Kenya’s Selective Amnesia When it Comes to Accountability of Leaders
The concept of selective amnesia has been used in different context to denote different issue and this case is not an exception. Few weeks ago, I came across an article on “Between the duty to prosecute atrocities and domestic precedents of dealing with the past in the era of the International Criminal Court” by Dr. Lugano and he had explicitly expound on the concept of selective amnesia when it comes to criminal accountability. However, I tend to relate this concept to our political situation. We have just a couple of months to the general elections of 2022 and the campaigns have already begun despite Kenya’s electoral commission IEBC warning the politicians of the early campaigns.
Having said that, it is no lie that the elected leaders have performed differently in terms of service delivery to the citizens. There are a number of governors who have been outstanding in their work and they have really shown that devolution can work in Kenya. However, a majority of the elected leaders have not delivered satisfactorily and right now the are running around the clock to close the loopholes that could jeopardize their bid in the forthcoming elections. A majority of them are pretending to be commiserating with their constituents but the truth is that, that is a guise to help them get votes and they disappear for another five years.
Now this is where our problem as the citizenry arises. Despite knowing too well that politician X is not delivering on his or her mandate, we will still vote him based on the theatrics that they are currently throwing our way. Actually, some of will vote in incompetent and inept politicians just because we want to punish a certain politician. It will not be the first time to happen, it has happened in the past and that has exposed us to the current economic dispensation that is characterized by high standards of living, high prices of commodities and high rates of unemployment in unprecedented manner.
We have failed in the past to make our elected leaders accountable and looking at some of the discourse we are having, probably we will not dare look into the issue of accountability. For instance there are a number of leaders who have been implicated in graft cases but instead of us denouncing such leaders, we come to the public claiming that our community is being targeted. While this may suggest that that the problem of ethnicity is deeply entrenched in our society, it also suggest that we ignore the obvious and at the end of the day we remain the victims and blame the wrong individuals for the woes that we created ourselves.
Actually, it is interesting how a majority of us in the past two years have sworn not to make the same mistakes that we made in 2017. However, that may not happen because we are going to support or probably we are supporting those who plunged us into this economic mess we are currently dealing with. While COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the economic crisis in Kenya, the truth of the matter is that the decisions made by the government has contributed a lot to the wreckage of the economy. The issue of corruption has threatened the economic growth and creation of employment opportunities unprecedentedly.
Unless, we change our mindsets and put our leaders to task of what the Constitution of Kenya 2010 demands of them and what we expect of them, we still have a long way to go. If we make the same mistakes that we have been doing in the past years then we are going to face it rough than we are currently doing. Let us endeavor to vote leaders with practical ideas that can be achieved and shun those who provide false hope laced with narratives nuanced with abstract ideas that do not offer any solutions to the economic woes we are witnessing.
