Will the Kisii coronation elevate Matiang'i?

United Opposition principals led by Jubilee Presidential Candidate Fred Matiang'i addresses Kisii residents. [Sammy Omingo, Standard]

Ethnic coronations in Kenya closely resemble ethnic profiling. Accordingly, they empower and constrain at the same time. Dr Fred Matiang’i has been crowned the king of the Kisii, a role that has gone begging since the demise of Simeon Nyachae five years ago. Can he convert the Kisii crown into a platform for wider national engagement, or will it cage him into a tight ethnic enclosure?  

In essence, the big question is not Matiangi’s crown. It is rather whether this coronation will be accepted as a tribal ceiling, or as a stepping stone to greater heights. The former powerful Cabinet Secretary for the Interior stands at a tricky crossroads. One fork points towards ethnic consolidation. It leads towards a critical predictable ceiling if he uses it to generate powerful discipleship among the Gusii. In converse is a national platform that he could win or miss, depending on how he situates himself in his new role.

A massive national following is the surest pathway to the State House. Yet, no serious presidential contender in Kenya has so far escaped ethnic consolidation. The difference between those who will go far and those who will not is whether, first, they have an ethnic following, and second, the ethnic crown becomes a launching pad or a prison.  

Neatly rolling into one fine string, the strand of ethnic supremacy and nationalism is a tricky affair. The same reason a politician is beloved of the tribe is the reason the rest of the country mistrusts him. Kenya’s politics since independence have been hegemonic.

Trebal elite cabal

The man at the very top usually establishes ethnic dominance by a tribal elite cabal that lords it over the rest of the country. Hence, the more his tribe embraces any one politician, the more uncomfortable with him the rest of the country becomes. 

Matiang’i, therefore, arrives on the Kisii throne with multiple dilemmas. He will want to balance them delicately. The ethnic surrogate in Kenya is a necessary evil, however. It is a critical springboard to greater heights. A leader who does not command a strong ethnic following is judged as rootless. At the power bargaining table with other leaders, he is minimised and dismissed as a lightweight. They will tell him that he has brought little, or next to nothing, to the joint effort to win power.

Numbers count. That is the ethos. Going hand in hand with that is money. Those who do not bring either, or both, are dismissed and passed over.

On this count alone, the “Gusii throne” is an asset in Matiang’i’s lap, even as he ponders his next move after the ethnic honours. He must be national while remaining ethnic. But he must also be ethnic, even as he seeks to win over the nation.  

These are difficult marbles to juggle. Only a few politicos, like the late Raila Odinga, have mastered the art. Raila cultivated a broad national following while also dominating his native Luo community. The chances for political survival within the Luo community were always very slim for those who did not toe his line. The exceptions were there, of course, yet they remained in the margins. 

Matiang’i, a disciplined office boardroom operative and go-getter, is trying to fit in this ethnic command position. The state technocrat is learning how to be a grassroots mobiliser at the same time. He must remain the bureaucratic enforcer that he is known to be, but also morph into a populist operator within the tribe; a national crisis manager, who is also a local patronage baron. 

Coronation

Matiangi’s coronation is, accordingly, an exercise in compensatory politics.  The consummate multiple-ethnic boardroom man must also excel in ethnic anchorage. Will it work? It could, if it will not swallow his brand as a national technocrat, and if it will not signal external elite choreography. For a start, it must not look as if the process is being choreographed by his colleagues in the United Alternative Government in waiting, previously the People’s United Opposition. 

It is remarkable that the DCP leader, Rigathi Gachagua, has been ill-at-ease with the fact that Matiang’i belongs to the Jubilee Party. He has always wanted him to come to the joint table with “a personal party” with a strong dose of the Kisii character. He has never liked Matiang’i’s association with Uhuru Kenyatta as his Party Leader. “Bring us a party from Kisii,” Gachagua has said time and again. 

Gachagua wants to give the impression of having taken Matiang’i home to be crowned the Gusii supremo. Is this a ploy Gachagua employs to maximise himself, while minimising everyone else? Apart from diminishing his colleagues, the Gachagua approach arrives with a note of artificiality. It lacks the organic trend that a previous kingpin like Nyachae had in Kisii and, accordingly, must be carefully managed. Matiang’i will not want to look like a muppet, with Gachagua’s hand in the glove. He must be his own man, establishing his own ethos in Kisii and elsewhere in the republic. While he travels with his opposition colleagues, he must still carve out his own wider space, in Kisii and beyond. 

Nyachae’s command arrived through a different organic avenue. First was the factor of his father. The redoubtable Senior Chief Musa Nyandusi was a renowned individual who was listened to both at home in Kisii and away. He was a shrewd businessman who made his hay both in the colonial sun and in the independent Kenyan state. Nyachae walked in his footsteps as a respected and, at times, a feared provincial administrator. He enjoyed prominent visibility under Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi. 

Today, occupying a prominent leadership space among an increasingly enterprising businesspeople like the Kisii requires the kind of qualities that Nyachae brought to the agora, and a lot more. Independent capital and an independent political platform are major assets. The Kisii are more likely to be endeared towards Matiang’i if he does not present the profile of an individual under another person, or one who would place the community under the command of another community.  

Additionally, Nyachae’s immense wealth underwrote loyalty. Matiang’i is not the industrialist that Nyachae was, nor is he a banker, an exporter of large-scale organic farm produce, or an insurance underwriter. He is not known to own numerous big push money minting platforms. Yet, a person seeking to become the President of Kenya must not only draw loyalty, but he must also be able to sponsor supporting candidates across the political chessboard. The Kisii crown aside, these realities will begin sinking in the next few months.

