By Barrack Muluka

If you have not yet read Homer’s famous epic, The Iliad and the Odyssey, you are truly to be envied. For, you have a whole treasure trove of knowledge and entertainment waiting to be explored. It is in this amazing store that you will discover the young man, Prometheus, among dozens of other tragic heroes.

Now Prometheus was sent by his freezing people to wrestle fire from domination of the gods. But when he got there, Prometheus forgot his mission. He quickly found his place in the ring of the gods. He began enjoying with them the warmth of the fire. In our time and space, you are frequently reminded of this young man of ancient Greek mythology.

Long before I began dreaming of being crowned a junior Laibon, I sat and learnt at the feet of Prof Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o. He taught me such strange expressions as ‘political opprobrium’ and filled up my head with philosophies and ideas. That was many years ago. We were youthful sophomores, swaggering at the University of Nairobi, saying big things with big names. But if our teachers could not go beyond the sound bytes of the words they formed with their mouths and put into our heads, we took them seriously. At any rate, some of us did.

It was the age of idealism, agitation and student unrest. We were taught by red-eyed-dyed-in-the-wool fire-eating revolutionaries. They rained against the Nyayo Government and taught us to follow suit.

Professors of political science made us understand that revolution was not some abstract stuff that you just theorised about in class. It called for practical commitment and participation. And so we would every so often burst into the streets of Nairobi to demonstrate our commitment to change. For their part, the Kenya Police, led by reservist Patrick Shaw, would clobber us silly.

The university was aonce the incubator of political revolutionaries and intellectual initiates. Our minds clean slates, eager to be written on. We were swooned by the men and women of letters. But they were not just men and women of letters. We modelled ourselves against them. We worshipped at their intellectual shrines.

The kinetics of politics have brought us a long way. Revolutionaries of yesteryear now sit pretty in Government. And you cannot help but wonder about the good men and women we keep losing to the gods. President Mwai Kibaki has never disappointed me. He never pretended for a single day that he was progressive. Even when he gabbled through high-sounding mumbo jumbo that some professor of words had concocted for him on December 30 2002 in Uhuru Park, I never believed him for a second. I knew he was a rigid Mugumo tree politician. It would be easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle than to make him pro-people.

Fall of good men

Raila Odinga almost had me, and Anyang’ Nyong’o certainly had me. Today, I watch my professor say hard-to-believe things on TV and vote with the wrong side in Parliament. I cannot help wondering what goes wrong. I saw it with Prof Kivutha Kibwana before, and with others. Young Ababu Namwamba has gone down the political drain faster than it takes to say Tawfiq.

Like Prof Nyong’o, Ababu almost had me. And so I get very afraid. I fear for the fall of good men and women. What happens when they get to Parliament? I have had occasion to fool around with politics. As I watch Prof Nyong’o, a ‘born-again’ James Orengo and a repackaged Ababu Namwamba, I cannot help asking myself turbing questions. Just supposing I had actually made it to this House, would I be doing the things these gentlemen do? Would I take the curious positions they have taken on corruption, on the maize scandal, on taxation of MPs, on media law and on so many other things?

Would I be Raila Odinga’s political spanner boy, or would I be reading William Ruto’s lips and amplifying the sound? Would I be Musalia Mudavadi’s sounding board?

But even if I did any of these shameful things, Kenyans would need not despair. For even before they were welded together by chance and circumstance, President Kibaki was already a worn out tubeless political tyre. For his part, Raila Odinga is a slow punctured tube that has known better political times. As the reigning dreamer of dreams and an aspiring Junior Laibon, I told you two weeks ago that it is just a matter of days before the son of the bull can chasten himself with the words, ‘how are the mighty fallen!’

The age of the new leadership is at hand. We may not know how it comes, for sure, or when. But it is coming. Raila and Kibaki are on the wrong side of history. Those who hang on their coat tails will go with them.

I watched them in Parliament on Thursday. Make no mistake; President Kibaki and Premier Odinga have had their time. They are a spent force. And Prometheus is sinking with the gods in the sea of political opprobrium. Such is the curse of those who do not listen to the oracles.

—The writer ([email protected]) is a publishing editor and media consultant with Mvule Publishers.