By Victor Ochieng’
vochieng.90@gmail.com
On February 7, 2022, something funny and farcical happened in a high-end meeting. Hon. Martin Wambora, the governor of Embu, who is also the chairperson of the Council of Governors (CoG) attempted to read an old speech at Port Reitz – tucked in the old coastal town – Mombasa during the launch of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). He fished out a folded piece of paper from one of his pockets, started reading a speech, which he shortly realised was an old one. The audience made of bigwigs, where President Uhuru Kenyatta was also in-attendance, laughed loudly. The CoG chairperson spoke casually, then went back to sit.
Of course, this spectre revealed many cracks and chinks. We have plenty of politicians who know nothing about the essence and puissance of rhetoric in leadership. No wonder, they hardly heed to the three facets of rhetoric – logos, ethos and pathos – advanced in the distant past by the Athenian thinker – Aristotle. This philosopher viewed every speech as a form of persuasion. Logos focused on logic or reasoning, which had to be true. Ethos focused on ethics, boiling down to the character and conduct of the presenter. Pathos, was the most important component. It pitched its tent on the orator’s ability to stir up emotions. This argument is made cogent in a book titled Speak Like Ted: The Nine Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds by Carmine Gallo. This polymath posits that special speeches focus on three thrilling things: emotionality, novelty and memorability.
Most of our politicians have not mastered the art and science of public speaking the way some did in the years of yore. This is because some of them are not philosopher kings. They don’t give their leadership positions great deal of thought. We have several leaders with dearth or death intellect. They attend important state functions just for the sake of formality; to earn per diems allocated to them as trip tranches. No wonder, in the good book titled Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds us of Plato’s didactic dictum: “States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.”
Just to be blunt about it. When you listen to some politicians addressing the public, you can cringe. Some of them who perhaps ascended the leadership ladder through wrong means like use of moolah, will leave you shell-shocked. It is a sad state of affairs to listen to a petty and pedantic politician, who covers his cluelessness with dry jokes and jests. Yet, when a leader is out to speak, we expect him or her to be some sort of sage on stage. They should set good agenda for the nation. When selling their manifestos to the electorates, they should avoid pelting other politicians with insults: Even if insults don’t break bones. They should stop profiling people based on ethnic extractions. It is also wrong to be vile and vulgar in the glorious glare of people.
Someone may ask. Why are some politicians behaving that way? The answer is simple like a dimple: Water seeks its own level. You cannot expect them to be what they are not. Is it not my mentor Professor PLO Lumumba who is fond of saying: We elect hyenas to take care of goats, and when the goats are consumed we wonder why. We go to a show room, buy a tuk tuk but we expect it to operate like Mercedes Benz.
Legendary leaders like Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, Tom Mboya, Kwame Nkrumah, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, J.F. Kennedy: Spoke sense in their heydays because they were philosopher kings. They were leaders who were wise, not otherwise. Some of their phenomenal speeches can be accessed through online sites like YouTube, maybe our politicians should listen to them and study how these men of means and manners commanded class and clout through great gifts of the gab.
Most of their speeches focused on the three Cs – content, context and clarity – as recommended in the beautiful book titled Present like a Pro by Cyndi Maxey and Kevine E. O’Connor. Content means that the speech is replete and complete with substance. Context means the speech is relevant to the audience. Clarity means the audience can remember it.
By and large, carefully-crafted speeches inspire, inform and transform people. For instance, We Choose to go to the Moon speech delivered by John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1962 at Rice University, inspired and invigorated the American scientists to make a giant leap to the moon.
Over and above, that tells you that our leaders should have skillful speech writers, for they may lack ample time to pen great speeches. Albeit, that does not mean that all serious speeches are written. I want to give you a classic case. In 2018, Trever Macdonald from ITV did a documentary on the spell-binding orator, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He interviewed the wise woman who was the official speech writer of King’s speeches. The winsome woman admitted, before King delivered I Have a Dream speech, they spent the whole night welding words. But the following day as King decided to deliver the speech, he realised that at some point the audience was escaping from his thralldom. Some openly told him, Martin tell them about the dream. He heeded to that clarion call, dropped the formal speech. He decided to speak from the heart. Immediately he changed tact, he got it right. That is what made it a phenomenal speech, which planted hope and help in the hearts of African-Americans who were hard-hit by racism. To achieve that bit, Dr. Martin Luther King must have focused on what Dale Carnegies talks about in his tantalising treatise titled the Art of Public Speaking. Therein, there is a chapter he calls Riding the Winged Horse, where basically he talks about the place of massive memory and imagination in public speaking.
The writer is an editor, orator and author.
