THEY ARE back, ladies and gentlemen!

(Please do not mistake the exclamation mark there to be a sign of flourish or excitement. Instead, stand warned.)

The next phase of our lives will not be as bad as a pandemic brought on by an unpredictable respiratory disease; this one is very predictable and affects first the brain and then the body of our society.

It is political campaign season, and may God help us all.

The affliction does not hit only the political aspirants, as you suspected I would focus on today. They are the hardest hit, mostly in the short term, and can recover from it eventually.

The vast majority of them will lose hundreds of millions of shillings spent on unimaginative campaign antics.

A number will develop deeper mental health problems brought on by unrealistic expectations of their seriousness that they will project onto the voters.

Most will be fine. Maybe.

We – the rest of us – will not. We, the majority, will bear the brunt of this illness in our corner of the world.

The symptoms are already clear, such as the posters that have started showing up on utility poles and walls around towns and trading centers.

Already, somehow, the voters seem to be mesmerised by these sheets of paper. We do not question the claims placed on them, nor mock them for being so meaningless.

Most of the posters are so lazily designed that they are clear evidence of how hard working the political aspirant will not be should they be voted into a position of authority.

And yet we do not laugh them offstage and out of town. Instead, we entertain their loosely-phrased claims masquerading as ‘slogans.’ One of the simplest definitions of a slogan is “a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising…” (and that’s in the Oxford dictionary).

Good luck finding an actual slogan in the weeks and months to come.

Another symptom of this fast-spreading disease is the dilute droppings of quasi-wisdom from some aspirants who have public exposure.

This is supposed to be good because it should enable the voters to immunise themselves against further infection – by not voting for those aspirants.

Unfortunately, it has not worked before, and we do not have political epidemiologists monitoring the situation to work with other political scientists to come up with a vaccine.

Neither are there face masks strong enough to cover the mouths of the worst politicians out there so we do not hear their rhetoric. So we remain open to the risk of contracting this disease and suffering its aftermath – bad politicians being put in positions of authority.

Our situation is not hopeless. There might be some good political health out there; some politicians and voters who wash their hands of the nonsense of empty talk and promises.

Some aspirants might actually consult their constituents before designing their campaigns and writing their manifestos. A few will even be sensible and avoid mortgaging family property to spend billions violating electoral rules and regulations.

A very small minority will position themselves as servant leaders working for the people rather than lords aspiring to be small gods once elected into positions of power that will entitle them to be even further removed from the people that pay them and fund their lavishness.

There will likely be voters who follow the process keenly, read manifestos, and challenge candidate claims during interactions. But we can be certain that not all of us will Be Serious this season.

If we did, then our political landscape would change – in every country on this continent. If we did, then we would certainly achieve the civic aspirations that first created the need for this process of selecting political leadership of the people, by the people, from among the people.

We are already not being serious – and you can see that on most of the daft posters being placed in public view and circulating on social media.

We have been here before, and unless we all agree to Be Serious about political leadership, we will be back here again and again, suffering a political pandemic of empty promises leading to a five-year lockdown of shallow, lackluster, and debilitating leadership.

***

Simon Kaheru

www.skaheru.com
@skaheru