The Right Honourable PM while you were away...

 

By OTIENO OTIENOPosted Saturday, January 22 2011 at 16:43

Dear Sir,

Welcome back home after your difficult assignment trying to drum sense into Laurent Gbagbo’s stagnant mind.

While you were away, the Ivorian dictator won himself a sizeable fan base in Kenya among people who — to borrow from Chinua Achebe — are always uneasy whenever stolen elections are mentioned in a sentence.

As expected, the Cote d’Ivoire mission was also a hot topic for your favourite critics: the attention seekers, the newly initiated into political talk, those who are paid to talk about you, those who see it as a duty to their community to do so and those who have nothing else to talk about.

Media reports of turmoil in your ODM party gave the sense that you were finally cornered by your political hunters.

Joshua Kutuny and Isaac Ruto barked — louder. William Ruto, Kalonzo Musyoka and Uhuru Kenyatta moved for the kill. PNU (now PNU alliance) thought you were dead meat.

The pundits took over the airwaves to discuss your political obituary.

Not that I care much about your perceived personal political troubles. Quite often you are the author of your own misfortune anyway.

Many times you are too pragmatic for my liking; bending over backwards to cut political deals and compromising your reform credentials in the process.

What worries me is the negative tangent our politics tends to take whenever it appears you are down. Whenever you become a national issue, the more important agenda like the fight against corruption and the implementation of the new Constitution are thrown into the dust bin.

Take the events of the past week, for example. The campaign to defeat justice for the Kenyans murdered and raped during the post-election violence gained momentum.

Two of the six people the International Criminal Court Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, says are the prime suspects were rewarded with an appointment to the hallowed grounds of State House. (Who else does the Waki report say held court here?)

This weekend, President Kibaki flew out for a peace and reconciliation meeting in Eldoret, although there are those who saw it as part of the official cleansing ceremony for the suspects.

And lest I forget, Mr Musyoka, the vice-president, continued with his side hustle of distributing relief food to the families evicted from the Mau Forest and got a well-deserved front page photo display at the expense of the victims of drought downstream.

jkotieno@ke.nationmedia.com