TYRANNICAL REIGN OF THE FLIES BY JOEL MOLA

You have to admit it by now that in the current Muso    office, we only have artists, activists and others. An old      cliché describes a leader as a people’s servant. Each year, we go to election full of hopes that some thing is going to change. We spare a few minutes of our privacy listening to promises, policies and manifestoes of fellow students we believe are honest and can do something, yet every beginning  of a new era, the first thing that goes is hope.               At last, we begin to realize the vicious cycle of hollow words, broken promises and petty threats. Too early at the dawn, we begin to experience desperation, then        disgust and lastly annoyance. That the student of Moi   University is a perennially annoyed lot is beyond question, this is an understatement. They get used to it and move on silently. A few get extremely annoyed and begin to       question how things are handled here. It is this lot which some times you hear Mwamburi calling  “election losers, dwarfs and cowards”.               We are yet to see anything tangible being done by the current Muso office. Like their predecessor, they have adopted the ‘eat, do nothing and go’ attitude of the Rashid-Karega reign. In Tyrannical Reign of the Flies, poet Pablo Neruda calls them domain of the flies. . . the leader fly is a crook, the worker fly is a crook, the female fly is a crook, the child fly is a crook. . . he concludes by saying all ‘flies are crooks’.  The entire leadership wallows in miasma of corruption and deceit, they have perfected the art of     leadership by trickery.       And while their business          interests suffers no harm, they make other students lose business opportunities, did you know that a student has taken another to court over the use of items which he had acquired to use in chips café A at Soweto only to be shortchanged when he realized the premise had changed hands to some two Muso officials? Did you know that he enjoined Okeri Orina (Sec Gen) and one Olando David (Accommodation Director) as interested parties? You might not have known this because the media in Moi do not want to report these events. They still walk everywhere in campus shoulder high is because they have     compromised a certain media house( which is said to be undergoing internal restructuring after senior officials    disagreed  why comrades are not being adequately          informed about this and other ‘secrets’ we are yet to put on these walls) . Media freedom is not only when Muso leaders frog match writers to the dean’s or Chief Security Officer’s offices, nay, it can also involve covert censorship where certain articles can only be published if they are       consistent with the viewpoints of some Muso officials. Like KANU in the 1980s, this Muso has now said to have acquired two media houses which dance to their tunes. One media house which initially was vigilant in keeping former student leaders on their toes is today a pale shadow of its former self. They even punish      internal dissent by members with divergent                viewpoints. In the KANU of 90’s, all senior writers and editors; anchors and broadcasters were staunch           sycophants of KANU, this scenario is slowly coming back to our generation. It hurts, it shocks.               In a recent war of words between Ted Ngugi and Philip Ochieng (fifth columnist), the young Ngugi wa Thiong’o wondered how Ochieng- a three decade prolific writer has since ‘seen the light’ and can now define democracy in un-KANU terms. When I read this piece and compared it with the recent          Mwamburi-Disembe wars, I realized just how writers can contribute to positive development of a place.               But lest we forget, Okeri Orina was one of the best writers through which students got a glimpse of the rot in the 23rd and 24th SGCs. Today, his writings remain a sad reminder of a conniving politician who used a media house to make ends meet and get into Muso leadership. If a sequel of his best pieces were to be put on these walls again, you will be utterly         disgusted by this fellow. He fulfilled his mission and so long as our sister media house is composed of his     former friends and sycophants like Obilo Kobilo (I hear he hurls shoes at people he disagrees with, maybe he still suffers from stone throwing exercises of the post-election violence era in South Nyanza), he can still sleep soundly and softly without ever thinking about that Together towards change crap. It is this way of doing things that we must begin to question. And yes we will. FOLLOW US ON www.tcommunicator.blogspot.com