Sunday, January 22, 2012

From kings to kingmakers



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Mt Kenya region and Rift Valley, which have so far produced Presidents of Kenya are fast finding themselves increasingly, yet separately, confined to king-making chores, totally unable to work in tandem in the face of unfinished business from the post-election violence.

Every last presidential candidate has done the Coast political pilgrimage. No one expects a successful presidential candidate to arise from the region any time soon and it is therefore considered one of the permanent swing-vote areas in the Kenyan electoral scheme of things. This is a status that the Mount Kenya and the Rift Valley vote blocs, the only areas that have produced Presidents of Kenya thus far in our independent history, have long been unfamiliar with, particularly the Mt Kenyans. The Kalenjin vote bloc has undergone two very divergent baptism-of-fire electoral experiences since the end of the 24-year-long Daniel arap Moi rule.
From vote-bloc-to-beat to swing factor
No two general elections are alike, even consecutive ones, as the Kalenjin community’s electoral experience since the end of the Moi era has amply illustrated. In the two consecutive presidential elections, the Kalenjin went from the vote bloc to isolate and beat, at the 2002 General Election, Kenya’s first State House transition poll, to the swing-vote factor against another isolated and marked-for-defeat incumbency, the Kikuyu bloc, at the 2007 polls. The planned defeat of the Kikuyu did not happen definitively enough to make them lose the presidential incumbency in 2007, although they suffered the massive body-blow of the post-election violence that saw hundreds of thousands of them violently ejected from the Rift Valley.
Now all indications are that the Rift Valley bloc could play yet another role at the eleventh general election. As in the seemingly permanent case of the Coast, there is now almost nil expectation among Kenyans of all communities, including in the Rift Valley itself, that a Kalenjin could return to State House in the forthcoming polls. But the realisation that the bloc has reached a historical junction where it can still propel a candidate from another region to State House, or prevent such a targeted candidate from ever residing on the House on the Hill, is on everyone’s mind in early 2012.
How will the Rift Valley play only its second swing-vote role in a general election this time around, and how much clout, really, does Eldoret North MP William Ruto wield over the region? The Mois (the patriarch Daniel and his youngest and favourite son Gideon) have spent the years since the post-election violence working assiduously to control Baringo and parts of Nakuru. And while Ruto undoubtedly bestrides Uasin Gishu county like the proverbial colossus, sections of the Kipsigis and Nandi communities clearly have their own priorities and personalities who have ensured that he is not yet as all-powerful and influential in Rift Valley politics as he would like to be or as both the results of the tenth general election and the referendum on the new constitution seemed to suggest.
Roads minister Franklin Bett, a Kipsigis, former Industrialisation Minister Henry Kosgey and Agriculture Minister Sally Kosgei, both Nandi, remain firmly in ODM alongside Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Indeed, on the day Ruto and his allies launched the United Republican Party, with its slogan of Kusema na Kutenda (Walk the Talk), Kosgei rained very heavily on the former Cabinet minister’s parade by announcing that she had no intentions of quitting ODM.
Ruto’s clout, both real and putative, is one reason that the URP launch on Sunday last week was watched very closely in the political sector. The party has Ruto as its figurehead and most likely presidential candidate. The launch was clearly the most significant of new political outfits over the past five years. Ruto’s speech was masterly, clearly crafted to be of inaugural address timbre. The keynote speakers were all men of substance and house-hold name standing, including former Speaker Francis ole Kaparo (who is the party Chair), Transport minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere, assistant minister Ekwe Ethuro and Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo.
Ruto invokes ‘Family Values’
