Listening to President William Ruto criticising his former deputy, although he didn’t call him by name the other day, reminded me of a discussion I had had with some colleagues in our editorial office at the Platform Magazine.
We were trying to identify a Kenyan narcissist and why such is a threat to our democracy as flawed as it is. Their personalities are constructed on projecting an image entirely disconnected from reality. Theirs is a make-believe world. They are notorious for condemning others for the very behaviours they themselves engage in.
They demand loyalty but are utterly disloyal even to the best of their friends. They expect boundless empathy while offering none in return. They preach morality but fail to practise even the most basic tenet of integrity. They tell lies as facts. They successfully mask their shortcomings by exercising extralegal authority. Their manipulative tactics enable them to instill guilt, sow doubt and erode the confidence of others, all while maintaining a deceptive facade.
They want you to believe that their anger, their rage episodes, their inability to deliver, and their covert punishments, codenamed abductions, forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings are all your faults.
Every time Kenyans try to talk about something that bothers them, they’re angry, every time we try to explain how they’ve hurt us, they’re angry, every time we try to call out their behaviour and their blatant disregard for the rule of law, they’re angry. And they blame their anger on us and the parents in the case of Gen Zs, making it seem like it’s our fault for bringing these things to their attention rather than taking accountability for bad governance in the first place.
They twist the narrative to where the problem is not. The problem is that they are lying, they are stealing, and they are unable or unwilling to run a government that governs with integrity and follows the rule of law.
To the Kenya Kwanza leadership, the problem is not that they are lying and the fact that they are running the most incompetent and corrupt government in Kenya, it is that the youth are so badly brought up.
The KK leadership wants Kenyans to believe that it’s their job to regulate the emotions of these leaders and prevent their rage episodes by not bringing anything up. They want these Kenyans to walk on eggshells every day, making sure not to bring up the reality of how they’re treating them and how they are running their country.
They want Kenyans to feel like it’s their job to not anger them. This is gaslighting. It’s not your job to regulate anyone but yourself, and the focus needs to go back to where it belongs, which is the behaviour of these leaders and the way they’re treating the country, not the Kenyans pointing it out.
However, we need to understand that we are dealing with narcissists. They will use dehumanisation on these Kenyans. Dehumanisation is a core brainwashing technique employed by narcissists to strip their victims of their sense of self-worth and individuality.
This often manifests in behaviours such as belittling the victim’s emotions, invalidating their experiences, and disregarding their basic needs and their demands for good governance, integrity in management of public affairs, transparency and accountability.
-The writer is a lawyer and publisher
