THE SEASON FOR WONDERFUL POLITICAL PARODIES IS HERE.

In any political campaign period the electorate will always welcome wonderful parodies. After all, it is innate in people to love to see characters with traits of delicious whimsy pretending to have genius for leadership. This is the reason why crowds are turning out in large numbers to witness grown up men and women present memorable and delightful eccentricities in the on going constitutional campaign trail. Admittedly, the sensation of the season that the “No Brigade” is providing is the greatest because it is full of sinuous rhetoric, wild and pure nihilism and ecstasy than one is willing to admit.

However, I doubt whether their eccentricity will translate to votes. These kind of sublime eccentrics carry with them all the excitement and possibility only in so far as a political rally is concerned. Not that its architects are oblivious of this effect.

Understandably ecstatic over their sudden and rather unexpected good fortune from “unseen munificent hands”, many of those who fought for reforms in the years of despondency have found the temptation to join the anti-constitutional crusaders quite strong consequently many of these hitherto democratic warriors have rapidly succumbed at the moment of the country`s greatest need. This perhaps explains why many of the Johnny come latelies in the No Brigade have rhetoric which illustrates no general principles; the only principles that they illustrate are such as are valid only for them to observe. In other words the import of rhetoric has been lost in Kenya`s politics.

That is why men and women who in some ways never believed that their past convoluted plots will come back to haunt them are now resorting to empty rhetoric in order to turn the nation`s genuine need for reforms into a “Constitutional Pandemonium Show.” They think that in so doing they will instantly acquire heroic status that they enjoyed in the yester years. But unbeknown to them the hour of reckoning is nigh. Suffice it to say that however much they squirm they will only succeed in turning themselves into twisted constitutional freaks. Their antics will never in anyway reverse the ticking constitutional clock.

It is largely due to the dangers of misusing rhetoric that the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Gorgias lampooned the more technical approach to rhetoric, with its emphasis on persuasion rather than truth. Aristotle too in his work Rhetoric, defined the function of rhetoric as being, not that of persuasion, but rather that of “discovering all the available means of persuasion,” thereby emphasizing the winning of an argument by persuasive marshaling of truth, rather than the swaying of an audience by an appeal to their emotions. He regarded rhetoric as the counterpart, or sister art, of logic.

Impossible to gainsay, however, is the reverberation that their campaign is causing in Kalenjin dominated parts of Rift Valley where people are likely to vote against the proposed constitution almost to a man not so much because of the contentious clauses in the proposed constitution but because of pure ethnic considerations.
It appears as if the natives of Rift Valley are still heavy consumers of the traditional ethnic-baiting tactics. They still think that is prudent for them to unquestionably follow creative ethnic inspiration from their “de facto political guardians.

TOME FRANCIS,
BUMULA.
http://twitter.com/tomefrancis