organised their parties not as mass movements but as clubs controlled
by the elite, without the mandate and legitimacy from the people they
claim to represent.
b) Justice : The expectation of the Kenyan people as enshrined in
the National Anthem is that ‘Justice be our Shield and Defender’. This
is what St. Paul had in mind when he was writing those verses in
Romans chapter 13, which have been used to support oppressors
when they invoke biblical authority. This passage, Romans 13 :1-7,
should be titled ‘responsibilities of leaders and citizens in a state’.
Verses 3 and 4 suggest that the responsibility of the rulers is to punish
those who commit crime and to praise those who do good. This is
what is called ‘justice’. The quest for justice is what made St. Augus-
tine retort :
Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a
large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a
group of men under the command of a leader, bound by compact of asso-
ciation, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.^7I have quoted St. Augustine so that we can link his advice to what
we have observed above in regard to political parties as far as equi-
table distribution of resources is concerned. The just distribution of
resources is what we may call ‘economic justice’. If the leadership will
not exercise justice, then it has no business in being in power, and
should be removed during the next elections. We do not have the time
and space to explain fully what we would want the leadership to do
in order to demonstrate that it has provided justice. However when
the people see that those who are involved in corruption are not
punished, they wonder what has happened with their rulers. When
they witness leaders amassing wealth while the gap between the
rich and the poor is widening, they cannot be convinced that there
is justice.
c) Integrity : The Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionarydefines
‘integrity’ as ‘the quality of being honest and having strong moral
principles’. Former president Moi insists that ‘Leaders will never
win the confidence and co-operation of the masses, unless they live
an upright life and unless the people see them to be leading that
upright life’.^8 In this case, although this is not what many Kenyans
would believe, he argues to have striven persistently and relent-
lessly to cleanse the country of corruption, moral turpitude, intel-
lectual delinquency and cultural decay’.^9 He terms these as ‘... accu-
rate symptoms of loveless greed and avarice’. He describes leaders
who practise them as no more than hypocritical exhibitionists’.^10
268 Responsible Leadership : Global Perspectives