Democracies the world over are increasingly morphing into populist contests.

Catch phrases that can easily go viral and create the spectacle are more privileged by political communication strategies. Guy Debord conceptualises the spectacle as a sociopolitical dispensation that alienates individuals and connects them to the spectacular pseudo-world.

And the spectacle continues in our politics today as we witness the continuation of campaign like rallies and rhetoric from the political class. The political class is perpetually in the business of creating a rosy picture whilst in an ideal democracy you would imagine the outcome and impact of policy implementation on the citizenry would win the vote in the next election.

The regime has everything going on for it. A plan that won them an election, enough numbers in Parliament they have used to force the legal frameworks for all their policies and a dearth of a strong and self generating civil society.

The Opposition, on the other hand, though robust and made up of very authoritative voices, seems to be walking on eggshells. On the one hand there is the issue of holding the government accountable, while on the other hand are conflicting interests as the quest to galvanise the disillusioned masses against the regime is complicated by the big-name politicians in Azimio, some who have ambitions and bank on a solid Azimio voting block come 2027.

This has played to the advantage of the Kenya Kwanza regime and its one advantage they are willing to do anything to hold on. Nevertheless, in both the government and Opposition there seems to be shortage of ideological reformers who are bold enough to anchor themselves on the weight of public interest to constructively help the cause.

No one from regime has come out strongly to articulate the grand plan with a substantive illumination of what it has that is great, the pain points we are to experience and the eventual light at the end of the President’s radical shift from the debt burdens.

It is one thing to have the President depart from the norm and belabour explanations in every public address, but it is another to have voices that disagree with him from within, air that in the public, and still advance substantive reasons why the direction taken is the best way to go.

Failure to do that has created an information vacuum, a dearth of clarity of where we are going and of course emergence of the narrative that our country has been taken over by the Bretton Woods institutions.

The lack of deep engagement with issues and attendant articulation of these issues seems to our main undoing. In fact, many a times whether for the regime or Opposition often times articulation of issues have been debased a cause that frivolous voices that have either politicised issues or personalised and tribalised the same.  At the dawn of the NARC administration in 2003, the Kibaki administration did splendidly well to address our economic issues. However, as a country we lost it because we sorted our economic issues but failed to address the elephant in the room – our politics.

You see, addressing the economic base and not our politics of deceit and treachery has had our politics mess our economic recovery. Suffice to say, the leadership immediately after the fall of Kanu had the best opportunity to clean up our politics and institute a political dispensation that would have sustainably addressed the socioeconomic insecurities of majority Kenyans. Instead, the opportunity that we had with the NARC administration to bury tribalism and cronyism once and for all was sacrificed at the altar that gave tribalism wings to fly.

Today, our tribalised and politicised articulation of national issues consistently trivialises public interest discourse and this is the harbinger of stunted economic development.

—  The writer is a PhD candidate in political communication