

It has been a helter-skelter season in Nairobi. Kenyans have witnessed a whirlwind in the Legislature, and something close to darkness at midday. The Rigathi Gachagua impeachment process places us on the weighing scales of civilised living and enlightened leadership. We seem to fail both tests.
Civilized societies don’t do the kind of things Kenya’s leaders are doing. Before our very eyes, they are killing our faith in just governance. The political class, especially, has been shockingly crude and dry-eyed. They seem to be very clever in a very wicked manner. Let me go back to the beginning. Humanity is bonded in certain universal values and virtues. These mores define levels of vileness that society will not tolerate, even for those punishing absolute rogues and their very worst enemies. There must be acceptable civilized standards, even when dealing with a rogue. This applies to politics, too. Some level of hygiene is a must, even if you did not go to a good school.
A murderer who is caught in the act, for example, must still be accorded a fair trial. We don’t drag him through a ten-minute kangaroo court, for the sake of appearances of legality, and go on to kill him another ten minutes later. If the judge who should ordinarily try him was witness to the murder, he recuses himself. Moreover, if a judge has proclaimed in public that the man should be killed, he does not go on to feign impartiality and still conduct the trial.
No. Civilized societies don’t do that. But we have done it in the Gachagua case. We must squeeze our big bent heads in our hands, in absolute shame. Following the process on live TV, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between the umpire and the prosecution. And I often wondered, “Do these people know that the world is watching? Do they care that they are entering into the annals of history? What do their peers think of this thoroughly choreographed drama?”
It did not seem to matter. This is Kenya. We hold ourselves to lower standards of civilization. So the trial goes on. The jury returns a verdict of guilty. The only available sentence is death. Yet, in civilized society, the murderer must still be killed in a manner that does not offend public sensibilities. You do not strike him down with repeated blows of the machete. Nor do you make minced meat of him, and feed him to your dogs. It is about common decency and decorum of process.
As a social observer and commentator, I have had a problem with Gachagua’s brusque insensitivity. He comes across as a crass and blustery individual. He brandishes ethnic chauvinism in a gusty and lowly manner. His style lacks even the most basic polish. I put this to where he grew up.
Manners are learned at home. And Kenya’s political arena is replete with people who learned nothing at home. Maybe, there was nothing to learn there, and nobody to learn from? You cannot hold it against anybody that they had no role models at home. Or that their homes were schools of scandal. Hence, the music of the current Kenyan political class is the same in all its elements. It is socially offensive. Still, even for this class, there must be an ethical minimum.
Something critical needs to die in you before you can celebrate its management of the ended impeachment in the National Assembly and the Senate. George Bernard Shaw said of the trial of Joan of Arc, that it was informed by “hate, calumny and cozenage.” So has been Gachagua’s in Parliament, clearly with the impatient hidden hand of an overbearing grandmaster puppeteer.
In William Shakespeare’s play titled Julius Caesar, Brutus – the man who inflicts the final fatal blow – cautions the others, “Let us not be butchers . . . Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully. Let us carve him as a dish fit for the gods, not hew him as a carcass fit for the hounds.”
Look, the Kenyan deputy presidency is a horse. When they say that there are two horses in the presidential race, the horses are actually the running mates. The president is the rider. After victory, the rider enters the house, and the horse is led to the stable. Horses that want to enter the house will be fed to hounds. The cure is to remove the running mate from the Constitution. Let presidential candidates find their own votes. Let them be free to appoint and sack their deputies without dragging the country through shameful draining and dramas.