Pretenders to Power: Why community elders must embrace transparency

There was something about Bagine that made him such an awkward fit even among high school boys.

For starters, he had arrived in Form One with a full beard despite claiming to be only 15. I recall his recurrent battles over the goatee with Mr Manene, the class teacher, who seemingly affronted by the sparseness of his own tuft that defied growth, occasionally ordered Bagine out of class for a shave.

Bagine’s real age would become a rich vein of speculation. Despite several schoolmates sharing his village, none could tell with precision how old he was. Even those we found in Form Four remembered finding Bagine in the world and as a big boy. If indeed he was 15, his life’s calendar must have stood frozen for a couple of years.

But it was his peculiar interests that made him an orange among apples.  While the rest of us indulged our pubescent fantasies by cutting out pictures of beautiful girls from newspapers and magazines, Bagine scoured the pages for something different: cultural rites and rituals and their high priests!

The result was an impressive albeit bizarre collection. He had an album of cuttings on traditional circumcision– for men and women. Ngonya wa Gakonya, a religious cum political activist, littered his album. Witchdoctors and medicine men featured in newspapers found their way to his assembly.

While the rest of us looked forward to school holidays for the promise of food, sleep and girls, Bagine answered to a higher calling. Holidays were reportedly spent apprenticing at the den of a famous witchdoctor. Like his real age, this remained a rumour. As a reticent boy who kept his own company and reportedly enough amulets to ward off evil and pesky boys, few of us dared to whisper anything that could provoke his wrath.

The part-time apprenticeship or whatever it was, seemingly paid off. Bagine had far more money than many of us. In lean times when boys fund-raised for bread, Bagine could afford a whole loaf for himself. He would put it, alongside his money, in his box that was reportedly never locked. His reputation was such that none of us dared to test the claims.

I don’t know what Bagine scored in the KCSE exams. But it was unlikely to have been impressive judging by his manifest abilities and ambitions. I heard that he never even bothered to check the results. He never needed them!

What he needed was more apprenticeship. So he went back to his witchdoctor mentor until he was ripe for his own adventure. But after setting what was essentially a rival shop, he found clients scarce and the money even scarcer.

Out of frustrations, he converted his shrine into a church. But it only attracted the faith of his wife, her three friends and their kids. He then tried a posho mill business but found his reputation sold better than his flour. Villagers were wary of trusting their tummies with an ingredient processed by a witchdoctor, even a failed one.

Only after a string of failures did he seem to have discovered his true calling: the business of being an elder.

I first saw him in a newspaper story as part of a faction of the Nchuri Ncheke that had reportedly endorsed a young and garrulous MP as the Meru community leader.  Then, I wasn’t very sure it was him. His physique appeared to have morphed!

In our high school days, he was tall and almost thin. Years later, his girth had expanded in the signature width of a man who frequently interacts with meat and other indulgences of abundance. He was in a suit and a tie although the background suggested the picture had been shot in the middle of a forest.

I called a former schoolmate with my doubts. He confirmed that indeed it was Bagine. The comrade had more interesting titbits about him. En route to being an elder, Bagine had briefly served as the village circumciser. But unsteady hands wobbled by chang’aa and a reportedly cavalier approach to the otherwise delicate operation had resulted in a few ceremonies gone awry.

Frustrations opened his eyes to a vacuum in a career with nebulous qualifications and an amorphous job description. Even the recruiting panel, like its interview process, is a smoky hut mystery. And so is the tenure. Is being an elder, for instance, a lifetime calling? Do they ever retire to their homes rather than their graves?

In an election season, virtually every Kenyan community appears to have a robust council of elders. Some communities seem to have as many factions of elders as the political parties and rich candidates in their areas. The coups and counter-coups being waged within the councils make for riveting drama.

The rent-an-elder business is thriving. If you have enough political ambitions and the money to pursue it, it seems you can always assemble a supporting cast of men– they are always men – to incant some mumbo-jumbo hailing you as the chosen one. Contrary to the assumption that the elders’ club is the domain of grey heads, the membership door seems to have been flung open to even youthful pretenders.

Out of curiosity, I have tried to inquire among my friends, including some well-versed in traditions, how the so-called community elders are recruited and by whom. No one seems to have an idea. No one recalls seeing or hearing a call for application.

Yet we all have heard the so-called elders purporting to make important decisions on our behalf. Among these are those reportedly determining who will or will not vie in the next elections or which clan or tribe will take which leadership position.

There may be noble intentions behind some of the elders’ decisions. In counties hosting historical enemy clans and tribes forced to co-exist by modern political and administrative boundaries, negotiated democracy could be the difference between peace and sectarian bloodletting.

But we must always remember the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The elders’ decisions should ideally complement, and not replace, the universal suffrage and the ballot as the primary determinants of our choice of leaders.

A good starting place would be to make the process of choosing the elders more inclusive and transparent.