To succeed you require change of mindset

The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report was made public last week after it was launched at the Bomas of Kenya. From the comments on social and mainstream media, many Kenyans seem to be sceptical about this initiative. 

Why is this so? We have many good laws on fighting corruption and even a fully fledged institution to fight it. But going by the many scandals in the recent past, we are still, if not more corrupt. 

We thought after the enactment of the new Constitution and the reconstitution of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), election violence would be a thing of the past, but we still lost many lives in the last elections. 

The scriptures put it so well: “You cannot pour new wine into old wineskins for if you do so, the wineskin will burst and you will lose both the new wine and the old wineskin”. 

Having a new Constitution didn’t change some things much because it was like that new wine being poured into old wineskins. What is needed is a new mindset, a complete overhaul in our thinking as a people and a culture change.

 Albert Einstein was right when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

This is the same for people who constantly enter into one relationship after another. This is not because there’s anything wrong with the people they relate with necessarily, what might just be wrong is with them. 

The moment you walk from one relationship to the other without checking and re-evaluating yourself, you are more likely to end up in another disastrous relationship. 

The moment you leave your current marriage without critically looking into yourself and asking yourself those difficult questions, you are more likely to carry the same mess into your next marriage. The moment you add another wife without examining yourself well, you will most likely end up getting a third one too. 

The common factor in all this is you. Not confronting and dealing with your own issues will make you end up with the wrong person or spoil the relationship. Having another wife or entering a new relationship like the BBI is not the solution. Changing our thinking is.