Being intellectually smart can work against you in a competitive environment especially if your opponents have gaffes as their middle names. The goofs end up sounding more natural and real while the smooth chaps takes the shape of programmed speech.
Raising the bar can be counterproductive when your competitors engage in reverse logic where instead of aspiring to measure up they bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. Just ask one smooth Barrack Obama who is till smarting from just mouthing the simple work BITTER while his competitor Hilary escapes with linguistic murder by baptizing lies as misspeaking.
Trust politicians to spin any vice into a virtue. It was the British wartime Premier Winston Churchill who when caught lying countered that he was simply engaged in a terminological inexactitude. Give it to Churchill, the same bloke who turned military defeat on its head by claiming that retreating is advancing from the opposite direction.
Sanitize rotThe above examples give a glimpse of how smart leaders can become victims of their own sharpness and even worse shrewd leaders getting away with goofs of murderous proportions. On our own backyard Kibaki’s
pumbavu and
mavi ya kuku is so dry and bereft of any wit that it only reminds you of the village shouting matches between juveniles. No wonder he is so much out of touch with his subjects and his culture of impunity only serves his ego and nostalgia of the 1960s.
But all that is likely to change damn fast. With the present culture of instant blogs and excessive scrutiny from an informed citizenry, every word and policy from any future Kenyan leader will turned inside out under microscope. Pretenders to leadership will have no chance and Kenya will be the better for all the pain. Woe unto scoundrels weaned on offensive blandness for the time of recrimination and persecution is nigh.
