Opinion: To heal Kenya, let stakeholders define the agenda of dialogue

As the country approached the 2013 elections and with the looming cases before the International Criminal Court against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, the large field of political actors tried out several possible coalition outfits, eventually resulting in the unlikely coming together of Kenyatta and Ruto, an occurrence that gave birth to the Jubilee coalition.

The coming together of Kenyatta and Ruto was unlikely because only four years earlier, the parts of the country from where they expected their core support, had been involved on opposing sides in the conflict that would give rise to the cases before the ICC.

Kenyatta and Ruto explained that they had come together to establish a coalition because they wanted to reconcile and unite the country, which had recently gone through the post-election violence.

The newfound cooperation between Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, evidenced by their recent handshake, is reminiscent of the earlier cooperation between Kenyatta and Ruto in a number of ways, including the fact that it was as improbable as the cooperation between Kenyatta and Ruto.

Two, like Kenyatta and Ruto before, the claimed reason why Kenyatta and Raila are coming together is to unite and reconcile the country.

It is reasonable to assume that the objective of uniting the country, the objective behind the coming together of Kenyatta and Ruto, was not achieved. If it had been achieved there would be no need for Kenyatta and Raila to embark on a new effort to reconcile the country. Also, it is difficult to understand why Ruto would not be a key player in the new reconciliation effort if he was important enough to be a key player in the previous effort.

There is a third feature of the Kenyatta/Ruto cooperation which the Kenyatta/Raila handshake now risks attracting.

Outside the political rhetoric that Kenyatta and Ruto had come together to unite the country, there was no discernible programme through which this ambition could be achieved.

In fact, even before coming to power, Kenyatta and Ruto had already denounced Kofi Annan, the guarantor of the the National Dialogue and Reconciliation process, which they brought to an inauspicious end.

Viewed in perspective, claims that the Kenyatta/Ruto alliance was an attempt to reconcile the country were always vacuous. In the end, those claims were no more than just a way of winning political power. Surprisingly, the same claims about reconciliation and national unity were made when the two decided to turn the Jubilee coalition into a single party in 2017, swallowing a number of small parties along the way.

Despite the claims about reconciliation, the Jubilee Party has remained only a vehicle in the service of the power ambitions of its two leaders, rather than the tool for the public interest which they claimed it to be.

Despite returning a healthier victory at the polls last year than their victory in the 2013 elections, it soon became clear that, on its own, Jubilee would not find the legitimacy to rule the country for another five years.

By allowing Kenyatta and Raila the room to be the sole determinants of what the handshake should mean for the country, Kenya risks another high-sounding but ultimately vacuous political programme like the one Kenyatta and Ruto have pursued in Jubilee.

While it was understandable that their coming together in a gesture of a handshake could start unilaterally, the identification of the issues that would need to be addressed could have been more participatory.

Instead, on their own and without the benefit of wider consultation, Kenyatta and Raila announced a nine-item agenda that would be addressed after the handshake, and that a secretariat of handpicked advisors would elaborate on how the agenda would be addressed.

Through a highly personalised process, Kenyatta and Raila have now been allowed to handpick a team of advisors who will develop a plan of engagement which is supposed to result in moving the country in the direction of discussing the agenda in question.

In the meantime, Raila in particular, has made clear the solutions he would like this highly closed process to produce for the country. Those solutions include an amendment of the Constitution, to change the form of Government.

It is difficult to regard the ongoing process as anything more than an arrangement to serve the personal interests of Kenyatta and Raila, in the same way that the Jubilee party serves the personal interests of Kenyatta and Ruto.

If the handshake is to yield promises for the country, rather than serving as a personal tool for its two leaders, Kenyatta and Raila now need to take a major step back. They need to facilitate an inclusive process by which an agenda for the promised dialogue can be discussed by stakeholders, who would also define the design of the dialogue process and how key role players are to be selected. For lack of participation, whatever Kenyatta and Raila have served up after the handshake totally lacks legitimacy and cannot succeed.