Sacking Of Balala Was Long Overdue

THURSDAY, 29 MARCH 2012 00:05 BY DAVID MAKALI

Najib Balala must rue the day he challenged ODM party leader and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. He now finds himself in limbo after being dismissed from Cabinet on Monday, which he unfortunately blamed on dictatorship. I disagree.

For the past three years, Balala’s political star has been fading as steadily as his virulent attacks on Mr Odinga have increased. His determination to wreck the party on which he was elected to Parliament was shocking. So was his apparent disdain for the party leader whom he liberally vilified and taunted. The streak of unprovoked verbal assaults on Raila was offensive to common decency and the decorum expected of a senior party member. It also flouted the official etiquette of collective government responsibility.

We cannot pretend to know the genesis of his gripe but it is curious that Balala found it heroic to disparage his party boss in public. Or expect to continue enjoying the privilege of his ministerial position courtesy of a party he had all but abandoned. That is legitimizing political immorality and encouraging impunity.

It is ok for one to hold a different opinion from the party’s or even the party leader’s. Democracy implies freedom of opinion and robust expression of divergent views. It presupposes consensus and open deliberation of contentious issues where the majority holds sway but the minority have a say. Democracy abhors monolithic thinking or coercion.

I believe this environment exists within the ODM party, even in its imperfect state. As a founder and high-ranking member, Balala was expected to use the party mechanisms to iron out his grievances. But he opted to become a reckless megaphone of bad publicity through ceaseless accusation of his own party leader as a dictator, without offering any details.

Whether he was doing so to endear himself to the party’s opponents or to set himself up for the next suitor will soon become clear. But it is obvious that the G7 group he flirted with for a while did not find much political value in him. His support base is at it shakiest and it is looking unlikely that Balala can withstand a strong opponent for Mvita constituency, let along the Mombasa Senator’s seat. In the last election, it was the combination of his own support and the euphoric following of ODM and Raila in urban Mombasa that overcame the spirited challenge from Ali Taib.

Now largely on his own, having lost favor with the Coast Parliamentary Group, Balala is like a ship sailing without a compass. His threats to form a party, which he said last week will be launched soon, is nothing new; many are out there yawning for members and leadership. He should hurry up and take over one to prove his mettle as a leader. I doubt it will be free from the worst of the very criticism he has leveled against his current party.

The propensity of the current crop of politicians for muckraking is undermining democratisation. Public dissent and promiscuous political behavior has become heroic because there are no sanctions. Politicians continue to flirt with and jump in and out of parties like Matatus without regard to the Political Parties Act. Defying the party leadership has become a short cut to fame and partisan adulation. If this profligacy and indiscipline is to stretch to the rest of society what nation shall we have?

Sympathetic protests will follow Balala’s dismissal. He will deplore his punishment as intolerance to criticism. He is entitled to feel bitter and betrayed. But that must not blind us from the true cause of his firing. Tying his fate to the fortunes of his religious community is patently misguided propaganda. He was not a representative of Muslims in the Cabinet or elected to represent a religious constituency, which is expressly prohibited by the constitution.

Mr Balala joins a phalanx of fallen ministers who have served in the Grand Coalition but miscalculated their steps. Their common denominator is a virulent bout of vainglorious self-deception. Once appointed, they forget such basic things as the real source of power and create illusory thrones in the air on which they perch to satisfy their egos. Soon, they begin to stray. For Balala, it is unclear what his defiance was all about. A core member of the Pentagon, he always enjoyed chummy relations with party leader/Captain Raila Odinga. He began to grumble when Raila declined to back him in the party elections in 2008, which saw Balala’s arch foe, Ali Hassan Joho, grab the organizing secretary post.

A grumpy Balala then began gravitating towards the PNU side of the coalition government. He was on hand to receive Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir at the promulgation of the new Constitution. That oblivious of his party leader’s stated opposition or even prior knowledge of it. By dint of his Arabic connection, Balala again accompanied Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka on the shuttle diplomacy to lobby then Libyan leader Muamar Gaddaffi to sway the African Union in efforts to defer Kenya’s case at the ICC.

It is this streak of open defiance and loud dissent, more than his performance as Minister for Tourism, that accounts for his fall. Although he was the critical ODM link to the Muslim vote in 2007, the sour relations had become more politically costly than beneficial to Raila. His exit has become necessary for order and proper functioning of the party. The moral: discipline is essential to good leadership as much as performance.