Tell me, who is teaching our politicians?

Every profession trains its next generation. Doctors train young doctors. Pilots train young pilots. Architects train young architects. Even plumbers, mechanics and electricians have apprentices.

So when it comes to politicians and our leaders, why do we talk about them as though they appear just like that?They don't!

Every politician is a graduate of somebody's political school. Some learned in student movements. Others in liberation struggles. Some in military barracks. Some inside political parties. Some worked under several leaders and governments. Others learned by watching a parent, a relative, or a political mentor. Some learned in parliament. Others learned on social media.But everyone learned somewhere.

What this means is that every country has a political education curriculum, even if nobody ever explicitly wrote it down, and so that makes me wonder.... If today's leaders and politicians are teaching tomorrow's politicians, who is updating the syllabus?

This actually explains why politics often feels repetitive, like you have seen it before. We see new faces on the scene, in the media speaking the language of change, yet not before long they begin sounding exactly like those who came before them. The slogans change and sometimes even the ideologies change but their habits remain almost exactly the same.

We complain about personality cults, about leaders who struggle to imagine life after office, about politics becoming a family business in some places and a winner-takes-all contest in others. But when you think about it, where did anyone learn something different?

All countries in the world passes down an idea of power. Britain inherited one, China teaches one, the United States has one, Singapore, Rwanda, Botswana, Uganda, Ghana, Brazil, and Japan all have political cultures, whether formally taught or absorbed. Every generation watches the one before it and (un)consciously concludes, this is what leadership looks like.

In some countries, such as Botswana and many of the Nordic countries, political culture has built stable institutions that outlive individual leaders. In others like Russia and Turkey, politics has often revolved around powerful personalities. The United States how polarised politics can become when confrontation becomes part of the political culture, while Switzerland and Singapore for example demonstrate different traditions of consensus, continuity, and long-term thinking.

What I am trying to say is that political culture is inherited way more often than it is redesigned or reconstructed. For many former colonies, there is another layer to this story. The first generation of post-independence leaders inherited institutions and systems designed for administration rather than participation. Colonial governments were efficient at organising authority, collecting taxes, and maintaining order. They were not designed to teach democratic leadership or shared ownership of power. Independence changed the flag but it did not always rewrite the "operating manual." Every generation since has added its own chapters to that manual.

This got me thinking about what should tomorrow's leaders be taught, not who should win the next election or take over when Mzee sleeps permanently (as we all will one day).

Imagine if politics borrowed from medicine. Surgeons do not become surgeons because they write surgeon speeches, nor is one handed an aircraft because their surname is familiar or he is his father's son. They study, write exams, practise, and are supervised. They make mistakes in environments designed for learning before being trusted with enormous responsibility.

Politics is one of the few where someone can wake up on Monday with no experience of governing and by Friday be responsible for the lives of millions. We have made it normal when it really shouldn't be.

If I were designing a political curriculum, I would begin with a course unit on listening, then how power works and how it shouldn't, then institutions before individuals, then public finance is not personal finance, then systems thinking, then ethics when no one is watching, then governance without threats and abductions, public service not peraonal glory, then other course units like conflict resolution, negotiation, etc. 

I would require every aspiring leader to spend months living in communities completely different their own to experience public transport, public hospitals, unreliable electricity, empty taps, overcrowded classrooms, and those small daily frustrations that national statistics don't capture.

I would even include a course unit on how to leave office well. We have since seen and learnt that the greatest test of leadership is not how tightly one holds power, but how confidently one prepares someone else to take it.

I think that is what it really means to decolonise political education. It is not replacing one ideology with another or swapping foreign ideas for local ones, but having the mind to examine inherited lessons, ask whether it still serves the people, and rewrite the curriculum where it does not.

After all, every country eventually becomes the classroom that its leaders graduate from. If we want different politics twenty years from now, we should ask who is teaching the politicians today.