Will it benefit each and every
Kenyan, including people in El Molo dying of hunger? Kenyans in Wajir and
Mandera counties involved in inter-clan fighting? Kenyan affected by the recent
Lamu attacks, whose security has been ‘improved’ only through presidential
political rhetoric rather than in actual sense seeing as people are dying from
what has been confusing intelligence reports placing culpability on everything
and everyone from al Shabaab, to political incitement, MRC, land grabbers, etc.
It seems no one cares enough to stop insecurity in its totality and secure the
people of this nation that all leaders swore to protect!
This brings me back to my main
agenda, public participation. Public participation works through involving
people likely to be directly affected by a decision made by public officials,
in the actual decision-making process. It portends that persons affected should
be provided with relevant information and should be told how their input will
affect the decision. We are living in an era where elected and appointed
officials cannot make arbitrary decisions purportedly on our behalf as Kenyans,
but must consult us at every juncture of decision-making.
As the opposition attempts to
collect five million signatures for a referendum, I'm not aware of any of my
friends or relatives who has ever endorsed or participated in any
decision-making that touches their lives. The only thing that most Kenyans
engage in is voting for leaders who ideally should be our eyes, ears and hands
in top decision-making places, but who end up using their offices to satisfy
their greed or their bosses’ greed. This is especially true of those who were
voted merely by calls for a ‘three piece suit’ system to give the big men
numbers in Parliament.
The moment we stop lending and
auctioning our politicians and our brains to political mediocrity the earlier
we will achieve development and kill the tribal card that has always been used
to amass votes for one political elite side against the other. We have to be
involved directly on every decision that touches our lives by first voting
people who share our views and agenda for development, then indirectly, by the
leaders we have voted through actions that totally represent us and not
themselves.
How representative have decisions by
the current government and opposition been of us Kenyans? How representative
are they of all ethnicities, religious affiliations and races? If none at all,
then it’s high time we do away with them come next election and more so vote
for a referendum that is about us and not them. To these political formations,
public participation will be through hired populous in their rallies where they
marshal up troops to lie to us that we are all one. We must stand up and be
counted! Ni Sisi!
The hard hitting reality will be
when Kenyans stand up for themselves and be counted. I quote Brian Eno
“Democracy is a daring concept, a hope that we’ll be best governed if all of us
participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place
where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to
arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number
of people”
Extract from my article on the Star
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