It is more than a year since the country held a General Election. After going through the rigors of court petitions, most elected leaders are yet to settle on their jobs.

Indeed, some of the emotive issues emerging out of the last General Election are subject of the ongoing national dialogue pitting President William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza and the Opposition Azimio la Umoja coalition.

These include demands for an audit of the election, reconstitution of the national electoral election as well as diversity and inclusion in public appointments. Some members of Parliament are yet to make their maiden speeches and only the first batch of Constituency Development Funds have been dispatched.

The Ruto administration has just started implementing its first budget. It is therefore worrying that politicians have already started declaring their intentions on the posts they will seek in the next election, which is four years away.

This is a very unfortunate attitude in our politics which ends up keeping the country in perpetual agitation from one poll to the other.

It is fact that the major focus of any politician after winning elections, is how to get re-elected.
And for the losers, making the winners fail through unhealthy distraction becomes their main pre-occupation at the expense of public interest.

The result is that the needs of the ordinary people take the back seat with the competing interests of the political elite occupying the centre stage for five years.

A country cannot develop in an environment replete with constant and putrid competition in which the politics of compromise and cooperation is seen as a weakness. The ideal situation is that after health and fair competition, leaders-bother winners and losers-should team up and harness politics as an enterprise for the advancement of public good.

There is a lesson framers of the Constitution wrote that the elections should be held after every five years. The five- year hiatus is meant to give those given the responsibility to fulfil their agendas and execute the people’s mandate.

The period is meant to give them space to implement their development programmes and vision for public good. It is time to ignore talk about the next election and let the elected leaders deliver.