By TEE NGUGI

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Imagine this scene. A man in a suit surrounded by gawking uniformed officers. One officer crouches before the suited man, shining his shoes with a cloth. The shoes are sparkling, but the officer keeps shining them. The man in the suit has one hand in the pocket, making stale jokes at which the officers surrounding him fall over with laughter. After his shoes are shined to within an inch of their death, he proceeds to greet government officers lining up to receive him. The person first in line begins to bow before the demigod.

Well, this is not a figment of my imagination. This is a video doing the rounds on social media. The man in a suit is a newly minted Cabinet minister.

Going by the comments, the video has greatly incensed people. The reason for the outrage is because there is something degrading about a human being, who is not a shoe shiner, but a uniformed government officer, crouching before another man to shine his shoes. That is not part of the officer’s job description. We know of police officers being demeaned by government officials. This video captures the master-slave relationship between high ranking government officials and their juniors.

Culture of supplication

The video also depicts another decadent aspect of our political culture. Why do officials, who should be busy in their offices working to remove Kenya from the list of poorest countries in world, line up to receive a minister or permanent secretary? Why do officials bow as if they are greeting a monarch, not an official of a supposedly democratic republic? Where did this culture of supplication before officials come from?

This culture of making demigods out of officials even became a lesson in a Grade Two book, which was later withdrawn by the Ministry of Education. One passage in the book read:

“I saw a helicopter / It was flying low / It was flying just above the trees / ‘Our leader! Our leader!’ we shouted / It was our Member of Parliament / He travels in a plane. It belongs to him / Three big cars arrived in our compound / They, too, belonged to him / He came out and greeted us / His wife waved at us. She had golden rings in (sic) her hand.”

The book was teaching children three lessons that make Kenya a poor Third World country: To worship money, no matter how acquired; women’s ambition should be to wear gold rings; and we must mindlessly cheer politicians, not question their decadence and hedonism.

Dwarf ambitions

If there ever was a passage that captured a country’s dwarf ambitions, that was it.

The video of the “hustler minister” pontificating to a reverential audience while an officer crouches to shine his shoes shows the cultural distance we have to travel before we can escape our Third World status.

China, through its Silk Road initiative, is planning for the next 100 years. Meanwhile, our officials are reinventing self-aggrandisement and megalomania.