Ruto added a new spin to presidential electioneering in Kenya, a theme he appears to have borrowed from certain conservative sections of US politics – the family values theme. He emphasized that URP recognises the institution of marriage as being between man and wife, empathising with millions of parents around the country who occasionally wonder what kind of company their children are keeping in an age of the illicit drugs menace, widespread promiscuity and criminality. It will be interesting to see where URP goes with a family values theme that sounds distinctly like something borrowed from the form book of the US Moral Rearmament Movement, a crusading and activist religious right-wing tendency. Almost certainly there will be a run-in between URP campaigners and more liberal Kenyans, particularly the gay and lesbian elements. In this day and age, URP runs a very high risk of getting itself a very bad press very fast indeed in the diplomatic community and the West.
Ruto pressed many other buttons in his launching speech, almost all of them designed to appeal to the self-interest and prejudices of any number of demographics outside the Mt Kenya region. Jirongo, who spoke before Ruto, set the stage, assuring marginalised communities that the economic scams of the past almost five decades of Independence were the work of hegemonic forces that had dominated Kenya for far too long and URP would end this predatory and disenfranchising status quo. Perhaps this was a bit rich coming from Jirongo, the quintessential Kanu era Mr Moneybags, a man whose political career was launched on the most spectacular slush-funding extravaganza of Kenya’s political and electioneering history, the Youth for Kanu ’92 lobby group, of which Ruto was a frontline luminary.
The first question on every analyst’s lips was how much of a clout Ruto really has over the Rift Valley vote bloc and how many of the majority of 30-plus MPs he had abandoned ODM with and plunged headlong into URP with are likely to win any electoral post in the forthcoming polls. Political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi, speaking on a local TV station at primetime, reckoned that Ruto is not really interested in the Presidency. Ruto’s game, according to Mutahi, is to garner the numbers in Parliament and the Senate to go to the negotiating table of the post-Kibaki Presidency and enter a strategic pact, including using the numbers behind him to help push the Presidential race into a runoff contest.
‘President Raila Odinga’
Early this week, Metropolitan minister Njeru Githae cautioned the Mt Kenya politicians who are all seeking to stand for president that if they did not unite behind one strong candidate they had better “start practising addressing the outgoing Prime Minister as Your Excellency President Raila Odinga”. Clearly, the prospect of the Mt Kenyan vote bloc having to join the Rift Valley bloc on the sidelines of Presidential electioneering as merely a swing-vote or king-making formation is not something that many in the region’s political elite cherish. To have the numbers but to be unable, for whatever reason (for instance the mood of the country), to field a candidate who is indeed guaranteed to succeed Kibaki is the beginning of a sinking feeling among the Central Kenya elite that was all too familiar, and dreadful, during the Moi years.
Ruto will conduct a presidential campaign that will exude every outward confidence that he and Rift Valley can win. Ruto knows one thing for sure; his relevance depends entirely on what he brings to the table and he is not the kind of operative who moves alone. He has clearly demonstrated this since his falling out with Raila. He moves in formations and is the one operative in the very top echelons of the political sector with no chance of becoming President. He however possesses king-maker factors like none other, apart from Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi, the Western Kenya political linchpin, another big vote bloc area that permanently plays a swing-vote role.
But, finding themselves seated on the sidelines despite being two of the biggest blocs on the voters’ register, can the Mountain and the Valley unite and propel a preferred candidate to the post-Kibaki State House? This remains the unlikeliest scenario of the eleventh general election for reasons arising from seriously unfinished business concerning the post-election violence. The Mt Kenya and Rift Valley political elite have discovered that their grassroots are in no mood for political alliance, apparently even in support of a candidate who is not from Central or Rift Valley.
Both Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka and former Cabinet minister Raphael Tuju have clearly been hoping to tap into a Kikuyu-Kalenjin alliance to thwart Raila’s beeline bid for State House but appear to have made no headway whatsoever thus far. Not even Githae’s scare tactics about practising a new protocol in the mountain with regard to Raila seems to light enough of a fire under the Central political elite to make them rush to embrace the Rift Valley political elite and take their grassroots with them. It remains to be seen whether an adverse verdict from The Hague could turn out to be the tipping point – and with what effect and consequences.

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