By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO (email the author)
Posted Wednesday, January 26 2011 at 19:33
Posted Wednesday, January 26 2011 at 19:33
If you hang out with foreigners quite a lot in Nairobi, you will hear them occasionally referring to Prime Minister Raila Odinga as the president.
Outside Kenya, it is worse. In Kampala over the Christmas, I was at a place where someone referred to “President Raila” about five times in the space of an hour!
The common explanation for this is that President Kibaki is a self-effacing man who avoids all public appearances he can avoid, and who has given only one full-length interview since he became president.
Raila, on the other hand, is very much a man about town, doing many things Kibaki doesn’t, and where there are a lot of journalists and cameras. He attends football matches, he is at cocktails, and so he gets in the news.
However, if that was true, Raila would enjoy very little press. The real reason for this is that almost everywhere in the world, we in the media usually adopt a simple formula for telling stories, however complex. We call it the “storyline”.
Social and political scientists, filmmakers, and authors are cleverer, so they call their formula the “narrative”. The storyline or narrative can last years, and endure long after the person around whom it is built is dead.
Take the example of Tanzania and its founding president, the charismatic Julius Nyerere.
The story of Tanzania was/is the tale of a humble, God-fearing Nyerere’s struggle to build a just nation, devoid of huge differences between the rich and poor, united by one language (Kiswahili), and where your typical African tribalism is banished deep into the Indian Ocean.
To this day, 11 years after Nyerere’s death, every leader of the CCM party and president of Tanzania is largely judged by how far or close he is to Nyerere’s vision of Tanzania.
Since 2002, Kenya has had a simpler storyline — that Raila is the man to watch because, to his supporters, he was the Messiah who would shake up Kenya and deliver it to the Promised Land.
Or, to his opponents, he was a kind of anti-Christ, a dangerous angry demagogue, who would drive it to Lake Victoria and drown it and all its greatness.
That storyline has only changed in one respect. All great dramas where there is a hero or a villain are never complete without a foil; a Goldfinger in a James Bond film, or a ghost in a Scoobydoo cartoon trying to hurt the good guys.
Donkey years ago, there was very popular action magazine sold all over Africa. The hero was a dashing detective called Lance Spearman (with the inevitable beautiful secretary called Tandi by his side), and the best evil character ever conjured by an African called Rabon Zollo.
There were many foils to Raila, but the perfect one finally came along in 2008; his former ally, suspended minister William Ruto.
Ruto is the perfect weapon to the hero/villain Raila, because he has a very important element that all such dramas need to work; a secret weapon. His secret weapon is, according to the storyline, the Kalenjin vote.
So, over the last eight years, we have been told about Raila’s favourite food; we have seen all views of his house; we know the names of his children, their wives, and his grandchildren; and his favourite clothes.
In the last three years, we have learnt almost as much about Ruto. In the days to come, expect to read a story like, “Heavy rain in Côte d’Ivoire ahead of Raila’s visit”.
Raila and Ruto are still around for some years. You can fully expect that in the near future, you shall even know their wives’ favourite perfumes. Of course, Kenya is a bigger story and deserves to have its story told better. But that is the name of the game.
In the USA, when the brilliant novelist and journalist Norman Mailer saw the American media doing even worse, he wrote famously in despair that, “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist”.
I wish he were wrong.
cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
Outside Kenya, it is worse. In Kampala over the Christmas, I was at a place where someone referred to “President Raila” about five times in the space of an hour!
The common explanation for this is that President Kibaki is a self-effacing man who avoids all public appearances he can avoid, and who has given only one full-length interview since he became president.
Raila, on the other hand, is very much a man about town, doing many things Kibaki doesn’t, and where there are a lot of journalists and cameras. He attends football matches, he is at cocktails, and so he gets in the news.
However, if that was true, Raila would enjoy very little press. The real reason for this is that almost everywhere in the world, we in the media usually adopt a simple formula for telling stories, however complex. We call it the “storyline”.
Social and political scientists, filmmakers, and authors are cleverer, so they call their formula the “narrative”. The storyline or narrative can last years, and endure long after the person around whom it is built is dead.
Take the example of Tanzania and its founding president, the charismatic Julius Nyerere.
The story of Tanzania was/is the tale of a humble, God-fearing Nyerere’s struggle to build a just nation, devoid of huge differences between the rich and poor, united by one language (Kiswahili), and where your typical African tribalism is banished deep into the Indian Ocean.
To this day, 11 years after Nyerere’s death, every leader of the CCM party and president of Tanzania is largely judged by how far or close he is to Nyerere’s vision of Tanzania.
Since 2002, Kenya has had a simpler storyline — that Raila is the man to watch because, to his supporters, he was the Messiah who would shake up Kenya and deliver it to the Promised Land.
Or, to his opponents, he was a kind of anti-Christ, a dangerous angry demagogue, who would drive it to Lake Victoria and drown it and all its greatness.
That storyline has only changed in one respect. All great dramas where there is a hero or a villain are never complete without a foil; a Goldfinger in a James Bond film, or a ghost in a Scoobydoo cartoon trying to hurt the good guys.
Donkey years ago, there was very popular action magazine sold all over Africa. The hero was a dashing detective called Lance Spearman (with the inevitable beautiful secretary called Tandi by his side), and the best evil character ever conjured by an African called Rabon Zollo.
There were many foils to Raila, but the perfect one finally came along in 2008; his former ally, suspended minister William Ruto.
Ruto is the perfect weapon to the hero/villain Raila, because he has a very important element that all such dramas need to work; a secret weapon. His secret weapon is, according to the storyline, the Kalenjin vote.
So, over the last eight years, we have been told about Raila’s favourite food; we have seen all views of his house; we know the names of his children, their wives, and his grandchildren; and his favourite clothes.
In the last three years, we have learnt almost as much about Ruto. In the days to come, expect to read a story like, “Heavy rain in Côte d’Ivoire ahead of Raila’s visit”.
Raila and Ruto are still around for some years. You can fully expect that in the near future, you shall even know their wives’ favourite perfumes. Of course, Kenya is a bigger story and deserves to have its story told better. But that is the name of the game.
In the USA, when the brilliant novelist and journalist Norman Mailer saw the American media doing even worse, he wrote famously in despair that, “If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist”.
I wish he were wrong.
cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
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