In traditional dramatic scripts, writers and playwrights including the Greek tragedians through their creative conceit always had this stage christened, the level of supreme ordeal. It is that level where everything goes wrong for the principal protagonist. You see it in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when everything goes against Hamlet in his procrastination-laden revenge mission against his evil uncle Claudius, who had killed his father by pouring a mug of poison in the King’s ear while he was taking a nap. But Hamlet is a tragedy that ends in a blood birth.
Perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio in the iconic movie, Titanic, is one principal protagonist who depicts a great script that had the level of supreme ordeal that puts even the most stoic movie fan on the edge. As the Titanic was sinking, he experienced the supreme ordeal as he was trying to save himself and his love from the wrath of a jilted and dumped lover and survive the sinking ship only that by running away from the fiancé of his lover, he was running further down rather than up to float. A beautiful love story but tragic, nevertheless.
The situation in Kenya today is probably close to a supreme ordeal going by the headline of one of the top newspapers in the country “A broken system” and the avalanche of depressing headlines we have been having in the media in the recent past. Well, when such depressing stories are carried in any society’s main public purveyors of public interest information, then the situation is a lot more dire than normal and mere action by disclosure is not enough – they must act by shouting. That is the situation we are in today with very little glimmers of hope.
The Kenya shilling is on a free fall, the cost of living is anything but just a buzzword for majority of Kenyans who are struggling. It is indeed broken and our parliamentarians, save for a few, are either mute or all crying that Parliament has been captured.
Even the few UDA and Kenya Kwanza perceived dissidents are vocal yes, but on social media where their little noise reminds me of Hamlet who when presented with that opportunity to slay his murderous uncle, decided not to. His convenient excuse which would have saved the bloodbath at the end of the play – his uncle was praying, and he did not want to kill him at his holiest moment because that would have sent him to heaven.
They cannot behave like Hamlet, yet they have the power to legislate and deal with the current challenges by passing bills that the people who voted for them will celebrate. Ironically, it does appear that to some extent they celebrate passing bills that easily lend themselves to litigation and probably back to Parliament and there seems to be something fishy.
What is this incentive to pass legislation that gets stopped by the courts? Not once and not even twice and probably we haven’t seen the end of this cycle. What happened to public interest as the interest of the common mwananchi and should it be defined by the ruling regime or the constitution? And aren’t the representatives of the people in parliament better suited to safeguard the public interest?
The behaviour by our MPs who seem to be doing a lot, of everything and nothing about the plight of mwananchi is baffling. What these MPs, especially the KK MPs should know, is that the rise of the hustler from a chicken seller to the presidency will be a sad story if they keep on cheering everything including bills that worsen the situation or go mute when the king needs to hear wise counsel. Already the ‘leaves are falling’ and the one question that needs a study is what really happened to the ruling coalition MPs?
The voting pattern in Parliament, especially on the acts that have since proved very unpopular with the people calls for the interrogation of whose interest they are serving. How come we have MPs, Senators and Governors who voted, supported and are in the top leadership of this regime yet even in their strongholds they cannot address their own people in the presence of the president who has pushed a galaxy of “pro-poor legislation?” Governors, MPs, senators, and any political leader supporting this regime have increasingly become unpopular together with their president and they seem not to care. Why is it that bills they pass to legislative acts in record time are stopped by the courts for being unconstitutional, discriminatory on Kenyans and lacking the requisite legislative underpinning?
When representatives of the people pass both anti the people and unconstitutional legislation, the courts will always do what the courts have to do, and it is unfortunate when the judiciary as a whole is framed as anti-public interests. It is unfortunate and this trend by the MPs who threaten to cut funding to the judiciary is a new low in our democracy.
It is equivalent to the Greek playwrights’ crafting of the level of the supreme ordeal, but without the ray of hope and the half-happy ending we see in Titanic. Well, we are not a country that can sink to rise no more or end anywhere close to what we see in Hamlet. But we need some glimmer of hope or an institution we can look up to and say, we shall get out bruised, but out, nevertheless.
The writer is a PhD Candidate in Political Communications.
