It’s time to shift focus from Raila-Kenyatta power games

NAIROBI: Kenya’s politicians and their invariably fanatical followers are a hopelessly superstitious lot. They simply have no sense of objectivity, perspective or even strategy. They interpret everything they see or hear to their own convenience and to massage their egos. If it wasn’t such a tense moment, I would have been left with broken ribs by the comical parade of subjective propaganda that ‘political analysts’ passed off as ‘analyses’ in the run-up to the 2013 General Election.

I chuckled through the wishful thinking of the Jubilee apparatchiks who, even with doubts written all over their faces, exaggerated the numbers that the regions that favoured the candidacy of Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto could marshall. I remember one pseudo-analyst on TV alleging that the Mt Kenya region, which was presumed to be solidly behind Kenyatta, and the Rift Valley turf of Ruto, needed only half of their numbers to reach the 50 per cent plus one threshold needed to occupy State House.

“And we haven’t even counted the many other votes Uhuru and Ruto will definitely garner from the CORD zones and neutral areas. It will be a wrap by midday,” our pseudo-analyst enthused, obviously trying hard to believe his own fiction. Listening to him, you would not have expected the presidential results to be a neck-and-neck affair between Raila Odinga and Kenyatta, which would be determined at the Supreme Court for lack of a clear winner. But perhaps it is the CORD stock of analysts that would have left me in stitches; if the matter wasn’t such a stomach-churningly divisive affair.

I watched a Professor of Political Science on TV, who passed himself off as a ‘neutral’ but who could as well have been a card-carrying life member of CORD, spin a clever yarn about what would happen in the Rift Valley in the 2013 polls. The man, was at pains to explain that after the people of the Rift Valley supported Raila’s ODM in the 2007 polls, and even gave him the name “Arap Mibey”, they would vote for the former premier in the presidential poll and give Ruto’s URP men and women the Senate, National Assembly and county seats. Until the results trickled in and all these false theorists were put to shame.

It is however not these preposterous predictions that make me think the Raila-Kenyatta power games are not healthy for the country. One, other than being highly divisive, they come with alarmist ethnic lies that could tear the country apart. Two, it is sad that we have reduced every aspect of our national discourse – economy, culture, devolution, democracy, reforms, everything – to a contest pitting Kenyatta against Raila’s men. I am of the opinion that, if we could put half the effort we put in defending illogical arguments for or against these two rival sides, we would attain Vision 2030 goals by 2020.

Today, no matter how educated our middle-class, business types, professionals and even scholars are, we see no realities or possibilities outside what CORD says, which means Jubilee says the opposite. The irony of it is that we have been complaining our politics and top positions revolve around the same old names and nothing for the younger generation. It all confirms the rest of us as a despondent lot who cannot critically look at the world outside the blinkers we have inherited from this decidedly unnecessary fault line that we even fund on pretext of Political Parties Funding.

It is indeed a great shame that you can foretell the position of any scholar or professional in any intellectual debate just by asking them whether they are in CORD or Jubilee. For outside this axis, it seems, the world is formless and no ideas, or positions can exist.