Now We Have A Real Race On Our Hands

Thursday, 14 April 2011 00:05 BY WYCLIFFE MUGA

For the past two and a half years, all opinion polls have confirmed Prime Minister Raila Odinga as the man most likely to be our next president. And he has usually led the field by a very wide margin indeed.
This must have seemed manifestly unfair to the other politicians who aspired to be the next president of Kenya: hence their insistence that the polls were invalid and no reflection of the political reality at the grassroots.
But on Monday April 11, all this changed, when massive crowds turned up at Uhuru Park to “salute the returning heroes”, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, and former Cabinet Minister, William Ruto. These two were presented as innocent saints and, indeed, heaven-born patriots who had – by the grace of God – miraculously escaped from the evil clutches of the “neocolonialists” at The Hague.
Looking at that victorious parade, you would never have guessed that these were men who stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’. Nor yet that they had but made the preliminary appearance before a global court where they had been preceded over the years by the likes of Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic, with Joseph Kony and Omar al-Bashir counted among those who have so far evaded the attempts to bring them to trial at the ICC.
Still, as of this point, the ‘Ocampo Six’ are all innocent men. And indeed there is barely a serious political or legal analyst who is not convinced – before even having seen what the evidence is against them – that there is no way all of them will be found guilty. Among the six, there are bound to be some who will end up being released, one way or another.
But back to our local politics, here at last is a situation in which two leading politicians have formed a potentially formidable electoral pact which can effectively challenge Raila Odinga’s long-established supremacy in the polls.
It is easy to be dismissive of the kind of parade that filled the roads from the airport on Monday, especially as there was evidence that many youths were ferried to the capital from various rural districts to participate in this “homecoming”. But there is a crucial psychological dimension to all politics, which gives immense significance to this kind of manufactured spontaneity.
The outcomes of elections depend not so much on how the “hardcore support” of a major candidate votes; this is usually predetermined. What really matters is which way the “floating vote” will swing; and when it comes to that floating vote, everyone, at the end of the day, wants to be with the winning team.
And that certainly looked like a winning team when they mounted the podium and declared an end to the use of violence as a tool for those seeking electoral victory. This declaration was no small thing, given who was making it.
To put it rather plainly, the deepest tragedy of electoral violence in the multiparty era, has been that of cadres of so-called “Kalenjin warriors” routinely descending on vulnerable Kikuyu farmers in the Rift Valley; evicting them from their land; destroying their legitimately acquired property; and sometimes killing them in the process.
If this cycle of atrocities in the Rift Valley can be stopped, then that will be a huge step forward for the country. And so, anything which brings the top leaders of the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin communities into a close political alliance must be celebrated by all those who value peace within our borders.
There is, however, room for doubts over the staying power of this alliance.
For example, we could reasonably argue that the average Kalenjin voter by this point, very likely has complete faith in the leadership virtues of William Ruto, and will follow where he leads. But do we really know if this average Kalenjin voter will accept to vote as Ruto directs, if Ruto is but the running mate of presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta?
This, in many ways, is the central question facing this new political alliance - if we reasonably assume that the two main players have no intention of handing over to VP Kalonzo Musyoka on a silver platter, the millions of votes needed to pave his way to the presidency.
For what seems obvious is that William Ruto as presidential candidate, with Uhuru Kenyatta as his running mate, would be a non-starter as far as the voters who form Uhuru's core support are concerned.
To all appearances, the average voter in Central Kenya is not yet ready to contemplate the swearing-in ceremony of a President William Ruto.