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Ar How Presidents Manufacture Crisis to Hide Their Failures
Politicians often manufacture or magnify crises to divert attention from their own failures, using spectacle as a tool to manipulate public discourse. This article unpacks how these tactics shift focus from real issues like corruption, economic hardship, and human rights abuses, eroding the very foundations of democracy.
In Kenya, a storm is brewing between the President and his Deputy, just two years into their tenure. Parliament is bracing for an impeachment motion against the Deputy President. A censure motion has already been filed against him. Unlike an impeachment motion, which aims to remove someone from office, a censure motion involves a debate where members voice strong disapproval of the individual in question.
For some, this showdown feels like political theater, a carefully curated distraction. The streets whisper of far graver matters: abductions, extrajudicial killings, economic hardship, tax hikes, and corruption, all simmering beneath the surface of political gamesmanship. This impeachment drama is designed to pull public attention away from these bitter realities. And yet, this strategy is not new. Politicians the world over have long been adept at fabricating crises, using them as a smokescreen to mask their own failures or their refusal to confront systemic issues. It’s a tactic as old as politics itself.
Dividing to Distract
Samuel P. Huntington, the former Harvard University political scientist warned that political leaders seize upon cultural and societal divisions, amplifying them into conflicts that divert attention from governance. His ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory wasn’t just about foreign relations; it also illuminated how rulers pit communities against each other, using internal strife as a tool to mask incompetence or corruption. In Kenya, the rift between President William Ruto and his Deputy Rigathi Gachagua has become the headline act, drawing attention away from the country's festering wounds of excessive corruption, economic decay, rampant unemployment, abductions, extra judicial killings, human rights abuses, and more. Every minute spent debating whether the Deputy President should be impeached or not is a minute not spent deliberating on bad roads and police brutality.
Huntington would have seen the pattern clearly: inflate a conflict, sow disunity, and the people will be too distracted to notice that their lives are getting harder, their freedoms more tenuous. It is easier for a president to orchestrate a political spectacle than to reckon with the rot within their administration. That’s why Kenyans, Tanzanians, South Africans, Nigerians and all Africans must reject this tactic and constantly shepherd national conversations back to the issues that truly matter.
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Manipulating Democracy’s Structures
Ever heard of polyarchy? Robert A. Dahl, former Political Science Professor at Yale University described it as a form of government the vests power in multiple people. It takes the form of neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. It’s a government where many people have a say, rather than just one person or a small group. That’s what’s happening in Kenya and South Africa where broad based governments are now inclusive of opposition parties. This arrangement provides a perfect backdrop for never-ending political distractions – in South Africa, are the six Cabinet Secretaries from the Democratic Alliance being too harsh on blacks? Are they any different from ANC ministers? In Kenya, are the four Cabinet Secretaries from the Orange Democratic Movement implementing policies they recently castigated?
Professor Dahl taught that democracy is a fragile ecosystem, vulnerable to manipulation by those who wield power. Dahl knew that leaders could engineer political crises, leveraging them to entrench their authority or shift blame. What seems like a democratic process like a parliament deliberating on an impeachment, is often nothing more than theater, a game of smoke and mirrors designed to obfuscate the larger failings of governance.
In Kenya, this impeachment is not just about the Deputy President; it's about redirecting the narrative, turning national attention toward a high-stakes drama while avoiding the deeper conversation about corruption, extrajudicial killings, or economic collapse. For Dahl, this would be a clear manipulation of democracy’s pluralism, where the true concerns of the people are drowned out by the political class’s internal power struggles.
The Crisis as a Strategy
Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist points out that a crisis, real or fabricated, provides politicians the opportunity to play the role of the problem-solver. Fukuyama’s work on state-building and governance helps us see how leaders thrive off chaos, portraying themselves as the answer to the very crises they create. They like to start fires so that they can heroically put out those fires. The Deputy President’s impeachment drama in Kenya isn’t just a power struggle; it is a calculated diversion, a way for the president to claim control of the narrative.
As the nation is swept up in the spectacle, the government’s failures to address the cost of living, rampant corruption, and security breakdowns are quietly pushed to the background. Fukuyama might warn us that this is not just bad governance; it is the erosion of the state itself. When leaders prioritize maintaining their power over building strong, accountable institutions, the foundations of governance weaken and crumble.
Kenya's President William Ruto and his Deputy Rigathi Gachagua
A Global Playbook: Distraction as Survival
Kenya is not alone in this. Across the globe, politicians use manufactured crises to shield themselves from accountability.
In the United States, Donald Trump consistently stirred up controversies – whether through incendiary remarks or attacks on his own administration – drawing attention away from failures in healthcare, governance, or foreign policy.
Under President Vladimir Putin, crises like the annexation of Crimea have been used to stoke nationalist sentiments, deflecting public attention from economic challenges and accusations of corruption within his administration.
In Turkey, President Erdoğan has turned internal political disputes into existential crises, repeatedly fanning the flames of conflict with the Kurdish population to divert attention from his authoritarian grip and the nation’s economic freefall.
The blueprint is always the same: the creation of a spectacle, the raising of a lesser issue to eclipse the greater injustices simmering beneath.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Democratic Alliance Leader John Steenhuisen
The Cost of Distraction
The cost of these distractions is steep. Real lives are affected while politicians play their games. Corruption festers, justice becomes elusive, and the weight of poverty, insecurity, and inequality continues to crush those at the bottom. The public, caught in the whirlwind of political theater, struggles to hold onto the deeper truths about what’s really affecting their lives. In the long run, these games leave scars on the institutions, on the people, and on the very fabric of democracy.
As Huntington, Dahl, and Fukuyama would remind us, these tactics weaken nations. And as the political theatre plays out, it is the people who bear the brunt of leaders' refusal to confront their own failures. Distracted, the nation watches the spectacle, while the truth slips away, unnoticed, into the dark.
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