Challenging the New School of Thought

As I peruse through the Nation newspaper today (Kenyan newspaper), I come across a slide of pictures taken during a meeting dubbed "Raising leaders of integrity", well attended by Members of Parliament and representatives of both the government and the people of Kenya. Below every slide is an array of comments from readers of the newspaper. At first glance, the pictures and title of the event are full of promise, but as I keep reading the comments left by my fellow Kenyans, the lack of hope, trust, faith and respect for our government and politicians is more than evident. The very first picture for instance, is one of an array of MPs bowing their heads in prayer and is followed by a comment stating the following:
"Good luck to the conveners of this meeting and their attempts of marrying integrity and politicians together. It would be much easier to mix water and crude oil. Even prayers couldn't figure out that miracle."
Slide after slide, comment after comment is filled with a lack of faith, a lack of hope, a lack of trust. It's almost as though...no strike that..it is definitely as though we have given up on our government, and our people and we are just going through the motions waiting for all of it to be over. These comments immediately evoke thoughts in my mind as I realize that they epitomize many of our thinking patterns as far as politics, and social issues are concerned. As I kept thinking about this, and trying to figure out whether these comments were warranted, it dawned on me that our people have let us down. We keep electing representatives and we keep getting disappointed. This is a fact that has repeated itself over and over again in the course of history, so why do we never learn?
I have a theory I would like to share with you. We, for the most part, are raised in a culture where respect for our elders is KEY and what a beautiful value to acquire, if you ask me. Here's the glitch. We take on a whole different meaning to respect. Respect, many of us are taught, is a lot of things, among them doing what one is asked to do, no questions asked. This was taught to our grandparents, who taught our parents, who taught us. So then here come these people that feel they have a calling to serve their communities by representing them in government and come election time, they bombard us with promises, most of which die with their election.
I believe that the mentality that most gamers/politicians use to their advantage is that they can't fool all the people all the time, but if they fool the right ones, then the rest will follow behind. My challenge to us, as a new school of thought is to stop being fooled and instead seek and cherish the value in asking questions. We need to be self taught, we need to be seekers of information, we need to be knowledge craved, and we most definitely need to have intellectual self reliance. This to me, is the only way we will be able to make our leaders accountable for their actions and it's the only way that will help us elect people that will actually get the job done. Put simply, if we don't ask, then how are we to find a correlation between where we were yesterday, where we are now and where we want to be tomorrow? With this in mind, the leaders we choose to represent us may very well be charismatically challenged, that we can deal with...but they MUST, they MUST have resolute integrity.
Democracy my friends, is more than government bound, its more than civic duty..its a culmination of those things along with values, attitudes and practices and if we don't learn how to hold ourselves and those that represent us in our government and life in general accountable, then our democracy is shot.