YVONNE’S TAKE: Political dishonesty & the manufactured narrative of unity

Political dishonesty. It is one thing I have talked about here on my take since 2019. And now, just like in the past, we are being forced into a narrative. One of unity. Manufactured unity.

We are once again being forced into the false narrative that those on differing political sides are enemies and that this does not bode well for the country. So that their supposed handshakes, post-election agreements, broad-based agreements that are about to get even broader, will save the country from annihilation.

We have been made to believe that having an opposition or a minority means total ruin for the country and lack of development for some regions, and thus justifying their need to come together for the “good of the nation.”

And so, we now have an opposition within the ruling party, the opposition in the ruling party, making decisions, advising the president on government projects. An opposition openly touting government projects, even launching them. We have the president and the leader of the opposition going to foreign nations, hand in hand.

Now, if you remember not too long ago, the president said the handshake in Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration took away the role of the opposition.

“The opposition is running government and government is running the opposition,” he said. Is that any different from what is happening today?

Today, there are such blurred lines between the minority and the majority, even in Parliament. There is a reconstitution of parliamentary committees. Such that the ones that are supposed to be led by and filled with majority members, pushing for government business in the house, are being reconstituted to look rather different.

There seems to be no clarity anymore over who is the minority and who is the majority, a matter that is still being canvassed at the court of appeal as we speak. Yet today, the president and the opposition leader are in some sort of working “broad-based” arrangement that no one yet understands and is not formalized anywhere save for in their own minds!

Look, I am not against people meeting and working together, it is a free country and the constitution itself advocates for the right of thought and freedom of association, but we also have the right to question in the words of our current president, and then deputy president, “what the hell this is.”

So, as a result of these events that keep happening in the country, should we also start to question whether we need elections in this country? The IEBC now tells us that we will need Ksh.61 billion to conduct an election in 2027. An election in which we are required to choose one candidate over another, one set of ideologies over another.

Why bother, when they will start preaching “unity” shortly after and abandon the oversight role that we have enshrined in the constitution? Why waste that Ksh.61 billion?

Let them pick the representatives for us then, from MCA, all the way to the top. Because it is unity we want, right? Let us all be one big happy family and hold hands and sing kumbaya. After all, it is about “unity” right? But on my take, I ask, whose unity, theirs, or ours?