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Media talk shows have a democratic function. They constitute a public sphere where citizens seek information, debate issues, challenge office holders and get feedback.

Often the ruling party and political interest groups benefit from political talk-shows because such they afford them the opportunity to gauge public opinion and mobilise the public. The downside of talk-shows is the risk of peddling of misinformation and disinformation by interest groups.

Nevertheless, talk shows are very critical in a democracy. They give the government the platform to convince the people that what they are doing is of interest to the masses.

They also provide the parties out of power the opportunity to point out what the ruling party is doing that is not in the interest of the public, or what it ought to do and its not doing to address the plight of citizenry.

Recently, a senator reminded President William Ruto that his biggest opposition in the next election will be the very Kenyans that he over-promised in the run up to 2022 polls.

To add to this analysis of what the President is up to in 2027, his people in Parliament and the ones he has put in charge of his UDA party are holding the ladder for his biggest opposition in 2027.

If MPs and Cabinet Secretaries cannot explain government bills, policies and tell us the success stories of the government, then there can only be two reasons. Either the regime is doing nothing that advances people’s quality of life or it has inept leaders who cannot articulate its policies and programmes.

Look at the Haiti situation and how our Foreign Affairs ministry is conspicuously mute on it. One would expect that a well-coordinated State machinery would coherently explain why Kenya is on this mission, what is in it for us and how it is a service to humanity.

It is an open secret that even the folks on social media platforms ‘parroting’ for this government and pushing hashtags act with very little strategic nuance.

You can count all of them for the mechanical fashion in which they lack depth. In the last few days they’ve all been on Haiti and they are all saying the same stuff with very little illumination of what this mission is about.
These folks will post that the President is hosting the Haitian Premier, is holding Cabinet meetings in Kakamega or flying out to Silicon Valley or that the shilling has gained against the dollar and that the cost of fuel has gone down without foresight or context.

Often the outcome is embarrassing. Look at the price fuel or unga, for instance. Their mechanical postings have been met by contextual analysis that speaks of a government whose economic benchmark is the cost of fuel and unga.

What they end up confronting are rebuttals that show that even with the reduced cost of fuel, unga and the strengthening shilling, to the common mwananchi it is still clear that life was way better during President Uhuru Kenyatta’s time and the taxes were not as high and no one was taxing avocados back then.

Simply put, the ruling party operatives are symptomatic of how the regime suffers the lack of any substantive development record that its people can articulate.

—The writer is PhD candidate in political communication