Mudavadi should find the courage to quit Cabinet posts

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By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Saturday, April 28  2012 at  19:59

It is only from the tenets of democracy that I have supported Musalia Mudavadi’s challenge to Prime Minister Raila Odinga as the presidential candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). But Mr Mudavadi is letting me down.

For it begins to look as if the Deputy Prime Minister is like every other graduate of the Moi School of Politics. He seems dead set — Nyayo-fashion — on having his cake and eating it.

But democracy is nothing if it does not mean respect for system (and a certain amount of personal gentlemanliness).

To be sure, many Kenyans — including me — are not too sure that the party has treated him with justice ever since he announced his decision to vie with the Prime Minister.

The manner in which some ODM potentates have treated him may itself be seen not only as ungentlemanly but also as disrespectful of system.

The fact remains, nevertheless, that, in the higher system — the one which Kofi Annan once convinced us to adopt — it is to the ODM that Mr Mudavadi owes not only his deputy premiership but also his ministry of Local Government docket.

Therefore, whenever he quits the ODM, he must also quit those posts. This is a moral constraint no matter how one quits.

For, in the present arrangement, both the ministry and one of the two deputy premierships are ODM property.

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Whether the ODM forces you out or whether you leave of your own volition, you must return to your employer all the property with which he furnished you on your appointment.

Social propriety

You do it as a matter of personal awareness of social propriety and personal duty to a system.

You do not — as some of your supporters have argued — retort that another Deputy Prime Minister has refused to relinquish his post in circumstances analogous to yours. 
For, as the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right. At any rate, why cite Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta when, clearly, he is not the template of political propriety?

If he were conscious of social responsibility, he would not have waited for President Kibaki to relieve him of his position as chief of the national Treasury when the ICC confirmed his crimes-against-humanity charges.

That is why civil society has widely criticised the President himself — namely, for failing to also show young Mr Kenyatta the door out of his Deputy Premier’s office when this son of our founding father failed to see his duty to voluntarily step aside.

But, quite manifestly, Mr Kenyatta is not alone in this folly.

Moral courage

In other circumstances, politics has forced the President to suspend from the Cabinet such nawabs as Amos Kimunya, David Mwiraria and Kiraitu Murungi when they failed to drum up the moral courage to step aside by themselves when mentioned in situations which made their continued presence in office quite untenable.

Yet Mr Kimunya went only a day or so after he had thumped his chest with the promise that he would rather die than step aside.

Just a modicum of prescience or predictive wisdom would have deterred any politician from making such an astonishingly arrogant statement, especially in a volatile country like ours.

But Mr Mudavadi is a much more likeable person — homely, soft-spoken, reasonable, full of bonhomie. Only occasionally does our pork-barrel politics force him to raise his voice.

That is why I believe he would make a good president. But it is also why I think his decision to quit the ODM is wrong-headed.

Because injustice is rife in all our parties, you do not quit yours. You stick with it, fight the wrongs within it, seek your personal ambition right in there and help it to form the next government.

But, if you do quit, please go the whole hog — and have the grace to return to the party all its property.

ochiengotani@gmail.com