The return of Parliament this week swings the spotlight back on politics, as it plays out in the press. The face of politics in our media is not pretty. It is the picture of perpetual bickering, endless shenanigans, talk, talk and more talk.

And just for this, we are told that the country pays the basic politician, Members of Parliament, nearly Sh700,000 every month. Oh, and they now want an additional golden handshake of Sh1.5 million when the clock says it’s time for them to shut up and go home.

Despite the fact that the current Parliament drew the largest number of professionals and academicians – we have several professors there – media commentators continue to point out that siasa (politics) is the only career where no one demands an impressive IQ. As long as you’re Kenyan, over 18, and can speak Kiswahili and/or English, you’re in. It doesn’t matter if you can write decently. As I said, if you can talk, you’re in. (Now you know why our deaf and dumb brethren never make it to Parliament, let alone get representation!)

It is only in this career where it is okay for an assistant minister to stand up and talk mumbo-jumbo for an hour, without shame, to an audience that went to school. One of them, the country has observed, cannot talk three straight sentences in grammatical English.

Ask around. These days, say you want to join politics and people will think you have lost it. Politics just doesn’t seem the honourable profession it proclaims to be. If politics is all about the scheming, half-truths and constant bickering we see in the media, it is hard to think that even an eighth of the population would rely on government.

It was the eloquent Charles Njonjo, independent Kenya’s most powerful Attorney General, who nailed the "dirty game" badge on our politics. In the aftermath of the 1982 attempted coup, powerful political forces had forced Charles from grace to grass. And when he took his decade-long bow out of public life, he did it with one sentence: "I did not know that politics was such a dirty game."

But it is all a distorted view of the real thing.

Politics, the real thing, is essentially the noblest career human beings can pursue. You will agree when you think of its beginnings among Greeks, the people who invented mathematics, science and philosophy.

Derived from the Greek word, "Polis", which means "community", politics is actually about running a community. The dictionary defines it as the science and methods of government, be it of a small community or an entire country.

Government has preoccupied human thought ever since Socrates, the proverbial father of philosophy.

Socrates’ most notable "descendant", Plato, connected politics with philosophy – that activity devoted to the systematic examination of basic concepts such as truth, existence, reality, causality, and freedom. Now imagine if our politicians preoccupied themselves solely with driving Kenya toward "the ideal" – an economy that grows only upward, roads that angels could kill to drive on, air so fresh fish out of water could live on. Plato is the father of idealism in politics.

And Plato’s eminent disciple, Aristotle, believed that every state is a community of some kind. And every community is established with a view to some good. Now Aristotle took it for granted that mankind always acts in order to obtain that which they think good.

And among communities aiming for good, the state or political community is the highest of all. In other words, the man who taught that the highest power mankind can exercise over the world is to understand it, believed that the state always aimed at the highest good.

Yet here at home, while pregnant women in Tharaka-Nithi still have to walk 30kms to the nearest health centre, men charged with the affairs of state reportedly hide Sh750 million a piece in foreign accounts (Friday Daily Nation). It renders Aristotle’s political theory stupid.

Not many people in the streets know this, but the only reason we send people to Parliament is so they can make laws. Good laws to govern the people. In its purest form, politics is about service, period. And what is greater than the call to serve? For politicians, the service is to make laws – not get rich.

Former US President Bill Clinton points out in his book, My Life, that he did not really begin to make money until he left the presidency.

He spent most of his adult life pushing for laws he believed would best serve his people.

Well, doing that is not always pretty. There are two things, according to Clinton, that the public should not watch being made – sausages and laws.

Both processes are ugly in the extreme. It is the reason conscientious men and women who stand up to serve in politics know that they are putting their good name on the line for a greater good – to serve.

But where do we stand when our politics, as it plays out in the press, does not draw the line between lawmaking, governance, statesmanship and porojo?