Mocking DP for luggage stunt betrayed class bias
Video clips shared online show Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua on the tarmac at the Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi on June 12 boarding a Kenya Airways flight to Mombasa. He’s all casual – wearing loafers, white slacks and a patterned shirt. Carrying a wheeled lavender-blue suitcase, he shakes hands with a line of people before getting onto a mobile airstair and disappearing into the belly of the plane.
The next day, members of the National Assembly, with the Speaker’s nod, took a break from their scheduled business to debate this episode, spending more than an hour discussing Gachagua’s theatrics.
Some MPs sounded genuinely perturbed that the DP had taken a commercial flight even though (they claimed) a budget exists to pay for his travels by fancier, comfier means, presumably by private jet, where he would not have to mix with the hoi polloi.
Minority Whip Junet Mohamed suggested that Gachagua had demeaned his office by carrying his own luggage. “The DP has portrayed himself as a person who is not interested in his position,” Junet offered, People Daily reported. Mombasa Woman Rep Zamzam Mohammed chimed in with the farfetched claim that the sight of the DP wheeling his own luggage had tarnished Kenya’s image.
Let’s set aside the trigger for the MPs’ outbursts. They were exploiting the opportunity supplied by this minor event to needle Gachagua for his newfound enthnocentric political crusade. It was a gratuitous pile-on, but that’s a separate issue.
What a waste of time, though. You will have to look extremely hard around the world to find another country where lawmakers get worked up about a national leader flying commercial and then devote time in a legislative chamber to froth about it. Why? Because it happens so often, it doesn’t bear remarking.
But this is Kenya, whose citizens have deeply rooted attitudes about social class and status and what’s expected of people in high office and the moneyed. The simple-minded view is that such people are above menial tasks.
Because class consciousness is so deep in our society – especially among the better educated, part of the legacy of colonialism; the affliction Frantz Fanon writes about in Black Skin, White Masks – people at the top are seen or carry themselves as being superior to those below them, so in the division of labour, menial tasks go to those of lower status.
The views of Junet and others also pointed to the importance (to them) of symbolic status. Seeing Gachagua as a symbol of authority and power, the disapproving MPs may be forgiven for concluding that when he carries his own luggage, he undermines that status.
But they stretched their arguments too far. In one of the most laughable remarks you’ll ever hear an MP make, they suggested that because taxpayers provide more resources to our leaders , they need to delegate menial tasks to others so that they can move around unburdened and in luxury.
Junet and his colleagues have a warped, outdated view of leadership. They need to read more history. They will discover that other leaders have challenged the notion that they are above menial tasks.
The most notable historical example is Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian lawyer and anticolonialism campaigner. Gandhi used a charkha to spin clothes for himself and others and cleaned latrines at his spiritual retreat, among other menial chores.
In more recent times, former US President Jimmy Carter, after retiring, worked as a volunteer for the non-profit group Habitat for Humanity, hammering nails into trusses and pushing wheelbarrows to help build homes for low-income families.
Gandhi, Carter and others, each in his own way, demonstrated that leadership isn’t about status, as our politicians seem to think, but about understanding the needs of the people they lead and leading by example.
While Gachagua’s gesture of wheeling his own luggage into an aircraft didn’t look authentic – the suitcase seemed too light to be carrying anything, coming across as just a prop in a PR stunt - it wasn’t an example of undignified behaviour.
