Jubilee Party will unite the country

President Uhuru Kenyatta was only 17 years old when his father died in 1978. He was a teenager in high school facing a future without his father.

But the principles, ethics and wisdom that his ageing father taught him in just 17 years are what Uhuru has held onto in his political career – principles of unity, bringing communities together and leadership through service.

I don’t know if Raila Odinga can remember being 17. He was 49 years old when Jaramogi Oginga Odinga died.

Unlike Uhuru and his father, from onset Raila sought to undo everything his father had tried to do in uniting Kenya’s ethnic communities under the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy.

Almost immediately after his father’s death Raila turned on his fathers’ colleagues and attempted to oust Michael Kijana Wamalwa from the chairmanship of the Ford-Kenya party.

By the time Raila was done, what started out as the hopes of millions of Kenyans for an inclusive political dawn where freedom of conscience and speech were upheld became several splinter groups, all of them ethnically homogenous.

Recently during a speech he gave during the ODM 10th anniversary in Mombasa Raila stated that “the land is littered with epitaphs and unmarked graves of opposition parties that arrived with pomp and died without notice.”

Raila should know. He went out of his way to rock the fledgling opposition, weaken its foundation and splinter the country along ethnic lines.

After the 1997 elections Raila yet again abandoned the struggle for democracy and supported the Moi government, merging his then National Development Party with the ruling party Kanu, after having given opposition leaders like Mwai Kibaki false promises that he would stand with them in a petition against the election of President Moi.

Five years later Raila walked out of KANU to the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party. Three years later he formed ODM. However, even within ODM itself, the notion of unity across communities does not exist.

Three years ago youths were once again used to disrupt elections that threatened to democratically bring in other communities into top echelons of the party.

Now compare this with the consistency that President Uhuru Kenyatta has shown. Even as a rather young politician and despite the fact that much more powerful and long serving leaders like Raila, George Saitoti and Joseph Kamotho had stormed out of Kanu, Uhuru stayed with the party; with the communities and individuals that chose to remain within Kanu.

Then look at his decision to accept decisions made by voters even when they go against him like happened in 2002 when he conceded defeat and saved the country the headache of an election dispute resolution process.

This history is important to voters who need to decide who, between the recently launched Jubilee Party of Kenya led by Uhuru Kenyatta and the ODM Party5 led by Raila Odinga, to support in the next general elections.

Jubilee Party might be new but the concept on which it has been founded is as old as Kenya. It has taken us several evolutions and election cycles to realise that fragmenting, violent and ethnic politics destroys rather than builds our nation.

Today Jubilee Party offers unity as the basis of political organization; not ethnicity.

As Uhuru Kenyatta said, we must learn lessons from our own history and put an end to the cycle of self-interest, greed and disregard for the greater good that ultimately brings about bloodshed.

As the 20th century Spanish philosopher George Santayana also warned “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.