Election 2007, Cherchez La Différence

[Nick de Cusa]

Je tombe sur un article de The Nation qui m'amuse parce qu'il aurait pu être écrit pour ma grande nation.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200701020170.html

Extraits:

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the captive state of Kenya.

If the Islamists in Somalia were to invade the sacred soil of our homeland, or the Norwegians or Martians or Neptunians or any other group of foreigners were to invade us and impose their rule, we wouldn't be any more of an occupied territory than we are today.

We are captive, not to a foreign power, but to our own brothers, sisters, fathers, (a few) mothers, uncles and aunties. We are the captives of a class, the political class.

…

This is the year that politicians reaffirm their commitment to their tribes in night meetings and confirm their commitment to Kenya in the light of day.

Those who had changed their numbers dust up old sim cards, call up the loyal old friends they shafted in January 2003 and flatter the market women whose smell they couldn't stand for four years.

Politicians, who by their very construction are incapable of keeping a true friend and wouldn't recognise loyalty if you shoved it up their nose, will suddenly be surrounded by a retinue of village failures, gritting their teeth and drinking warm beer with every description of low life.

…

Editors, whose calls ministers might not take under normal circumstances, will have their butts kissed in an effort to pass off garbage propaganda as news.

The corruptible will be offered small handouts, others will be co-opted into "think tanks" for politicians from their tribes. Of course no politician takes the advice of the so-called think tanks, they use them as a method of buying loyalty by making people feel needed, wanted, important, consulted.

Politicians will read statements at press conferences, setting out their "vision". The statements will have been written by other people. Little or no research will have gone into these "visions" and if they were to be implemented the country would probably explode. But they are not for implementation, they are for reading at press conferences.

…

Around August, out will come the manifestos, most of them the tepid work of ageing and unenthusiastic leftists, others cut-and-pastes from the Internet. Yet others will be an attempt to re-live the Kenyatta (pour les Français, lire: de Gaulle) years and Sessional Paper No 10 of 1965. You will comb the manifestos for a single, miserable new idea and you wouldn't find it.

…

Don't pay a bribe, don't take one and if you have ever bribed me, please let me know. I will put your cheque in the mail, with specific instructions where to put your money in future.

Mutuma Mathiu is the managing editor, Sunday Nation.

Il a du style, cet homme.

[Invité jabial]

En effet.