PLO Lumumba said it in 2018 at the University of Nairobi, and it has only gotten sharper since.
“Because what we do is to elect thieves. We elect hyenas to take care of goats and when the goats are consumed, we wonder why.
He was not talking about wildlife. He was talking about ballot boxes. He was talking about the voters who line up for hours to hand power to men they already know are predators, and then act shocked when the national treasury is empty. He was talking about the cycle that repeats across the continent with depressing regularity. Campaign season brings promises. Election day brings celebration. Inauguration day brings hope. Six months later, the contracts are signed, the loans are taken, the money is moved, and the same voters who danced in the streets are now posting angry comments online about corruption.
The metaphor is cruel and it is exact. The hyena does not pretend to be a shepherd. It does not campaign on goat welfare. It is a hyena. Everyone knows what it wants. The problem is not the hyena’s nature. The problem is who opened the gate.
Lumumba is a Kenyan lawyer and Pan Africanist who has spent his career watching this up close. He ran the Kenya Anti Corruption Commission. He has seen the files. He knows the names. He knows which leaders arrived in office with modest assets and left with foreign bank accounts and city blocks. He knows which cabinet ministers signed contracts that bled public hospitals dry. And he knows that in nearly every case, those same men stood for reelection and won.
The question is why.
Part of it is the machinery of African politics. Campaigns cost money that only the connected can raise. Party structures are often personal fiefdoms. Media coverage favors incumbents. Election commissions lack teeth. But Lumumba’s line cuts deeper than institutional failure. It points to something more uncomfortable. The hyena gets elected because enough voters decide, consciously or not, that tribal loyalty, ethnic arithmetic, or short term patronage matters more than clean government. The goat is secondary. The herd is secondary. What matters is that our hyena is in the pen.
And when the goats are gone, the performance of surprise begins. Protests are staged. Hashtags trend. Committees are formed. Reports are written. No one goes to prison. The hyena retires with a pension and a security detail, or rebrands as an elder statesman, or simply waits out the noise and runs again. The voters who elected him forget, or forgive, or calculate that the other hyena is worse.
Lumumba did not offer this as a comfort. He offered it as a diagnosis. The line is not about despair. It is about responsibility. If you keep hiring the predator to guard the prey, the outcome is not a tragedy. It is a choice. A choice made repeatedly, election after election, country after country, decade after decade.
The goats are the public schools that never get textbooks. The goats are the roads that wash away in the first rain. The goats are the young people with degrees and no jobs while ministers buy property in Dubai. The goats are the national reserves that vanish into opaque infrastructure loans. They are being consumed in real time, and the wonder is not that they are gone. The wonder is that anyone is still surprised.
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