,all I know is that this country does not deserve the leadership that is currently in place.
#KenyaAt53.
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