By Morris Wambua

The Crownless Kings and Queens of Modern Politics

There is a peculiar madness that stalks the world. It walks not in rags or shadows but in polished suits, expensive scarves, designer spectacles, and surnames that unlock vaults, votes, and vice. It is
not a plague of hunger or war.

No.

It is something subtler, something sinister. It is the tyrannical persistence of legacy politics. A democratic masquerade where ballots replace blood oaths, but the crown remains in the family.

It starts softly, with nostalgia. A portrait here, a quote there:“He was a great man,” they say, “let his son finish what he started.” Suddenly, before you can say “constitutional democracy,” the State House is a family heirloom, and the nation becomes a glorified backyard.

Make no mistake.

Legacy politics is not leadership. It is lineage masquerading as legitimacy. It is democracy wrapped in tribal cloth, perfumed with entitlement, and served with a silver spoon to the offspring of former tyrants, visionaries, thieves, and saints alike. And what of the rest of us?

We, the children of nobodies, are cast into the wilderness of irrelevance, our ambitions outshouted by surnames and silenced by history.

Dynasties Are the New Monarchies (Just Don’t Call Them That)

Let’s take a global tour, shall we?

In America, that self-styled Vatican of democracy, the same surnames loop across decades like recurring nightmares: Bush. Clinton. Kennedy. The electoral system, designed to reward policy and principle, now rewards branding. You need not have bold ideas. You just need a familiar name and a pliant media handler.

In South Asia, India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has turned one of the world’s oldest civilizations into a revolving door of recycled privilege. Even Rahul Gandhi, who has turned losing elections into a performance art, still commands the leadership of the Congress Party like a hereditary priest guarding a dying temple.

In Pakistan, the Bhutto-Zardari family continues to dine on the bones of history, using the tragic martyrdom of Benazir as an eternal campaign poster. One would think a nation of 240 million could find fresh talent, but alas, the only thing more common than a tea stall in Islamabad is political inertia.

And in Africa — oh, my mother continent! The disease has reached biblical proportions.

In Kenya, the surnames Kenyatta and Odinga have become political weather systems. They come and go, but always return. It’s no longer a question of ideology, but genealogy. A state of affairs where a boy named Omondi from Migori, however brilliant, must seek political godfathers to
navigate waters long claimed by dynastic ships.

Uganda’s Museveni is not content with nearly four decades in power. No, he’s now moonwalking his son, Muhoozi, into presidential succession like a proud patriarch handing over a family shop, except that this "shop" is a nation of 45 million people. Banaaange!

In Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang has ruled since disco music was cool. His son, creatively named Teodorín, is being groomed to inherit the country like a family car dealership; except the assets include oil fields and a ruthlessly tamed army. It is a global affliction, from the Marcoses of the Philippines to the Kabilas of the Congo. One cannot help but ask: Is leadership now a birthright, or a divine gift only certain uteruses possess?

The Fiction of Competence and the Cult of Surnames

“But they are competent,” the apologists bleat.“They’ve grown up around power. They understand statecraft.”

Let us pause here for a moment of righteous laughter.

By that logic, the child of a pilot should fly a Boeing 787 (Bongoi 77 - In Commander's voice) at age ten. The son of a surgeon should be allowed to perform brain surgery because he played with scalpels in kindergarten. A girl raised in a garage should, by age 15, be designing engines for Formula One.

Power proximity does not equal proficiency.

Legacy does not mean leadership. This lazy logic is how nations end up governed by men
who confuse GDP with DJ Khaled, and women whose primary policy focus is how to trend on TikTok.

And let us not forget that the ability to win an election, especially when lubricated by name recognition, state machinery, and looted wealth, is not the same as the ability to govern. Legacy leaders are often politically agile but intellectually bankrupt, able to recite slogans but unable to execute solutions.

Systems That Breed Dynasties

Political dynasties do not emerge in a vacuum. They are born of complicit institutions. First, the political parties: hollow shells where democracy goes to die. Internal democracy? A joke. Primaries? A sham. Party leadership is often passed like a family recipe, where there is precisely no room for new chefs.

Second, the media. Legacy politicians sneeze, and it becomes headline news. Meanwhile, an independent-minded policy expert writes a 90-page vision for national reform, and it ends up in the recycling bin. Media houses, often owned by the same political dynasties, serve as echo chambers for elite mediocrity.

Then comes the judiciary, that supposed temple of justice. In too many places, the courts are not the last hope of the common citizen, but instead, they are the final stamp of elite impunity. They legalize theft, sanitize rigged elections, and dismiss petitions with the cold phrase: “No sufficient evidence.”

And let us not forget the voter, often bludgeoned by poverty, dazzled by nostalgia, and browbeaten by tribal loyalty. Voters are sometimes wooed by rice, handouts, bewitched by surnames, and seduced by funeral speeches that promise roads to heaven.

The result?

A society where the child of a pauper must work three jobs to earn a living, while the child of a president must simply smile to inherit power.

Dynastic politics is not just a political tragedy. It is an economic heist wrapped in a family photo. These families do not just inherit power. They inherit wealth, contracts, exemptions, and silence.

They own banks, construction companies, sugar mills, media outlets, and arms deals. Political
office is not a service. It’s a supply chain. Why do they fight so hard to stay in power? Because the presidency is the most lucrative tender in town. It offers immunity from prosecution, impunity from regulation, and immunity from shame. A common man is jailed for stealing maize flour.The son of a former president steals billions and becomes Minister for Economic Planning. This is not just unjust. It is unsustainable.

The Ethical Drought and Moral Void

Rarely do dynastic leaders dismantle the very ladders that carried them. You will not find them reforming the electoral commission, limiting campaign financing, or capping terms.

Why?

Because they are structural parasites feeding on systemic dysfunction. And when they fail, as they often do, they blame everyone but themselves: “The deep state,” “the opposition,” “foreign interference,” or the classic “we inherited a bad economy.”

Yes, from your father.

These leaders turn the state into a soap opera,with ministries treated like dowries and ambassadors like wedding gifts. National parliaments become dinner tables, where cousins, uncles, and in-laws negotiate over budgets and bloodlines.

What shall we do, then?

We must reimagine democracy not as an inheritance, but as a meritocracy of ideas. We must rebuild parties from the ground up, with internal elections, ideological clarity, and term limits that mean something. We must reform campaign financing so that billionaires do not monopolize the national imagination. We must teach our children that leadership is not lodged in a surname, but in sacrifice. We must awaken civil society, not just NGOs, but coffee shop conversations, WhatsApp groups, and university debates, to name and shame dynastic gluttony.

And yes, we must learn to laugh at the absurdity.

When a man with three degrees, no money, and infinite ideas is outvoted by a trust-fund princeling who confuses parliament with a nightclub, we must laugh, and then get angry enough to change it.

The Republic of Orphans

Chinua Achebe, the high priest of African letters, wrote, “The problem with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” But I say this: the failure is not only one of leadership, it is one of imagination. A failure to believe that a nation’s future should not be determined by wombs and tombstones.

We are political orphans in a world ruled by crowned democrats. Until we smash the pedestal of surnames, until we replace inheritance with innovation, until we stop kneeling at the altar of nostalgia, we shall remain captives of dynasties in democratic clothing. Let us dare to imagine a world where any child, not just of a president, but of a peasant, can rise. A world where ballots are not coronations.

A world where legacy dies, and leadership begins.