Make those goodwill messages meaningful
President Uhuru Kenyatta.
What you need to know:
- President Kenyatta read his speech, another ritual that few seem to care about.
- The President did not describe the challenges facing the country and the region we are living in.
The new year has triggered floods of messages of hope and renewal. A prayer to God that 2021 will be a better year for those who endured a miserable 2020.
Reading through the messages, there is a sense of déjà vu; that these are the same sent last year and the year before, seemingly just stored to be resent.
Nothing wrong with this. I sent those messages too. It is the “new year moment”, a ritual that we just celebrate. Thanks to digital designers, now we can flavour our messages with beautifully photoshopped images of ourselves to make what should be a contemplative moment merely colourful and petty. It is not only politicians and Twitter celebrities that can look pretty!
The President read his speech, another ritual that few seem to care about, particularly since the ceremony was shed off its key spectacle of the President and everybody else that was anything in government, trooping to State House Mombasa and at least pretending to dance at midnight!
The New Year crossover moment has become wasteful. We send prayerful messages, forgetting that whoever your God is can only lend a hand to those doing something about what they are praying for. We hope for better times, greater success, continued health, happier families, and so on, with most of us having no intention of doing anything to achieve these.
What, for instance, does the President mean telling Kenyans that they cannot experience “the newness” of the New Year without a “renewal of minds”? That they have to change their national mindset. What is this national mindset that must be changed for the country to appreciate what he calls “a constitutional moment”?
He may have been asking skeptical Kenyans to embrace the referendum and constitutional change that has been forced upon Kenyans. If so, I’d rather he campaigned directly than hide behind semantic superfluity.
Symbolically important moments like the dawn of a new year are opportunities to address real concerns of people and for human beings to introvert their focus and audit their behaviour, searching habits to discard in order to bloom as individuals and contribute to nurturing more humane, richer and civic-minded communities.
Food insecurity
The President knows that some of the top concerns include health, made worse by a merciless pandemic and a strike by health workers (including doctors), the financial burdens they bear, the security of their children as they resume school tomorrow, corruption and food insecurity in the latter part of 2021.
Geopolitically, there are the simmering tensions with Somalia and the instability they trigger in the greater Horn of Africa. There is the wanton abuse of the democratic processes in Uganda by the Government of Yoweri Museveni as the January 15 general election nears.
Except for a peripheral word of appreciation for the sacrifices of many people in the fight against Covid-19 and a cursory promise that all will be done to ensure children are safe in school, the President did not describe the challenges facing the country and the region we are living in and his government’s position on them.
A definitive statement on how soon the Covid-19 vaccine could be available locally could have been welcome, as could a presidential directive on measures to resolve the medical workers’ strike. That the strike has been allowed to last this long beggars belief.
I can’t think of a more opportune moment for the President to reassure tax-ravaged Kenyans that his government too will discipline its appetite for profligacy. Announce new measures to cut costs.
His counterpart in Tanzania travels probably twice a year outside the country. Delegations to meetings do not comprise more than three people. Here we still hire jets for those representing the President to attend funerals.
This specificity of what needs to be done to make Kenya more livable should cascade down all ranks of leaders and officials to the individual whose indiscipline at home or at work is causing unnecessary pain and suffering to families and to wananchi seeking services from public institutions.
Most of us drive like maniacs and are shockingly uncivil. Think about these issues and how to change them when you send those messages asking for the best in others. It is not too late to retrieve those messages and reread them.
Have a meaningful 2021.
The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group and is now consulting. [email protected], @tmshindi
