PREMIUM Macharia Gaitho: Homa Bay proved, again, the backward slide to one-party mindset Our Columnists 6 min ago Listen

What we are seeing coming out of the unguarded mouths of politicians is eerily reminiscent of the blood-curdling rhetoric that was a staple as the one-party regime of President Daniel arap Moi tried desperately to counter the march towards democracy and human rights in the early 1990s.

We are seeing evidence of that every day in reasonably well-educated folk—engineers, medical doctors and researchers, architects, accountants, lawyers, scientists, university professors and other acclaimed professionals and academics—attempting to catch President William Ruto’s eye by making the most outrageous and illiterate public statements in defence of that mongrel of the so-called broad-based government.

The ODM fellows queuing behind President Ruto in the broad-based government arrangement, aptly bastardised as bread-based or blood-based, remind one of the hired mourners who wail more loudly than the bereaved.