The Era of Puppets and Their Puppeteers

 

Courtesy photo

It doesn’t take rocket science to realize that the greater Dundori ward in Nakuru County is on a backpedal progress. And this can be seen by the kind of leaders – previous and the current – that had or are representing us.

  It is not an understatement to claim that a cabal of power brokers had been in the making for long going by the choice of leaders rammed down our throats. The previous and current ward representatives, claims had it, are products of a local administrator and a renowned tycoon and were forced to the majority who had no choice but to legitimize them through the ballot.

  A story is told how one former councillor was compelled to step down from running on The National Alliance (TNA) party during the 2013 General Election and pave way for the former MCA by this administrator whose name cannot be revealed here. The septuagenarian former councillor opted to run on the less popular Democratic Party and lost massively to a young engineer graduate.

  The same narrative was repeated to the run-up of the 2017 General Election – if the claims that did rounds are to be believed.

  The problem with puppet leaders is that they follow the script of their puppeteers. This means they are manipulated either through the pulling of strings or remotely, and can hardly be said to be making decisions that affects their subjects independently or through consultations. A puppet speaks the body language of its puppeteer. A puppeteer can be a good ventriloquist, meaning he or she can speak through a puppet, but in actual sense, the persona of the puppeteer is what is seen through the puppet.

  This raises an important question, do puppets speak on own or lip-sync what the puppeteers are saying?

  Whose interests do they advance, anyway?

  Take the scenario where a sizeable chunk of fund is allocated for such and such development. At the twiddling of fingers, the puppeteer can direct a puppet to move an amount of funds here and there, and the results are discernible even to the clinically blind. No wonder we have stagnated or are developing at a snail pace!

  What if the puppet runs amok and wants to free itself from the manipulation tactics of its puppeteer? It doesn’t need one to be a clairvoyant to see the end results of such a puppet, politically speaking.

  How do these political puppeteers succeed with their puppets? They know the populace will ride with the wave of a party popularity and cannot go for alternative candidates. They have the means and resources to rig in their preferred candidates. They are master of theatrics and all it takes is to parade a puppet before the masses and voila! the crowd will be chanting the puppets name before long. This is psychological manipulation, and a deluded crowd doesn’t know a choice is being rammed down its throat!

  In nutshell, a puppet is a project of its puppeteer. It must derive returns for its manipulator one way or the other. Whoever controls a political puppet has no interest of the people at the heart.