politics rocks

Warning this is a rant

Just after I had been offered a place at university to study for a degree in Politics I was walking in Nairobi city centre with a member of my family when we bumped into a lady who at the time could reasonably claim to be the most powerful woman in Kenya. Well when I say we bumped into her, we bumped into her and her entourage of bodyguard/cronies. After the exchange of pleasantries amongst the wazee attention was focused on me.

“Young man what are you doing with your life”, this powerful woman directed at me.
“I am at university”, I replied.
“What are you studying?”
“Politics” I replied.
” Politics, POLitics, POLITICS???? NO. You must change your course. We need doctors, we need engineers, and we need accountants.”

She then proceeded to lecture me in the middle of Nairobi city centre about my lack of understanding of Kenya’s situation, about my wasted life, she gave what was ironically a very political speech on why I should not do politics. Here was a person who had grown rich in the excess of the dark days of Moi’s regime giving me a lecture on accountability. That in itself steeled my resolve to study politics if nothing else just to find out what she didn’t want me to know.

Fastforward 2 years. This time I am sitting a Christmas lunch for African students organised by a prestigious and powerful international organisation. Each student was assigned a partner from the great and good for the night. The look my hosts face when he learnt I was studying politcs can only be described as horrified. You should be doing medicine, veterinary science, engineering, he told me. Is it to late to change your course?

I can give you countless more examples all with the same central theme. Africa does not need students of politics.

Bollox.

It is now fashionable to lay the blame for Africa’s problems at the feet of Africa’s political leaders. This opinion is justified in more ways than one. Our leaders have let us down again and again. Sometimes you wonder whether they know what they are doing, don’t you? Well what do you expect?

Take Kenya as an example. You take a unique parliamentary system of cabinet government which took the UK centuries to develop and evolve for themselves, mix it with a presidential system of governement which the fathers of America developed in direct opposition to the British model and then thrown in some measures to make the president untouchable thus in a stroke wiping out the whole principle of checks and balances and impose it on a young African democracy, you can not seriously expect the thing to work. And it didn’t and it doesn’t. Those of us who studied politics can hardly understand just how the system is meant to work. So what chance do you amateurs have?

Africa needs student of politics, millions of them. I’ll let John Adams explain

Without a political base, with out a civic base, without governance, without the people running the country knowing how to run the country we will never move forward. It is as simple as that. You can have the best LSE educated economists at the helm which we do, you can have the Oxbridge educated lawyers being driven in cars with ministerial flags, which we do but without the political scientist to examine, probe, devise a system of governance you will end up with chaos.

But isn’t the UK government full of lawyers. Si Tony Blair is a lawyer?

Yes but in the UK everyone knows how the system works. It has been working for centuries. Go back to the beginning when they were making drastic changes to the constitution, when political ideologies were being formed and you will find great thinkers who devoted their whole lives to politics.

In Kenya politicians do not even know what they stand for leave alone what the want to impose on the country. At the last election a group of Social Democratic Party candidates were asked which of their policies where social democratic in nature. Their response, and I quote directly, “argh we just took this name because political parties have such names.” Clowns. Do they understand that by calling themselves Social Democratic they are casting their lot with a movement over 100 years old? That it actually means something? What about the Liberal Party of Kenya? Do they believe in proportional representation? In internationalism? Do they understand that Liberalism argues that the F-P-T-P system of elections, which we use in Kenya, is flawed? Do they care? And what about our good friends the Democratic Party?

How about our regional organisations? Is there any surprise that the OAU failed? I mean that constitution was probably written by doctors and then you have a bunch of chemical engineers, lawyers, economists to try and put it into practice. Where were the political diplomats? The professional negotiators, the professional civil service, the political administrators of the continent if you like? (I can feel a post on the amateurisation of politics coming along!)

Without us, who study peace and war, who study man and his thoughts, who study political systems, who study governance, who learn how to run countries, the political technocrats, the professional government administrators, without us my friend everything will go to the dogs. Want proof, look around Africa.

Yes I know this sounds like I am trying to justify my life.
Yes I know we have brilliant political minds in Kenya even in SDP, LPK and DP.

Rant over. Let’s all go look at a pictures of a cute giraffe! Ahhhhh!