MUSAU: Decision 2027: A call to simmer down, tame our passions

So goes the second opening line of Simmer Down, the consequential hit song that introduced the Jamaican music group, The Wailers, to musical success.

The year was 1963, and Jamaica had just attained independence from Britain. In the ghetto where Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer grew, however, the budding national pride was drowning in the emergence of a dangerous wave of political clientelism.

As it was wont to, the new wave manifested itself in all its inglorious forms—patronage, violence, social tensions, inequality and corruption.

“Long time people dem used to say, what sweet nanny goat a go run his belly,” the Wailers sang, appealing to their ghetto friends to control their tempers.

The three musicians would much later grow into international superstars whose politically conscious music won them international acclaim.

The year 2026 has started on an awfully ominous political note in Kenya. We are barely 10 days into the new year and the ugly din of our politics has hit crescendo.

The President has described one of his major competitors as a useless fellow, and is bent on dragging the country “to Singapore”. His erstwhile deputy has virulently mocked him on the pulpit, describing him as a serial political con.

A sitting member of Parliament has been frogmarched out of a political event after expressing her political opinion in front of a hostile crowd. She has since claimed she was almost sexually assaulted.

Except for a gun which jammed, a member of a county assembly would have offloaded his bullets on a hapless city MP. The would-be-victim’s reputation for generous use and handling of firearms precedes him.

A former Cabinet secretary has taken on the former DP with reckless abandon, hurling all manner of unprintable epithets against him. ODM, one of the country’s most successful political parties, is right now a tower of Babel of sorts.

Just a few months after the demise of their party leader, they are tearing each other apart like there is nothing else left. Their secretary general has publicly claimed that his own Minority leader at the National Assembly is a fraudster.

In turn, the Minority leader has publicly sized up the secretary general’s anatomy below the belt, and derogatively proclaimed its estimate. One of their deputy party leaders has accused a “dangerous cabal” within the party of being “foul-mouthed”, poisonous and charlatans.

A seemingly sober wing of the party has petitioned their leader for a “spitting session” to square out the differences.

Every politician who has a foul mouth is running it this year. And they are running it wildly. The sensible ones are holding back their tongue as though to allow the vile colleagues to paint the town with their vileness.

All institutions that are tasked to monitor and promote ethical leadership are still on long Christmas breaks. Our churches, mosques, temples and shrines are probably waiting on their main days of worship to present belated censures.

The greatest danger is not that viler politicians will join the choir and drown us in this type of noise, this early in the year. The greatest danger is that this noise will pick up among their supporters and capture the national mood.

Kenyans are truly a condemned lot. They are condemned to pretend that they dislike the conduct of their politicians but also to embrace, imitate and believe their entreaties, their call to hate others.

The country has only 19 months to go before the next general election. Granted that next year will largely be wasted on podiums, the country only has the next 12 months to prepare for a free, fair, credible and verifiable election.

The window to plug in the lessons of the last general election is closing. We have not delimited our boundaries since pre-2010 days. We neither tightened our campaign financing laws nor addressed IEBC’s corporate governance flaws which were raised by the Supreme Court in 2022.

We simply have a lot to do as a country. It’s time to simmer down.

Musau, an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, is a Senior Project Manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the position of FNF