President Kibaki makes the State of the Nation address  Photo courtesy

We live in one the most scenic, serene places in the world. Indeed, if you have traveled a little beyond our boundaries, you will notice that this is a country that would be attracting tourists beyond our capacity to accommodate. Yet, today, some of the desert countries have bigger number of tourist visitations than we do. Despite being in desserts, they attract many visitors because of the focus and dedication their national leaders and the citizenry place on development. While in the Arabian desserts of Dubai, Kuwait and other such cities the leaders discuss and engage on how best to make their countries the future cities of business and pleasure in the world, our leaders sit in our August House discussing The State of The Nation.

In their state of the nation discussions, they spend about 3 quarters of discussion time discussing who holds the record of defection in the house. While in as many or almost all acknowledge openly that they hold no ideology of any sort and are in convergence with each other on that score, the only area that debate divides them is on who has the least fidelity to ideology.

Meanwhile, the citizenry, equally averse to issues relishes being fed on propaganda, non-issues and irrelevancies. A good number punch away similar irrelevancies about defections, tribal numbers and alliances all day on various blogs, forums and all avenues of social media.

They then sit back with satisfaction at how intelligent they are able to work out the arithmetic that will put into leadership another lot of scoundrels into position. All the while, any meaningful debate on issues is given a wide berth by both the leaders and their equally myopic followers.

Down the line, a few months when life becomes a little tough for the myopic followers, they make a little noise about the cost of living and feeble threats to take action and deny the scoundrels the pecks and opulence in the next election.

All this time, in India, Singapore, Malaysia; what we commonly call the Asian Tigers, young men and women are busy creating business opportunities online.  Today, most major companies and organizations doing business will rely on India's IT technocrats for one service or the other. Our lot will stop for a moment and glance that direction, get wowed by how those countries have grown in leaps and bounds and then settle back to begin yet some myopic topic on non-issues.

Then some scandal crops up and the myopic citizenry finds new ground to further their strong and unquestioned loyalty to the lethargy that leads them not on the side of justice but narrow tribal interests.

You can only imagine when such minds finally finds themselves in the seclusion of a voting booth! When the result begin to trickle in, it is a national disaster! And then we are shocked, you mean so and so made it to Parliament? How could so and so not make it when all year round for 5 years we never discuss issues?

Most debates on social media you can only waddle into if you are the idlest of minds. If the intellectuals are the ones running this low on ideology and focus, what could be the rot in ideology down at the bottom where the word ideology needs to be first defined before being internalized?

For this is the state of the nation.

By Otieno Sungu.
The Clean Kenya Campaign-TCKC.
0729294743.