When Speaking Your Mind Is a Crime

The last thing I would want to be is a sycophant singing praises to our irredeemably corrupt politicians. It is not lost some politicians are performers, though, and can deliver on their mandate. What makes for an interesting observation, however, is to see the people some of them surround themselves with.

  Be it the employees in their offices, the paid for bloggers and the cheerleaders, its inescapable some of these people are behind the negative image or perceptions the public have against them. Forget those rosy posts on social media or blogs that are purportedly to enhance a politician’s image, for, far from it, they tend to serve the contrary.

  Watch the hawkish nature of these employees and the sycophants especially how they savagely descend on one with hammers and tongs, lays one down on the anvil of humiliation, and flattens one with unpalatable remarks for making a not so flattering post or comment against their paymaster. Here you get the drift one’s freedom of thought or expression is not respected, and a politician should be immune from criticism of any kind! It doesn’t help matters whether the criticism is constructive in nature, for the little crowd surrounding the politician wants one to see everything in black and white!

  Succinct to say, some of the politicians’ personal assistants and secretaries think they are the only way and no one can see a politician in the hallowed kingly office except through them! They are there to insulate the elected from the electorate as if the latter doesn’t matter, or are merely rubberstamps to legitimate their terms (or to ascend to a higher political office) come the electioneering year!

  If politicians believes every praise and worship they are lavished with across social media is anything to go by, they would be in for a rude shock were they to go to the ground in disguise and mingle with the common man. I’m sure many will hire public relations consultants to clean their images and dispense with their praise singers and the sycophants.

  I’ll tell a story for an illustration. There once lived a king who loved to be praised. His court courtiers would tell him how his subjects loved him, composed songs in his honour and named the newborns after him. This praise got into the king’s head that he believed he was the most famous.

  One day, the king disguised himself as a commoner and rode on a mule. As he mingled with the humanity, pretending to be a wayfarer, he asked the citizens what they thought of their king. From the peasant to the merchant, many did not speak well of the king.

  Coming across three women huddled in silence, the disguised king asked them what the matter was.

  “Alas!” said one woman. “Didn’t you hear how the king’s officials came and took the husband of this woman and how they fed him to the crocodiles?”

  The king, aghast, asked what crime the poor soul did to deserve such punishment.

  “Are you a stranger in this land?” the second woman asked him. “Haven’t you heard that the king passed a decree that whoever fails to pay their taxes in time should be put to death?”

  When the king returned to his castle, he was a downcast man. He never saw anyone who praised him to high heavens contrary to what his courtiers and praise singers were telling him. Things on the ground seemed different!

  And the same holds true for our politicians! No wonder the people they’re relying on are indirectly distorting their public image.

  I fail to understand the reason I have been on the receiving end lately from the employees to sycophants of a certain grassroots politician!

Read part 2 here: https://paulkariuki.blogspot.com/2019/11/when-speaking-your-mind-is-crime-pt-2.html

Image: credit