Kenya’s politics of spectacle and rise of bad boys

You can’t succeed in politics without some zing. But experts fear things are getting out of hand in Kenya, as politics becomes all show but no substance and as leadership roles are left to bad boys, who have turned public service into a glaringly meaningless joke.

One of Kenya’s leading political scientists, Prof Eric Otenyo, blames the “machismo culture of strong rulers” for Kenya’s descent to a hell hole of adoption of hooligans as our leaders. Such rough characters appeal to Kenyans who feel their communities need a guy who can defend them “by any means possible.”

A professor of Public Administration at Northern Arizona University in USA, Dr Otenyo sees Kenya to have a reached a stage where politics has been reduced to a mere “video game”.

Street thugs with the ability to connect with the public have taken over the society by manipulating masses of followers who have “basically given up on the promise of democracy,” Prof Otenyo says.

He adds that because reality doesn’t count for much anymore, “some well-known crooks are packaged as reliable champions of the causes that masses would associate with, yet evidence suggests otherwise.”

This means that the age of prim and proper leaders is now gone, and farce has become the new norm of the game.

TRIVIALISED POLITICS

“Our politicians, from all parties, have trivialised politics by placing entertainment and personality cults above principles,” says Prof Otenyo. “The old gentlemanly nationalists like Ronald Ngala, Masinde Muliro, Tom Mboya, JM (Kariuki) were above such bad-guy entertainment.”

He says that in Kenya, the “trivialisation of the country’s politics” is seen in everyday items and practices such as making “fungua server” costumes, which on the surface imply a call for free and fair elections, but “deep down are meant to provide the masses with a theatrical spectacle for mere entertainment”.

To woo and wow young voters, whom politicians consider ideologically shallow, elderly national figures whose geriatric kneecaps are giving way under the weight of arthritis try to outcompete younger politicians in dance-floor buffoonery, to give the impression that they are not as old as their IDs indicate.

“While entertainment can be a good way to set the stage for serious debates, when overplayed, it becomes a meaningless exercise. It is embarrassing to watch some of the politicians dancing like clowns in public rallies, as if that offered any policy ideas,” says Prof Otenyo.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Spectacle makes for great television, but experts warn that this form of politicking will irreparably destroy civic engagement in Kenya, where politics will no longer be based on policy.

Multiple observers the Nation talked to have termed this trend “Sonkonisation” of Kenyan politics, in reference to the Nairobi governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko, who encouraged by the media, uses tough-man sideshows to trivialise important issues every time he is in a crisis.

Tribalism contributes hugely to ‘bad boy’ politics. “Competition between ethnic groups for power in Kenya has created a political culture where patronage politics thrives,” explains political scientist Njoki Wamai of the University of Cambridge in the UK.

“Wananchi then elect the ‘toughest, nastiest and baddest’ ethnic patron who can best fight for resources and also fight imagined enemies often created by the same politicians,” she adds.

Frequently cited in interviews as experts in manipulating the public with media spectacle, cheap slogans, and ‘bad-boy’ politics are Deputy President William Ruto (“the hustler”), activist Miguna Miguna (“the general”), Nairobi Governor Sonko, the militant Embakasi MP Paul Ongili Owino (“Babu Owino”), the shrill Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua (“Chap Chap”), Mombasa Governor Hassan Ali Joho (“001”), Starehe MP Charles Njagua Kanyi (“Jaguar”), Gatundu South MP Moses Kuria, and Nyali MP Mohammed Ali (“Jicho Pevu”).

TRIBAL HATE

Curiously, President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga did not feature on most lists of ‘bad boys’, although ruthless manipulation of tribal hate is the T-beam of their political survival. They have groomed most of the visible grassroots and county-level bad boys as a weapon against their national-level nemeses.

To maintain a façade of statesmanship at the top, unless hell breaks loose and their fake mask of civility peels off, most Kenyan politicians with presidential ambitions use lower-level surrogates (like Jubilee’s Moses Kuria) to do the hatchet job for them on the ground on their behalf.

Similar in moral character and lifestyle habits, the difference between the surrogate and his boss is usually the amount of power and money each possesses.

The descent to bad boy politics is a growing global trend, where voters in even developed democracies reject visionary leaders in favour of louts who traditionally would not be allowed anywhere near positions of power.

