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.