Gathunuku

Wouldn’t want to be you, mate

Where is it? The patronising, bien pensant sermon on freedom of speech, human rights et cetera. CNN, BBC, Dubya, Tony, Amnesty, leaders of the free world, anyone?

Where is it? Most disappointing.

Perhaps Mugabe should jail Zimpundit.

Political party funding is a difficult issue the world over. Democracies with considerable more experience than our forty three year old one are still struggling with it. Africa’s (and Kenya’s) struggle with this has obviously been keeping politicians’ hands out of the certainly tempting public treasure chest. We haven’t got peerages to give (sell?).

It seems our own December2002-born redeemers lost the fight against temptation. They have gone on and vindicated the reputation of African politics being an entrepreneurial activity.

“We have got to keep this going”, the brightest of the pack thought out to the rest of them. “I hear financing companies are in vogue these days” and he went on, “We can’t just export air now.”

What the Big Men didn’t count on was how far another big man (of a different sort) was prepared to go to end the shenanigans. Thank God for the apparent inverse relationship between tech savvyness and age. Voice recorders (wearing a wire) are the most basic trick in the book. And I am talking of a really bad one, think James Hadley Chase. They fell for it, hook line and sinker. So the Big Men sang and one man, who ordinarily should have been another poster boy, had the courage to look beyond the quiet whispers at goat eating parties, take an extraordinary stand and switch on his voice recorder.

“Are you wearing a wire?”

One would think that the rest of the lot of politicians, especially the next redeemers styling for another liberation(second, third?) would see this as an invitation perhaps an opportunity to rethink business as usual. No, not this time. They go on to suggest that they are going to bankroll their campaigns to the tune of US$28M (ODM) and US$70M(NARC-K). In a country with a GDP of US$16B? The figures just don’t add up. To the incumbent; wananchi now know, thanks to Moi & Co, that they can actually use their votes to seek a better life for themselves. To the opposition; those figures do not inspire confidence in your abilities to fight familiar temptations. Upcoming tales of repaying “investments” in your campaign now with inflated public contracts later seem eerily likely in the Daily Nation’s edition of 23rd April 2009.

His efforts must be costing Mr. Githongo an arm and a leg. They gave you a job and you are doing it rather well is what I would say to him. If it’s nearly the end of this constant stream of anecdotes about enterprise in our politics, if Swiss banking loses some business (even marginally) then you are succeeding at your job.

Courage under fire?