Source:
www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000058735&story_title=Teachers%20of%20rhetoric%20should%20further%20deconstruct%20poll%20messages Teachers of rhetoric should further deconstruct poll messagesUpdated Thursday, May 24 2012 at 22:00 GMT+3
By Jesse Masai
Teachers and students of Kenyan rhetoric should come out of their closets, and help us understand some of the messages being passed around by our politicians.
In attempting to do this, allow me to limit myself to Team Uhuru Kenyatta’s recent party launch which, deservedly, exceeded all expectations in the way of splendour.
Team Uhuru is, however, being allowed to get away with a few, yet critical “terminological inexactitudes.”
John Sakaja vs. JFKThe reportedly 27-year-old chair of The National Alliance (TNA) gave us a Kenyan version of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address at the dawn of the heady 1960s, whose clarion call was that a new generation was now on stage.
Teachers and students of rhetoric should help us understand why Sakaja found it necessary to build his message around JFK, and why he did not go far enough to embrace the overriding idea for which the American is best recalled: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”
For a political outfit that may safely be considered as being on the Kenyan Right, this idea of limited government would have been apt, and so well captured.
JFK is also recalled for a commitment to civil rights not seen in the White House since Abraham Lincoln; the feel-good idea that America could put someone on the moon in his lifetime; and the implicit assurance that a young Catholic from Boston could occupy the famous address along Pennsylvania Avenue without facing Rome.
Candidate Uhuru is a relatively young Catholic who schooled in Boston; occupies a space and time in Kenyan history in which millions are still asking for basic rights; and has not — sadly –— been known for a definitive, major, long-running transformative idea. Could Sakaja and, in effect, Team Uhuru, have played the JFK link better?
Eugene Wamalwa vs. MLKLess the cadence of preachers in the African-American tradition, viewers of the TNA launch would have been forgiven if they had believed it was 1963, they were gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Capitol Hill, and the Rev (Dr) Martin Luther King (or MLK) Jnr was addressing them.
But rather than merely run with the “I have a dream” portion of Dr King’s self-titled message — a feat first accomplished on the electoral stage by a poetic young girl at Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s campaign launch in 2007 — alluding to the preacher man would have been an opportune moment for the Saboti legislator to do his own vision thing (difficult as it increasingly appears for most presidential wannabes).
MLK was, as he declared in several of his sermons, concerned with the dimensions of a complete life: optimal actualisation of oneself; an upward peace with God; and harmonious relations with fellow men and nations, anchored in truth and justice. For a member of Cabinet tasked with justice, national cohesion and constitutional affairs, no platform would have been more opportune.
And for a legislator who — like yours truly — hails from a county riddled with historical injustices, we could have been treated to a decidedly nuanced, but still more beautiful speech-making around this.
Young people in Trans Nzoia — and the rest of Kenya — want much more than to see a younger face in State House; they want truth, justice and reconciliation. Was an opportunity to communicate this lost?
Uhuru Kenyatta vs. BHO
A careful review of presidential speeches from June 1st, 1963 to February 28th, 2008 will confirm that candidate Uhuru took a major rhetorical leap with his stated position on historical injustices.
In effect, he has firmly thrust historical injustices into the country’s electoral lexicon; the cliché was fast becoming the disused, misused and abused property of politicians on Kenya’s Left, as indeed our third co-principal, Dr Kofi Annan.
Pio Gama Pinto, Bildad Kaggia, Jaramogi Oginga and others must be poking fun at Jomo Kenyatta, seeing as Nairobi is these days firmly in Beijing’s corner and the younger Kenyatta agrees with them that something is fundamentally wrong with the Kenyan State.
Perhaps Kenya’s vibrant online community should laugh less at the younger Kenyatta, and instead hold his feet by the fire on this issue.
If he could pull a Biblical Zaccheus, candidate Uhuru could effectively put to shame those in our politics who are presently deluded that historical injustices are nothing to worry about.
Should we, like the Obama Nation, believe him? Is his change we can xerox, or one he should keep?
Uhuru is campaigning in poetry; one has to wonder if he will govern in prose. Wonder, because he is flirting with America’s Left, which would ordinarily be his archrival Raila Odinga’s domain.
Is Third Way politics, in recent years associated with both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, now effectively with us? And who will now run with “Compassionate Conservatism” and the “Great Society?”
The writer is a researcher on public affairs.