Gitau Warigi
By GITAU WARIGI
Posted Saturday, February 11 2012 at 18:23
Posted Saturday, February 11 2012 at 18:23
Musalia Mudavadi is belatedly learning that nothing comes on a silver platter, but the price is steep indeed for ODM.
Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o, the party secretary-general, was being untruthful when he told a television station that the Raila Odinga-Mudavadi presidential nomination contest was a “non-issue.”
Mr Odinga’s frenetic entry into the campaign for county delegates to counter Mr Mudavadi’s own does not bear out the professor’s placid description.
Nor does the ill-temper betrayed by utterances from the prime minister’s hardcore supporters.
The prime minister’s focus has even been diverted from the G7 ‘prayer’ rallies to deal with this more immediate threat to his hold on ODM.
In essence, Mr Mudavadi’s campaign deliberately raises the spectre that used to haunt Mr Odinga in pre-2007 days: his presumed ‘unelectability.’
Much as I think Mr Mudavadi’s fans wildly overrate his national popularity (they take it as a given, for instance, that he can win the General Election outright in the first round), they have clearly calculated that a county-based nomination process will strike directly at what was once assumed to be the prime minister’s soft underbelly.
Plus, this challenge is coming at a time when the PM is facing a vicious onslaught by two formidable and embittered rivals with the clout to influence fence-sitting delegates in counties of the North Rift and Central Kenya.
A lot of hot air has been expended about “internal party democracy” and all that. But listen to the barbs being thrown behind the veil.
While campaigning in Mombasa, Mr Mudavadi offered that ODM “is not a tribal party.”
Then he put it that the party did not believe in “dictatorship.” The coded messages are loaded with meaning.
Insinuations by some MPs allied to the PM that Mr Mudavadi is a plaything of the G7 have only added to the rancour.
One particularly ill-advised Nyanza MP blurted out at a public meeting that “Luos will not vote for Mudavadi” even if he became the party nominee.
I don’t want to speculate on the behaviour of the Luhya base if the situation were reversed.
An ODM press conference called on Wednesday to signal that all was well internally could only throw up the tired line that the problem was of “outside interference.”
Frankly, I don’t see a happy ending to all this. Mr Mudavadi’s bid has unleashed raw passions in Luhya country which will not let him give up the race even if, as I believe will happen eventually, he loses to Mr Odinga.
True enough, the challenger could agree to rejoin the fold as deputy if he deemed the contest had been adjudicated fairly, but will the supporters he has so suddenly thrown into excitement agree to follow suit?
Conversely, Mr Odinga has invested too much in his presidential quest to give up now even if he were to lose the ODM nomination to Mr Mudavadi.
Glib assurances by party honchos that all will be fine are not borne out by the record of political party contests in Kenya, starting ominously with the once mighty Ford party.
Show me any Kenyan politician who accepts defeat when the stakes are so high, and I will show you that Luis Moreno-Ocampo is a G7 sympathiser.
The only way out I can see from this is a mutually acceptable compromise between a counties-based nomination process and a centralised Kasarani show.
* * *
Justice Minister Mutula Kilonzo’s warning on “weird” rulings being issued lately by the courts is timely.
After the last census, results for eight districts in North Eastern and Turkana were cancelled over glaring anomalies.He omitted to mention one troubling suit against the Planning ministry which a judge recently upheld.
There were abnormal deviations in age and sex profiles with some districts showing a ratio of men three times higher than women.
But a court has now decided there should be no repeat census in those districts.
From what I could read of the judgment, it was not disputing that there were anomalies as such but that the residents were not to blame for the mistakes of the enumerators!
gitauwarigi@yahoo.com
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