Take your civic responsibility seriously -This reality is now sinking after the elections

The hotly contested elections are behind us now – it is actually over 5 months since we went to the ballot on 8th August 2022. The president, governors, and all other elected officials have long been sworn into office.

As of now, they have since pocketed their millions for high-end cars, their hefty monthly cheques have become normal in their bank accounts and they are already on multi-million medical cover for themselves and their immediate family members.

This is all funded by your taxes paid through sweat and blood. Life is good for them and their families.

I’m sure and am sorry they switched off or changed their numbers as soon as they were sworn in. Or does the guy you were dancing for, hate your friends and neighbors because they supported someone else picking up your phone calls?

For most of us ordinary people, nothing has changed. If anything, life has become harder with the end of subsidies. Taxes have not only gone up but new ones are being introduced left, right and center. Cash transfers for vulnerable people have not been released since June 2022.

They have told us to ‘vumilie’ while they themselves ‘eat life’ with a big spoon. How unfair.

I have said time and again, and I will still repeat it here –the people we elect into office affect our lives individually and collectively in a big way!

But who is to blame for this sad outcome of things? Is it the elected leaders? Do we blame the tribe? Do we blame the gods? Or do we blame our friends and neighbors who voted for the wrong person according to your opinion?

Those who care to listen or have followed me on social media and in the Saturday Standard newspaper will know that I warned of lucking danger on how we vote. I warned of the tragedy of turning national elections into a tribal affair and a time to ‘eat’ and con political candidates.

Now it is time to reap what we sowed.

Here are the 3 types of people who MUST not complain and MUST now lie on the bed we made for ourselves:

1. For those who did not vote without any good reason – the last elections were eventually won based on low turnout on voting day. Almost the same number of people as those who voted for the winner did not turn up on Election Day. If you are one of them, then you failed your country and ultimately failed to exercise your greatest civic responsibility as a citizen;
2. You took bribes from political candidates – I am on record saying any single coin dished out to bribe voters to vote for this or that candidate will have to be recovered in one way or the other. Those who took those KES 50, KES 100, KES 200, KES 500, KES 1,000, or any other amount in the name of ‘eating campaign money’, you sold your Birth Right – so keep quiet when patriots are talking;
3. Finally, you voted based on your tribe or ethnic leanings – it is better if you never went to school if your basis of evaluating a political candidate is speaking your mother tongue. The gods would have done a great favor to this nation if you were never born!

For avoidance of doubt, I have never tasted (eaten) any single coin from a political candidate. Only once in the early 1980s did a political candidate buy me and many other school children mandazi’s valued at 50 cents then.

Neither do I have any recollection of ever even taking campaign materials – caps, T-shirts and the likes from any candidate.

Yet, I have voted in every single election in the last 25 years.

If we made ‘foolish’ choices on the ballot – tafadhali tukumbali tupangwe tu!

God bless Kenya.