Jubilee single-handedly gave CORD a new lease of life

Kenya: CORD leader Raila Odinga’s return from a two-month sojourn in the US has inadvertently kicked off the 2017 campaigns four years too early. In one fell swoop, some life has been breathed into the Opposition, which seemed to have gone comatose after last year’s elections.

But Jubilee has been instrumental in reviving CORD’s fortunes with their comedy of errors, starting with its promise to supply laptops to primary schools, a pledge more suited to campaign sloganeering.

Others followed in quick succession, including the Anglo Leasing payments. Jubilee gave CORD resonant talking points to keep the Opposition alive and turn it into a waking nightmare for President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration.

Cold shoulder

Jubilee’s bumbling shifted attention back to Raila. It’s laughable banning and then unbanning the Raila welcome rally, and obsession with the former Prime Minister even when he was holed up abroad could not have been more conspicuous; even Kenyan embassy officials giving him the cold shoulder in Boston did nothing but lionise the former PM in a way Jubilee will find hard to tame.

It cannot be missed that the very idea of banning political rallies is very 1990s, hardly the kind of thing Jubilee would like to be even remotely linked to.

That explains why CORD is adapting to each misstep by insinuating Saba Saba, making the whole affair ominously reminiscent of the bad old days.

On the issue of the rally, I believe CORD should send Jubilee a thank you note for the tons of unsolicited publicity that no amount of money could have bought. Ruto’s immediate rejoinder that CORD’s demand for dialogue would have to wait until 2017 only made it worse

Kibaki never wanted to talk to ODM after the fateful 2007 elections, but eventually came around to doing it; so did Moi in 1991 as the curtain fell on Section 2A of the old Constitution. Crisis eventually forces the most recalcitrant parties to the table.

Over these past few months, the Jubilee administration has excoriated CORD for being, well, cordless, and not bringing any ideas to the table. Now CORD has made good what Jubilee was blaming them for not doing.

Raila has a knack for creating or helping to create devastatingly effective memes, some of which have come to drive past political pursuits he has fronted to stupendous effect.

Seismic force

One only need look back to the 2002 election to support this argument. In that year, there was the “Rainbow” coalition.  When Raila began to sense he was being shunted in Kanu, he declared, “If things go wrong at Kasarani, then that Rainbow is going to be a political party.” And so it happened.

Perhaps the most dramatic event of the 2002 campaign that attests to Raila’s amazing alchemy to take innocuous situations and slogans and package them into forces packing political seismic force was when, with one deft move, Raila’s “Kibaki Tosha” declarations generated a volcanic shift in Kenyan politics that shaped the political landscape we see today.

Indeed today, “tosha” in Kenya’s political lexicon is a well understood term.

Then of course, there was the Orange, fashioned after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. This led to the defeat of the “Wako Draft” and went on to fire the Opposition banner led by Raila in the lead up to the 2007 elections.

It is against this backdrop that the new slogan in town, “Baba” is emerging. The meme, “Baba” is bound to stick around in our body politic for the next four years.

It was brilliantly crafted and deployed, and is the start of a cry that may, at some point, morph into a nightmare for Jubilee.

Given that Jubilee’s electoral win was a squeaker that barely cleared the 50 per cent threshold, and hence they cannot afford to alienate even  one per cent of their core base, the ruling party must pay particular attention to Raila’s sloganeering wizardry and avoid giving him a platter like they have been doing lately. 

 The writer is Assistant Professor of Education at St Bonaventure University in New York