Mukhisa Kituyi. Photo/FILE
By MUKHISA KITUYI
Posted Saturday, March 31 2012 at 16:43
Posted Saturday, March 31 2012 at 16:43
Greetings Ndugu yangu. I choose to address you through this most public of mediums because the message I share with you in these lines is of significant public interest and may be in your best interest to be heard by your foes and, particularly, friends firsthand.
I congratulate you on the phenomenal success you have had in building a solid political following within the populous Central Kenya region and the significant forays you continue to make in the wider Kenyan population.
It is not easy to amass such goodwill and following these days. First you come from a community that is famously apolitical and rarely finds a common voice on anything.
Secondly, you are the scion of an aristocratic heritage that divides more than it unites opinion both in your community and across the country.
Third you live in an era of political cynicism and apathy especially among the younger intelligentsia. And fourth, Kenya remains polarised by the wounds of recent political skirmishes.
With your firm grip and bear hug; your ability to make your immediate audience feel like you really consider them important; your networks and nationwide rallies; you have patiently and systematically ridden out many of these challenges.
Your oratory and simplicity have wrung significant gains from the resources you have invested in siasa.
Yet, as your star shines its brightest, as you appear to tickle the Kikuyu electorate more than anybody since Kenneth Matiba, as your visage increasingly rises in national profile, ugly clouds are drifting in your direction.
Tactical blunders will easily unravel everything you have invested in. Those singing your praises do not build you.
Often they want to ride your train to their destinations. A daunting task before you is this Gema thing.
We all saw the emotional outpouring at Limuru and the solid endorsement you received from notables. But proceed with caution.
Although the Kikuyu community and, by extension, Gema, has provided two of our three presidents since independence, Kenya has never had a Gema president. How do I mean?
At independence, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was a leader of the nationalist party Kanu.
He coalesced the main progressive forces blending the heroism of Mau Mau, the organisational skills of Tom Mboya and the raw energies of Oginga Odinga, among others, to present credible leadership as opposed to the colonial comprador called Kadu that was designed, financed and organised by the settler elite.
Mzee did not set out as a candidate of the Kikuyu. He stroked that constituency for Kanu after winning leadership of the national party.
At the start of this millennium, as the opposition made its most concerted effort at a common front, Mwai Kibaki was brought forward into leadership of the fledgling NAK alliance, not as a Kikuyu candidate, but as the consensus leader between those taming their ambitions in order to win power.
At the time he was not even necessarily the most popular politician in central Kenya. To date Kibaki has never been endorsed as a Kikuyu or Gema candidate.
Kenyans can have a leader from any community. But they do not embrace one presented to them as a candidate of a community.
Indeed Limuru frightened a lot of non-Gema viewers as they witnessed a group of notables frantically engineering emotional nexus for binding them together in a way that throws a cordon around them.
It had the same effect that the many oaths your people tend to take in times of anxiety triggers among the other communities.
The legacy of Gema presents you with a problem that has been long in the making. Central Kenya has a well developed business leadership and a very under-developed political leadership.
The moment in the early seventies when they elevated successful businessmen to define and popularise the community agenda, the Gema wazee basically subordinated political skills to money-making skills.
The drought around you today as the independence generation retires and expires is a direct consequence.
Others promise you harvests beyond the yields of their fields. Yet others construct a popular history that easily falls short of our collective memory.If you look at your suitors in Limuru, they should frighten you. Some announce that a bus is waiting for you and then shift to ask you for a bus for them to get into.
They are not building you my friend. They want you to build them. After Limuru, few of the friends you traverse the country with believe that your community can rally around anybody other than their own.
Your travails with ICC have built you an empathetic constituency with significant bonds of emotion.
Always remember how fickle such a following is. It may help you not to over-ride this horse.
There are a lot of positives in you that can replace the message of prayer rallies.
Listen to people who tell you uncomfortable truths, they are more important to your future than those choruses of hypocrites that will praise the king’s cloths (nakedness).
You will miss the services of Mutula Kilonzo.
You will miss the services of Mutula Kilonzo.
The writer is a director of the Kenya Institute of Governance. mkituyi@kigafrica.com
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