By OTIENO OTIENO
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 16:57
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 16:57
Being the first day of what is likely to be a historic election year under the new Constitution, I couldn’t resist the temptation to draw my wishlist for 2012.
Raila to drop presidential bid
Barring a disaster, Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s name will be on the ballot paper in the next presidential election. Mr Odinga will point to his constitutional right, pedigree and experience in government to stake a claim to the presidency.
But, for reasons not necessarily of his making, his candidacy regrettably risks giving us a sham election.
Mr Odinga’s angry opponents have suggested that the sole reason they are in the race is to stop him from becoming president.
So of what value will it be for Mr Odinga or voters to participate in a hopeless election in which he — not the wellbeing of Kenyans — is the issue?
Elections in August
Although an endless debate on a matter so obvious from the Constitution casts us all as a people who can’t agree on anything, my grouse with an election in December or beyond has more to do with the sideshows than the complex legal arguments.
An early election will shorten another season of public idiocy and spare us the vice, the crime and the irritating habits associated with it.
These include the frothing at the mouth by politicians at public rallies, the machete wielding and stone throwing by youthful mobs, the littering and defacing of public and private property with candidates’ posters, the dirty propaganda on the Internet, the jostling for cheap handouts by wananchi, and the stripping of women dressed in mini-skirts by Mungiki.
Isaack Hassan to talk less
American journalist Ambrose Bierce famously said: “A bore is a person who talks when you wish him to listen.”
After Mr Samuel Kivuitu’s disgrace, no elections chief should ever lust after a vote of confidence based on the frequency of the sound bite.
But did Mr Isaack Hassan, the chairman of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, ever learn a thing?
Hassan Omar to head the national cohesion commission
The jury is still out on the performance of Dr Mzalendo Kibunjia’s spineless National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC).
But with a single newspaper article, Mr Hassan Omar Hassan of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights recently got Kenyans to confront the ethnic question with the kind of openness that the NCIC under Dr Kibunjia hasn’t for the four long years it has been around.
jkotieno@ke.nationmedia.com
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