It appears that Kenya’s Members of Parliament are collectively suffering from what mental health experts call “Amygdala hijack”. This is a serious mental condition that is characterised by intense and disproportionate emotional responses to situations.
Every time this happens, the parts of the brain responsible for rational thinking and competent decision-making becomes crippled. An Amygdala hijack can impair the judgement of one person, but it can also afflict a group, such as Members of Parliament.
In June, when mobs were descending on the National Assembly to protest the impending passage of the Finance Bill, 2024, MPs insisted on voting in favour of the taxation measures, a move that ignited a series of protests, including the unprecedented breaching of Parliament’s precincts.
Whereas the MPs who voted ‘Yes’ were doing so because it was routine to pass the Bill every mid-June, this time round the ground had shifted significantly, severely disrupting that routine to the point of making it dangerous.
However, the Amygdala hijack disabled their capacity to read the national mood.
More shock awaited them a few days later when they found themselves applauding after President William Ruto announced that he would not be signing that Bill into law.
Incidentally, the same legislators who had defied public anger to pass the Bill—egged on by their Azimio counterparts, who sensed the impending storm—were the first to applaud the President when he rejected it.
At that point, one would have been forgiven for thinking that this Amygdala affliction was only peculiar to Kenya Kwanza legislators.
Not too long after, the President dissolved his entire Cabinet — even as he marinated Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua for later impeachment — and voila! the Azimio brigade was ushered into what was then known as the “broad-based government”. It has since changed its name to the “bread-based government”.
All of us had, until then, believed that Azimio legislators were immune to the debilitating effects of an Amygdala hijack. However, we have now been swiftly disabused of this notion, first by the jingoism they have demonstrated in their vociferous defence of the nefarious Adani deals with the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and with Ketraco, the power transmission parastatal.
Despite overwhelming public opposition to these two grand heists of public assets, Azimio legislators — and their leader Mr Raila Odinga — went out on a limb to make the Indian company and its founder look as white as the cotton fields of Kano plains.
It had to take the intervention of the US government, and public pressure, for the government to beat a hasty retreat and cancel the deals. This came shortly after the US Department of Justice injected pressure on Kenya after indicting Gautam Adani, the firm’s founder, for corruption.
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Interestingly, that very Thursday morning, Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi — who until recently had a reputation for rationality — had defended the Ketraco deal, arguing that the US indictment would in no way impact the Kenyan contracts… because Adani had not committed crimes on Kenyan soil. Let’s just say that five hours later, he had enough egg on his face to make medium rare omelette.
Ditto the National Assembly which had near-unanimously sided with National Treasury CS John Mbadi — who was pushing the JKIA take-over — and Mr Wandayi. This time round, the imbroglio arising from the Amygdala hijack of Parliament was blind to the aisles. It consumed both the majority and minority sides in equal measure.
Worse, however, was yet to come.
When President Ruto announced in his State of the Nation address on the floor of the House, that he had ordered that the deals be cancelled forthwith, MPs who had supported the deals gave him a thunderous applause. Their collective Amygdalas kicked in and they forgot that all this time they had the powers to stop the deals but opted not to.
Which now brings me to my point. Sorry this has taken a while. It will be important, going forward, for MPs to use all parts of their brains when they are in the august House. It is not called august without reason.
That House, with a capital H, is meant for leaders who are not allergic to deploying all the parts of their brains to serve the citizenry. They can use the frontal lobe from time to time to help them think clearly about public interest issues and give them discernment.
They can also frequently use the temporal lobe, which will help them listen to what “the ground” is telling them.
Similarly, nothing stops them from using the parietal lobe, as this can help them to remain attentive while in the chamber and debate with decorum. And of cause, they have nothing to lose if they use their occipital lobes consistently, so that they can see clearly every time someone is trying to throw them under the bus.
I am not an expert, but why MPs have only chosen to exclusively use one of the smallest parts of the brain, the amygdala, is a phenomenon that needs to be studied even before we insist that they pass the law needed to form the electoral commission that voters need reconstituted so that it can start collecting recall signatures.
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