Service on wheels, Vanity on display

 Service on wheels, Vanity on display

There is no quarrel with the idea of taking government services directly to the people. In a country where access remains uneven, and bureaucracy often stands between citizens and assistance, a mobile outreach bus can be a useful, even necessary, instrument of public service. If the state can bring information, digital access, training opportunities, and support services to communities that have long been left waiting in line, then that is a commendable step in the right direction.

But that virtue has been badly compromised by the grotesque political branding splashed across the vehicle itself. What should have been a straightforward public service initiative has instead been turned into a rolling monument to presidential vanity, complete with a prominent image of the Head of State staring down from the back of a bus purchased, maintained, and operated with public money. That is not outreach. That is self-advertisement disguised as governance.

The problem is not merely aesthetic. It is constitutional in spirit, political in intent, and insulting in message.

When taxpayers finance a public service, they are entitled to expect neutrality, not personality cult packaging. They are entitled to see the state acting in the name of the people, not a ruling figure presenting the people’s money as though it were his private benevolence.

The bus may be carrying government services, but the image it projects is one of political ownership.

That is precisely what makes the exercise so brazen. The initiative appears to be aimed at providing access to programs such as Citizen Connect, Gov Connect, Skills Connect, scholarships, and other forms of state support. Those are practical offerings that should be made as visible and accessible as possible. Yet the decision to make the President’s image such a dominant feature of the vehicle cheapens the entire effort and invites the suspicion that the main objective is not service delivery, but political branding.

This is a familiar and tiresome habit in public life: when governments cannot resist attaching the face of the leader to every road, building, scheme, and announcement, they reveal how little distinction they draw between the state and the party.

That confusion is dangerous. It teaches citizens to associate public goods with personal benefactors, and it erodes the principle that government exists to serve, not to aggrandize. Once that line is crossed, every ministry becomes a campaign office and every public project becomes a billboard.

What makes the matter even more offensive is the obvious imbalance between who pays and who gets praised. The people fund the service. The people fund the bus. The people fund the fuel, the maintenance, the outreach, and the bureaucracy behind it.

Yet the message on the vehicle suggests that gratitude should flow upward to the President, as though he personally reached into his pocket to buy a bus for the nation. That kind of theater may fool the gullible, but it does not fool the public for long.

There is also a deeper issue of trust. Public confidence in institutions is not built by plastering leaders’ faces over every initiative. It is built by competence, consistency, and fair access.

If the government is serious about improving service delivery, it should ensure the bus is well-run, widely deployed, and genuinely useful to citizens in every region. Let the service speak for itself. Let residents judge it by the results, not the branding. The more the state leans on personality politics, the more it invites cynicism about its motives.

It is, frankly, a crass move. A service intended to shorten the distance between government and citizen should not first force citizens to wade through the swamp of political self-promotion. The outreach bus could have stood as an example of practical governance. Instead, it has become another exhibit in the long-running national museum of needless vanity.

The government should remove the temptation to turn public service into private glorification. If the aim is to help citizens, then help them without the pageantry. If the aim is to build trust, then stop insulting the intelligence of the very people being asked to believe in the sincerity of the project.

A public bus should carry public service, not political ego.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.