Urgent challenge

Matiang’i’s most urgent challenge, however, remains the retention of the faith that Kenya’s assertive GenZ population expressed in him during the 2024 youth uprising. In the same knot is the need to cultivate a wide national following beyond the jurisdiction of his Kisii coronation. Is this dual following endangered by the Kisii crown? The GenZs stamped their arrival on Kenya’s civic landscape, clearly decrying ethnic politics. “We are tribeless, leaderless, and party-less,” they declared.  

In Matiang’i, they saw an acceptable leader, despite the fact that he belonged to the same age group as the parents of most of them. Their unhappiness with their country’s leadership was not, therefore, strictly a conflict between generations. It was more about a leadership trust deficit. Matiang’i was the kind of leader to deliver the Kenya of their dreams. 

If you ticked the correct boxes, Kenyan youth would be willing to give you a chance. Now, by ticking the Gusii spokesperson’s box, does Matiang’i digress from the Gen-Z tribeless dream, or does he only muster some of the more crucial ethnic numbers that he must bag before he can bring closer the Gen-Z dream of him as the possible next President of Kenya?  

Kenya’s post 2010 politics have never been more performative, media-driven, and populist than now. Within this framework, Gusii leadership has remained fragmented, despite its outstanding technocratic character. In Kenya’s tribal political arithmetic, someone was always going to consolidate the Kisii vote and run away with it. Accordingly, the critical question is not going to be why Matiang’i has accepted being that person, but whether he can be the leader of his tribe and Kenya’s leader at the same time. 

Leading the tribe and the country is the one riddle that has failed Kenya’s five regimes so far. And for Dr Matiang’i, the taste of this pudding will be in the eating. He must first take a bite, but that will be in the future, if it comes. Yet, Kenyans will be watching the optics around him on the campaign trail, and what they herald for future management of ethnic diversity, should he succeed President William Ruto next year. 

Essentially, therefore, Matiang’i must retain his outlook as a state technocrat, even as he seeks to be an indomitable grassroots mobilizer in Kisii. He must bring on board all consequential Kisii leaders and take down those who will not toe the line. But he must also avoid getting mired into intra-ethnic power competitions to the extent that they besmirch his national image, or tie him down to the extent that he fails to reach out to the rest of the country.  Matiang’i will also now seek to tie up in the same multiple-knot the bureaucratic enforcer and crisis manager, the populist local orator and local power patronage baron. 

Outside the Kisii community, the coronation should increase his coalition's acceptability without clipping his wings in the rest of the country. If he cannot spread his wings outside Kisii and Nyanza, because of coalition restrictions, then both the coronation and the coalition will frame him as a parochial ethnic supremo. To retain the image that endeared the Gen-Zs to him, he must refuse to be fenced in. Kenyans will accordingly expect to see him cutting across the national communities, reactivating Jubilee Party offices, addressing local party honchos in town hall meetings, and the people in larger gatherings in diverse assemblies and rallies, even without being accompanied by his fellow Opposition leaders and managers.

The inherent danger in this remains being seen as a lone ranger and polarising figure in the Opposition. But there are no soft options. Matiang’i will either risk being called a lone ranger or degenerate into a clipped-wing eagle, with the outlook of a “managed project.” He must then accept the tag of a “sponsored assignment” that cannot break away from the “sponsor”. 

To be his own man in the political space, he must balance between coalition politics and personal political space. His political rallying capacity was never on the weighing scales more than it is now. He is now properly on the anti-Ruto platform, and he must show that he is ready and able to take on the William Ruto bull by the horns. He will not achieve this by being locked up in Kisii, or by being towed around the rest of the country only when it pleases Rigathi Gachagua to tow him around.

Even in Kisii itself, Matiang’i risks facing resistance if his leadership is perceived as an externally orchestrated assignment. The quicker he storms outside the “tribal zoning model”, therefore, the better for him. His post-tribal coronation appeal must intensify in order for his “competent reformist” character to continue swelling. To this extent, he will need to sustain his earlier position that the United Opposition presidential flag bearer should not be settled upon in a closed-door cartel-style power bargaining. He must insist on the preeminence of the voice of the people.

Are some of his colleagues in the Opposition likely to accuse him of “splitting the Opposition” and “handing victory to Ruto”? Yes, they will. Yet the only way Matiang’i can consolidate his national character is to take the risk of going out and meeting Kenyans on his own, with a revamped Jubilee team in full tow. If he does not do this, he will inevitably trail someone else. And if he is being towed, he must prepare to kiss goodbye his presidential dreams. It is a dilemma scenario all the way; a difficult choice between sinking into a narrow ethnic-based oblivion, or cultivating a broader national appeal that upsets his Opposition colleagues. 

In his posthumous “Challenge of Nationhood” essays, Tom Mboya states that tribal arithmetic is anti-modern. But Matiang’i needs both this tribal arithmetic and a preponderant modern youthful population. Mboya also states that nationhood requires a supra-modern nationalist imagination. Matiang’i must hold on to his ethnic numbers while also convincing the rest of the country that he has a supra-modern nationalist imagination. Finally, Mboya says that leadership must rise above birth identity. Matiang’i must demonstrate to Kenyans that he has risen above his birth identity, but at the same time retain that identity!

In negotiated political spaces, there is always the possibility that things will come crashing down like a house of cards. In the undesirable event that this happens, chance can only favour the prepared. These will be those who cast their nets wider than the reach of their ethnic coordinates. When Nyachae bolted from the National Rainbow Coalition in 2002, he had not cast his net beyond Kisii. This minimised him as a national leader. He won the Kisii, but lost the rest of Kenya. Hopefully, Matiang’i will not want to repeat the mistakes that his mentor made. He must be Kisii and Kenyan at the same time. It is a tight rope affair. His think-tank has its assignment cut out for it.