Opinion: Why Uhuru Kenyatta will find it hard to lead Kenya

Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist to drive home a political truth. Ironically, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist Carl Sagan, a specialist in astronomy and space science, opined that “one of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back”.

The bogeyman narrative, stereotyping certain communities and branding political opponents in ways that demean their standing in society, has driven Kenya to a crossroads. It was appalling to hear President Uhuru Kenyatta, a man of pedigree whose noble upbringing should have endowed him with a sense of finesse and decorum, borrow from his deputy William Ruto’s choice epithets for Opposition leader Raila Odinga and call the latter ‘mchawi’ (witch) shortly after he’d been handed the winner’s certificate by the chairman of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission that declared him winner of the October 26 repeat presidential election.

Interestingly, while Mr Ruto has described himself as a hustler, the word hustler is one of the many synonyms of charlatan.

Wildest imaginations

Against even their wildest imaginations, the UhuRuto duo was given the mandate in 2013 to steer the ship of State. And now, having tasted the trappings of power, it is almost preposterous to imagine that Ruto, especially, as evidenced by his aggressiveness, would give up so easily in the face of an Opposition onslaught when the ultimate prize in sight.

If we thought 2008 was a period of ignominy during which the myth that Kenya was an island of peace in troubled seas was debunked, 2017 is in a class of its own. There is a lot of acrimony across the country. Talk of secession is gaining currency. A resistance movement has been born and a boycott of goods and services is in the offing.

The import of that on our fragile economy has not registered on the Kenyan masses. Already, there are fears that in period immediately after September 1, when the Supreme Court nullified Uhuru’s August 8 election victory, despondency has cost the country more than Sh700 billion in lost business opportunities.

Police brutality has been visited on a people exercising their right to vote or not to vote. Nursery school children have been teargassed. A baby as young as six months was fatally clobbered by police. A 10-year-old girl playing on the balcony of her home was felled by a police bullet. Several deaths at the hands of police in Luo Nyanza have been recorded. These incidents fall in the ambit of extra-judicial killings.

Why do elections bring out the worst in African leaders? Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza, a man hanging onto office after his mandate expired in December 2016, has occasioned untold deaths in the country. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is not the democrat we all thought he was, clamping down hard on challengers.

John Magufuli in Tanzania is not faring any better with a clampdown on the media while opposition leader Tundu Lissu narrowly survived death after he was shot more than 26 times. Yoweri Museveni in Uganda is a despot without apology. This is the league of leaders UhuRuto are joining with the violence witnessed in Migori, Busia, Siaya, Kisumu, Bungoma, Vihiga and Homa Bay just so they could retain office. Opposing views are not tolerated.

Becoming president

Under the circumstances, Uhuru may be the President, but his legitimacy is questionable. If all he cared about was becoming president for a second time, then he is home and dry. However, presiding over the affairs of the country with the Opposition breathing down his neck may prove a different ball game altogether.

The tired refrain about the sovereign will of the people will not wash. Jubilee Party analysts and lawyers have been at pains to explain the low voter turnout, yet Ruto had averred they would bag 10 million votes. The more than 12 million who abstained were saying that one way or another, they could not be bothered about UhuRuto. That was a slap in the face for the ambitious duo.

There was desperation evident days to the D-day, as open bribery to get as many people as possible to vote dominated the news. Free bus rides upcountry, free motorcycle rides to polling stations and free meals in parts of the country couldn’t have been anything less than inducement.

The winner-take-all mentality is responsible for the growing divisions. Jubilee has never hesitated to say it is not amenable to dialogue with the Opposition. A religious organisation has proposed a constitutional change to create room in Government for the Opposition, something Jubilee is averse to. In the fullness of time, this will prove the logical thing.

 

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The Standard [email protected]