Raila rallies: Let the economic kingdom come first

Opposition leaders Raila Odinga addresses thousands of people at Kamukunji Grounds in Kibra on February 5, 2023. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

The Azimio rally in Kibra was an hour of reckoning for Azimio when they attempted to portray their ongoing rallies as youth-centric and youth-driven. It all started when fatigues and red-beret-donning individuals came to the podium at the prompting of Baba.

They had some fancy name that I cannot remember now but which sounded like the MDC party of the late Zimbabwean politician Morgan Tsavingirai. When they began to speak, each shouted slogans and mumbled some incoherent words while chanting the three names of the party leader. However, the rally would light up when one of the young men accused the party of "conmanship".

It's folk wisdom that when the king's advisors fail to tell him the truth, the king will get that truth from a madman in the streets or from a child. With the biting drought that has left at least 4.1 million people without food, and water, and an underperforming economy due to years of elite-centric thinking coupled with a pandemic that disrupted the global supply chain, the common man wants to hear nothing else except solutions to his needs of bread and butter. As President Clinton said, "It is the economy, stupid."

There was a concurrence among the leading economists in Kenya in 2022 that the economic mismanagement was so deep that for between three to four years, the government would be struggling to get the economy out of the ditch. It is usually a very painful process. Sometimes it may include devaluation of the country's currency, or take the shape and form of reduced spending in certain quarters of the economy as happened during the structural adjustment programme and the subsequent liberalisation of the economy in the early 90s. One thing about the prevailing economic tailspin is that it may reconfigure our political DNA.

For so long, our mobilisation has taken the shape and form of an ethnic siege mentality where the political class manufactures a bogeyman, who could be the government of the day or a leading political figure. For the first time, I have been invited to speak to youth groups across the country asking what they can do differently in this era, to avoid mistakes of the past. My response has been brief.

"Young people, especially from poor backgrounds, must be cautious enough not to be used again as expendable political cannon fodder."

The biggest challenge we have today is the cost of living which has gone through the roof. Instead of megaphone diplomacy, the Azimio team could achieve much more very easily via quiet and direct diplomacy. That is presuming that they have the best interest of the young people at heart.

A lot of young people are already disillusioned with the rallies due to their potential to metamorphose into equally destructive demos. There is the right to demonstrate, to picket and all, but when exercised without regard to the pain it may wrench on the ordinary poor, you begin to wonder when hedonism became part and parcel of our political values. Rights come with responsibilities.

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Our politics must not be reduced to a zero-sum game. If it was convenient for the Azimio honchos to have a rapprochement with the Jubilee regime in 2018 and sit idly by as the country continued to go to the dogs, the sham that was the repeat presidential elections notwithstanding, then it is possible to forge a unity of purpose with the current administration and address the two legitimate issues that they have raised so far; the cost of living and the composition of the IEBC. If they do not do that with urgency, then only one fate awaits them - that of a man who slept through a revolution.

Allow me to pen off with a story by author Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle is an amiable farmer who wanders into the Catskill Mountains, where he comes upon a group of dwarfs playing ninepins. Rip accepts their offer of a drink of liquor and promptly falls asleep.

he awakens, 20 years later, he is an old man with a long white beard; the dwarfs are nowhere in sight. When he returns to town, he finds that everything is changed: His wife is dead, his children are grown, and George Washington's portrait hangs in place of King George III's. The old man entertains the townspeople with tales of the old days and of his encounter with the little men in the mountains.

We the people of Kenya have heard of Nyayo and his days, we know of Kibaki but right now if it is not about the economy, then sorry, thanks but no thanks.

Mr Kidi is a governance and policy expert.

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