In a viral video, the eminent lawyer, Prof Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba was caught thoroughly vituperating at a conference host after being asked to make way for the grand arrival of Kisumu governor, Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o.
PLO, famous for his penchant for grandiloquence, was delivering a presentation at the 18th Tich Annual Scientific Conference in Kisumu.
“And that is part of the African problem. I am now being asked to stop because the governor is coming,” PLO surmised with magnificent, operatic indignation.
He then stormed out of the venue, leaving the moderator to offer nothing but a nervous, career-flashing-before-their-eyes laugh.
Reconstructing this clash of titanic egos from a snippet of viral footage is not a walk in the park.
For instance, it remains unclear whether organisers asked PLO to abort his intellectual flight mid-air, or if they simply wanted him to hit the pause button so the governor’s entourage could squeeze into the room.
What is blindingly clear, however, is that one esteemed professor was utterly allergic to another professor’s pompous, siren-blaring arrival stealing his hard-earned spotlight.
PLO’s dramatic exit perfectly bottles a broader social phenomenon: the collective eye-roll that occurs whenever a political figure hijacks a social function with their loud, heavily armed and deeply disruptive entourage.
It happens every other weekend at funerals, weddings and birthdays.
Yet, beneath our public groans and sudden, pious craving for order lies a hilarious mountain of hypocrisy, double standards and professional envy.
Let us be honest. Many citizens—and I shall leave it to the readers to decide where PLO sits on this spectrum—claim to loathe politics.
They claim to despise its gaudy trappings, but in reality, they are deeply jealous. They secretly crave the exact same room-silencing attention that politicians effortlessly command.
Despite their private sneers, the loudest critics usually melt into puddle-sized sycophants the moment they get a VIP handshake.
Take the late opposition doyen, Raila Odinga. He was practically a deity to both ivory-tower professors and street-level paupers alike.
I have personally witnessed intellectuals of high cerebral scrupulousness completely throw away their dignity and prostrate themselves in total surrender before him.
In his aura, they neither had speech nor mind of their own.
The tragic error we make is treating the theatre of politics as a cheap, useless circus. On the contrary, as Aristotle famously argued, politics is the master science and the highest potential good in a republic.
Taken as a whole, the messy practice of politics is the only thing pursuing the ultimate collective virtue and survival of a society.
Every other institution, including the noble, book-smart academia inhabited by PLO, serves vital purposes—but they all ultimately bow to politics.
Because of this elevated yet chaotic nature, politics is a remarkably complex game. Plato illustrated this beautifully in his Allegory of the Cave, where chained prisoners mistake mere shadows on the wall for actual reality.
In Plato’s utopian universe, the enlightened philosophers who manage to break their chains and glimpse the blinding light of truth have a moral obligation to walk back down into the dark, smelly cave to rescue their clueless comrades.
Instead, modern intellectuals behave exactly like PLO did in that Kisumu conference hall. They prefer to sit comfortably in their ivory towers, romanticising governance from a safe distance, tossing big words at the problem.
They mock the practical, gritty execution of politics, entirely forgetting that there is a brilliant, psychological method to the madness. There is a very calculated reason why politicians wear neon-bright clothing, use long words, dye their hair and arrive beautifully late only to leave spectacularly early. It is the raw choreography of power.
We must stop viewing politics as an annoying interruption to our civilised lives.
Politics is the very scaffolding holding up our civilisation. It dictates the bread on your table, the laws in your courts and your absolute survival.
And just like the process of preparing a sandwich, it may be messy but the bite is sweet.
Instead of dismissing the political arena with elitist disdain, we must collectively appreciate its indispensable place, purpose and value.
It is the grand theatre where a nation's destiny is forged. If the enlightened refuse to respect the arena, they willingly hand the stage over to the shadows.
Advocate of the High Court and a Senior Project Manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The views expressed here are the writer's own
