Jubilee Party failed to ignite desired spark

Failure by the new Jubilee Party to wrestle any ward seat from the Opposition in the just-concluded four by-elections is an indicator the political thinking in various places hasn’t changed an inch since 2013.

Jubilee only captured Sala ward in Tana River while ODM retained three seats in Mosiro (Kajiado County), Nyacheki (Kisii County) and Kalokol (Turkana County).

The votes cast reveal 50.78 per cent in favour of ODM against Jubilee’s 49.22 per cent.

The results must take Jubilee back to the drawing board.

ODM’s resounding victory Kisii and the usual narrow gap in Kajiado County give an impression of an electorate that doesn’t have any good reason why they should troop to Jubilee after the merger of its affiliate parties.

Preliminarily, the Jubilee merger seems to have failed to produce the spark it ought to have ignited. I have never been excited by the unstructured and ill-advised collapse of the so-called Jubilee affiliate parties into one big party.

That the process of folding the parties was done without participation of ordinary party members and its elected leaders smacked of dictatorship and lack of internal democracy within the ruling coalition.

The merger was done in the most undemocratic manner and my humble opinion is that this was a classic example of how a party, of the calibre of a ruling outfit, should never be run.

Yet in 2013, I was in the forefront championing the ideals of The National Alliance and in a tough battle of political wit, I became the only elected MP on that party in Narok County.

I therefore speak as a legitimate and original leader of the Jubilee Alliance who holds the view that the folding of the party, the main partner in the alliance, was not done under the tenets of ample consultations.

The application of the “Top to Bottom” principle in making a decision of such magnitude instead of the “Bottom to Top” principle smacked of utter disrespect to party membership. This can best be described as a testimony that Kenyans are hostages of individuals who hold the instruments of the party.

Truth be told, merging of the Jubilee affiliate parties is yet to sink into the minds of members of parties they so worked hard for in 2013.

One Kenyan community has a saying that the meat that strangles someone is not the one in the mouth, but the one on the plate.

Some Jubilee honchos have whetted their appetite for 2022 forgetting that for Jubilee, 2017 is an even harder political project than 2013 and it's going to be bruising.

As an MP, I have experienced first-hand the disregard shown to elected leaders where party chiefs view MPs as individuals and not representatives of the thousands of people who elect them.

This is disgraceful and I consider such treatment of elected leaders as a sure way to sound one's political death knell.

I went to court to block the merging of Jubilee parties because there was no participation of the real owners of the party.

The merger was only saved by parliamentary intervention through the Political Parties (Amendments) Bill.

Even then, the injustice directed at party membership and elected leaders still remained.

The new Jubilee Party will be a hard sell in certain regions.

The fact about our politics is that ethnicity is a key factor and certain communities still have trust issues with others with whom they have been lumped together in the coalition.

This historical suspicion won’t die in a day and what we should be working hard to achieve is a certain level of trust through active participation and leveraging on matters such as political party restructuring and rebranding.

As it is, certain quarters feel all that has happened to Jubilee Party is a plot by their political partners to craft a vehicle for their own political ends.

By disregarding the input of all players, Jubilee is cruising very fast on the highway of self-destruction.