"Great Kenya",a strong and prosperous Kenya is my cherished dream - as is of any true patriot.But moron management of our society by opportunistic political leaderships is leading us to ridiculous imbroglios.Everybody from common-men,to our social and political leaders and intelligentsia are crying about our society's overall degeneration.With the slogans of "Democracy Of Hypocrisy And Sycophancy dripping from their hearts,as they continue to consume the same poison of grand coalitions of mass corruptions in the name of democracy.
True democracy has five essential ingredients - freedom, self-governance, empowerment of people, rule of law and self-correcting institutions of state. Freedom is the right of any individual to do as he pleases as long as his actions do not impinge on the freedom of others. The Kenyan state can be ranked quite high in terms of freedom of its citizens. True, there are serious limitations to enjoyment of freedom for the bulk of our poor on account of inadequate resources and skills, which is largely a result of the failure of the Kenyan state. However, there are not many state-imposed fetters to individual freedom and choice. On an imaginary scale of 0 to 100, Kenya's score in terms of individual freedom will be probably below 60 for "have-not" above 60,for middle "haves" and in some respects may be approaching 80 or 90 for "have-ones".
Self-governance is the right of citizens to govern themselves directly or indirectly. What happened in 1964 was mere transfer of power from the colonial masters to the indigenous oligarchies. In our anxiety to preserve unity and order at all costs, we accepted centralization of power and bureaucratization, and marginalised the role of the people. We accepted many institutions purely on grounds of familiarity rather than suitability to our conditions and needs. As a result, self-governance is limited to an occasional exercise of franchise,that too when permitted by the local bigwigs. As the choice is often between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, this franchise has no real impact on the outcome, and self-governance became largely illusory. On our imaginary scale, self-governance component of Kenyan democracy can probably be quantified at about less than 25 percent, a poor score for any vibrant democracy.
Empowerment is the ability of citizens to influence the course of events on a sustained basis and to make meaningful decisions on matters of governance having impact on their own lives. In a highly bureaucratized and centralized milieu, with most local institutions beyond the reach of stake-holders' influence, as stake-holding and power-wielding are divorced,empowerment of citizens is at a low-level. The local school,Primary Health Center,or civic services are all beyond citizen's influence. The local public servant is unaccountable to people, and is often the master,rather than their servant. Many procedures are rigid, incomprehensible and highly formalized,preventing access to, and influence by,most ordinary citizens. Conse-quently, in terms of empowerment, on our imaginary scale our democracy would score some where in between 5 and 10, an appallingly low score for any functioning democracy.
Rule of law is the concept of people being governed by law, and all citizens, irrespective of station and rank, being subject to the same laws to the same extent. It is the basis of all democratic governance, and all our institutions, including the executive and judiciary, swear by it. However, in reality, the centralised autocratic functioning of the political parties,the flawed electoral system,highly secretive,opaque functioning, the ubiquitous patronage system, the all-pervasive corruption and the excruciating delays in obtaining justice in law courts - all these made sure that the people with access to power ,muscle and means are more equal than the ordinary citizens. As a result, rule of law has been given the go by in most cases and most citizens have resigned themselves to lives of indignity and quiet desperation.
Self-correction is the ability of institutions of state to constantly learn from past experience and improve themselves in order to serve the people better. No design is ever perfect and no system,however well-constructed, can ever conceive of all possible eventualities, and provide for them. In any reasonably efficient and responsive governance structure, there must be a high degree of flexibility and self-correcting mechanism, so that the system is functional. In Kenya, almost all institutions of state have become moribund and dysfunctional. There is no real self-correction visible on an enduring basis or in a meaningful manner. On our imaginary scale,the score for self-correction is almost zero.
My humble endeavor is just a part of such efforts,but with a significant difference.I have analyzed and reasonably discounted that all those factors-corruption to communalism and even malfunction of our political leaderships and institutions are not the causes of degradation;and that they are just symptoms of our society' degradation.And that our political system itself,the genetically flawed Democracy we practice further has manipulated and distorted by our opportunistic leadership,is the real villain,the basic cause,producing all those ill symptoms.
See Ya Soon,
Thanks!
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