Political scientist Mutahi Ngunyi has pointed out that President Uhuru Kenyatta's focus on fighting corruption and quelling the political temperatures was derailing the focus on the Big Four Agenda - inherently stealing the attention from his legacy project.
Through his weekly talk show The 5th Estate, Mutahi opined that although Uhuru's firm hand in dealing with corruption had an aura of control over the country's affairs, it nevertheless oozed negative energy to the people.
"Energy flows where attention goes. If the attention is on the darkness of corruption, national energy will flow to a dark place but if the energy is on the positive dreams of Uhuru, energy will flow to a positive place.
[caption caption="President Uhuru Kenyatta"]
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Although Mutahi lauded the efforts to go after the big fish implicated in mega corruption scandals, he noted that rallying the country behind the hopes of prosperity would have a greater net effect on the economic development path.
Uhuru cannot spend an entire year of his last term fighting corruption and talking problems. We want him to talk dreams and preach hope," the columnist argued.
While acknowledging that the country is rotten to the core, Uhuru should give hope that things can and will be fixed: "A positive president is a powerful president".
In Mutahi's view, a fisher of men is a preacher of hope hence Uhuru should emulate Martin Luther King Jr; "He did not tell the African Americans that he had a plan. He told them that he had a dream.
"He had seen something yonder in the horizon that no one else had seen. It was not a plan, it had no statistics, or economic theories but a dream with pictures and African stories."
Mutahi added that given that "everywhere there is a dream, there is a thief... or two thieves," therefore, focusing on the thieves makes one lose the dream.
[caption caption="President Uhuru Kenyatta in a past event"]
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Warning that too much focus on corruption and politics risks derailing Uhuru's legacy, Mutahi concludes that "If the Carpenter from Nazareth had spent his life chasing the two thieves, the world would be in a dark place".
Here is the video:
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