There is this story I repeatedly tell my children to illustrate how people complicate their lives by being economical with the truth.

Some young lady, a Kenyan millennial of course, bought an expensive perfume and wore it when visiting her parents. Her mother got a whiff of it and asked her the price.

Fearing that the old lady would berate her for spending so much money on a scent, yet she was cash-strapped, she quoted a figure lower than half the price. What she didn’t anticipate was that the mother would want the same perfume for herself.

When she was leaving her parents’ home, her mother gave her money for two bottles, based on the price she had mentioned.
This meant she would have to top up to buy them, report back that the prices had increased, or that the supplier had run out of stock. The millennial lied, and would have to tell another lie to cover for the first one.

This article is not about millennials and their poverty-is-the-enemy mantra or constant whining about their imagined fears.

It is about how hard it is to tell one lie – or how one lie births many more till people stop believing you, and whatever you say is treated as a lie until confirmed otherwise.

This is the situation we have in Kenya today when it comes to governance. There is a trust deficit between the public and the government, or generally the State, because our political leaders and even bureaucrats peddle half-truths.

Our politicians ride on lies to their elective positions, and afterwards have to keep telling us more lies to explain their previous lies. Even the bureaucrats have to defend those lies by spewing more lies.

To be a good liar – is that even a good thing? – one must have a good memory, but our politicians are not that lucky and forget their statements immediately a microphone is pulled away from them. When they get the microphone again, they spew more lies, creating an infinite line of lies.

Kenyan politicians thrive on spewing lies about almost everything under the sun. They lie to us about the state of the economy and other governance-related stuff, and tell lies about each other.

One might think that when they are telling lies about each other, the voters are not affected, but nah, we are still the losers because they move around the country, and the world, to tell lies, and it is the taxpayers who pick up the tab.

For a better part of this month, we have been treated to a circus by the President and his former deputy who figured that Kenyans needed to know how and why they fell out, and which of their minions were responsible.

It has been a season of accusations and counteraccusations by two people who spent months telling us theirs was a match made in heaven because they are God-fearing teetotalers and would not commit the kind of sins the previous regime committed.

As we have seen, they were not telling the truth, and now each is blaming the other, and they are still not telling the truth.

The President said the falling-out was caused by, among other factors, his former deputy pulling him down by failing to defend government projects such as the avoidable housing projects and the SHI/SHA imbroglio.

The former deputy says he told his former boss that these were some of the things Kenyans did not want, but he did not listen.

There is video evidence of the former deputy defending the two projects – and many others, including the punitive 2024 Finance Bill – and asking Kenyans to support government initiatives. That is proof that neither is telling the truth.

Looking back, their campaign was based on half-truths, and Kenyans believed them, and they will not stop peddling more because they have to cover for the ones they told during the electioneering period.

Believing what either of them says about the other would be a big mistake because neither of them is a saint, and it would not be surprising if they come together at some point and shamelessly continue peddling more half-truths.

Calling them childish would be an insult to children who are already dealing with many issues, including being blocked from staging plays at the schools’ drama festival and getting teargas canisters lobbed at them in the process.

Expecting them to change their ways and start telling us the truth this late in their lives would be another mistake. The most we can do is point out to them that we know their wicked, wicked ways, and we will never allow them to trick us again.

— The writer is the Managing Editor of the Alliance for Science (AfS). These views are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the position of AfS or its partners