“The politics of spectacle gripping Kenya is not isolated from events taking place in the rest of the world,” says Prof Otenyo, noting similar tendencies in the election of Donald Trump in the US last year and Rodrigo Roa Duarte in the Philippines in 2016.

GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Prof Ken Opalo, who holds a PhD in politics from Stanford University and now teaches political science at Georgetown University, US, agrees that what Kenya is witnessing is a global phenomenon. “The Kenyan case is not unique. Voters in different parts of the world want politicians who promise to be different and to get things done.” 

World leaders in this category include the leftist Pablo Iglesias in Spain, right-wing politicians Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi display similar populist proclivities, where the reality no longer matters and the end justifies the means.

Indeed, if Kenya follows the Philippines route, Nairobi’s Sonko or Mombasa’s Joho, might become our president and commander in chief a couple of election cycles down the line. 

As the mayor of Davao City (equivalent of Sonko and Joho), Duterte employed Sonko-like spectacle to worm his way into people’s hearts by patrolling streets on a big motorbike and personally shooting suspected thugs. Now he’s making the killings of drug users a televised entertainment enterprise.

BAD-MOUTHED

Duterte is as bad-mouthed as our bad boys. Asked by a reporter about his health, he is reported in the New Yorker as having replied, in a language reminiscent of our Sonko’s.

To Duterte’s credit, unlike Kenyan politicians, he has not been accused of drug trafficking, land-grabbing, fraud, poaching, or escaping from his country’s equivalent of Shimo la Tewa Prison. He fights drugs, not sell or buy them. He’s also highly learned and ideologically sophisticated.

Is it an exclusive male affair or are Kenyan women capable of “bad girl” politics as well? The feminist political thinkers we talked to suggested that most politicians, whether male or female, have a narcissistic streak and can do anything to grab power and consolidate their hold on it.

Largely considered a mental illness, narcissism is a condition in which a person develops an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves. Such a person only cares about his or her own survival and welfare, and the rest of us are trash to be used and dumped.

USED AND DUMPED

“A healthy amount of narcissism is required in politics, but bad-boys type of narcissism is often too high in the spectrum, arising from psychological issues that are undealt with that politicians cover up with power,” says Dr Wamai, who thinks it is wrong to see strong leaders as exclusively male.

“We need to bring psychology into politics and learn to differentiate between emotionally healthy individuals who we can entrust with power and those really emotionally unhealthy ones who should first take time to heal before volunteering to lead,” she adds.

Sadly, Dr Njoki’s prescription is possible only in utopia. With the structural collapse of all institutions in Kenya, politicians here will easily fake drug-test results and certificates of sanity, if such documents were ever to be required by anybody.

Probably in need of healing more than a politician suffering delusions of grandeur, the pain-loving Kenyan public will also vote for a narcissist even when it is clear he needs psychiatric help.

CHANGING LIVES

While in the West citizens have become cynical about politics and can elect anything that claims to be a human being, in developing countries like Kenya, “the Sonkonisation of politics is part of the emerging view that politics is not changing the lives of the poor and that those who pay to play by hook or crook know the game,” says Prof Otenyo.

Alongside his colleagues at Yale University, US, Prof Otenyo has been studying this phenomenon for the last 10 years in different countries, since politicians of dubious moral standing in various parts of the globe started perverting the social media strategies former US President Barack Obama deployed to overcome all odds and become, in 2008, the first non-white president of the most powerful nation in the world.

Shouldn’t we, then, accept bad leaders as just the natural product of a global trend we can do nothing about? Prof Otenyo disagrees. Even in democracies dominated by a casino baron and conman like Trump, “the local governments are quite vibrant and progressive,” he says.

SELF-MADE POLITICIANS

For his part, Prof Opalo thinks that if politics is to work for the regular Kenyan, “we must change our dependence on an ethnic tin-god and have independent self-made politicians who focus on the real needs of the forgotten.”

He adds that “political parties should lock unorthodox candidates from running for office.” However, all agree that to bar ‘bad boys’ from a political order founded on theft, impunity, and tribalism is quite a tall order.

Prof Mwangi teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA.  [email protected] @evanmwangi