Can Raila Odinga Lose In 2012 Poll?

BY WYCLIFFE MUGA

When in 1992, the incumbent president, Daniel arap Moi, was declared to have been duly re-elected, those who lost to him responded with outrage. The three ‘major opposition leaders’ of the time, Kenneth Matiba, Mwai Kibaki, and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga issued a joint statement rejecting Moi’s victory.
 Looking back, it is somewhat surprising that we did not have full-scale post-election violence then, like the one of 2008. After all, those who wanted Moi thrown out of State House were a clear majority, as Moi was re-elected with just about 40 per cent of the votes cast. Even more important, this majority was more intensely bitter and opposed to Moi than those who, in late 2007, voted to see Kibaki go into early retirement.
 Still, the country did not go down the path to self-destruction. And by 1997, a strange thing happened when Moi was yet again re-elected: his victory, once more with far less than 50 per cent of the vote, was easily accepted by more or less everyone. Indeed some civil society activists who had a long history of opposing Moi and all his works, turned to the opposition leaders and said, “What else did you expect?”
 The point is, by 2007 it was quite obvious to everyone that the only way Moi could be beaten was if he faced a single candidate fielded by a united opposition. When the opposition leaders of those days — among whom were our current President, Mwai Kibaki, as well as the PM, Raila Odinga — failed to unite, the guaranteed eventual outcome was obvious many months before the votes were cast.
 So, in general, it is better for the peace and stability of the country that presidential elections should not bring any surprises. In an ideal situation, we should know well in advance of the voting day who our next president is likely to be.
 This point of view was recently confirmed in the reports attributed to the ‘global research and strategic consulting firm’ Greenberg Quinland Rosner, said to have been commissioned by the PM’s election campaign secretariat. The truly scary words contained in this report, referred to what many pundits consider to be the more or less unavoidable outcome of the first round of voting in that 2012 presidential election: that it will lead to a runoff between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga.
 According to this report however, such a runoff would lead to Raila narrowly defeating Uhuru with 51 per cent against 43 per cent. But then “this scenario is shaky taking into consideration that what happened in 2007 may happen again if you find Odinga losing to Kenyatta. It should be avoided”.
 What this means, in effect, is that just as was the case in 2007, there is a large number of ODM supporters who have been convinced by what they see in consecutive opinion polls, that their favoured candidate simply cannot lose. And that if he were to lose, they would interpret this as a proof that rigging had taken place, and that they had been denied the victory that was rightfully theirs — a conviction we now know to be a recipe for widespread violence.
 Now in nations with a longer history of opinion polls, extreme shifts of political fortunes, as revealed in polls, are considered a simple fact of life, not something to make an ordinary citizen go out looking for a machete (or, if we are to believe the reports from The Hague, for political leaders to activate the militias they have long established in the event of such an outcome).
 Here is an extract from a recent US opinion column by a writer who is generally pro-Obama:
 “Romney and Perry will be competing to face possibly the weakest incumbent since Jimmy Carter, with the world in turmoil and the economy adrift. Six months ago, it still seemed as if Republican primary voters might be choosing a sacrificial lamb to run against Barack Obama. Now it looks as if they might be choosing the next president.”
 So, here is a clear admission that it took just six months for President Barack Obama to go from the heights of his seeming invincibility in the days after Osama bin Laden had been killed by US forces to the current low point.
 The question then is: Why should we imagine that something similar cannot happen in Kenya? After all, in much of the period after the 2005 referendum, the politician who led all others by a very wide margin in presidential opinion polls was none other than the current VP, Kalonzo Musyoka. Yet when he offered himself to the voters in 2007, what he managed was a distant and humiliating third place.
The writer comments on topical issues.