Our leaders should embrace political hygiene

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Our leaders should embrace political hygiene

Thinkers have mulled a process by which politics can be kept relatively clean. When adopted by all players both active and tepid, the public need not hold their breath during and after every contest.

At a time when the country has advanced to a level where almost every household has access to a mobile phone, one would have expected that campaigns will largely be about content and therefore free of violent confrontations.

Unfortunately, that is only possible if the contestants have embraced political hygiene. But political hygiene cannot all be legislated. It must be ingested.

No Kenyan wants to be indoctrinated. They just want to understand the message of the contestant. That means intrusive campaigns that require the prospective voters to follow blindly must be outlawed. Nobody wants to worship a candidate.

So, candidates should desist from declaring anyone as belonging to him or her. No one wants the candidate as a housemate. So, candidates must stop calling people’s homes their bedrooms. Whose bedroom is the rest of the country?

The reason for outlawing that conduct is simple. Once a candidate claims a prospective voter as property, then that candidate will want to protect that vote.

Some candidates ensure other contestants or their agents are forcefully prevented from accessing the prospective voter to canvass her vote. This is the usual genesis of violence in estates and villages. Once that is established as the modus operandi, it follows that at various polling stations or en route thereto, violent skirmishes might be witnessed.  

However, Kenya has seen a great deal of transformation, mainly as a result of innovation, but not in sanitising national politics.

The main obstacle is our seeming inability to forge durable friendships based on political philosophies. Maybe Kenyans are not good philosophers. It used to be fine during the cold war.





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