Is Kibaki party breathing its last?

By Standard Reporter

In two short years, Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi has watched the Party of National Unity — the party of President Kibaki — shrink from a powerful outfit to a castellation of splinter groups now lining up to support Uhuru Kenyatta.

Kiraitu was secretary general of PNU — the party that once boasted the Who’s Who? in the political power pecking order, but now is thought to be on the verge of collapse.

Deputy Premier Uhuru and Eldoret North MP William Ruto are poised to take over the political space previously occupied by PNU. The two were former chair and secretary general of Kanu seven years ago.

“Success without a successor is failure, and PNU’s legacy seems to have no takers,” says a source close to ongoings in PNU.

PNU was the party of power with Kibaki as party leader, Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka as deputy leader and chair of PNU Parliamentary Group, and former Internal Security minister George Saitoti as chair.

Below them were rank and file lieutenants whose glue that kept them together seemed to defend Kibaki administration against local and international pressure on several fronts from the pace of reforms, war on corruption and the International Criminal Court’s intervention in Kenya over 2008 post-election violence.

China model

The glue that kept PNU together was keeping Kibaki coalition partner Premier Raila Odinga and his ODM party in its place, checkmating it at every turn in and outside Parliament and Cabinet.

This time, last year, Kiraitu was so upbeat about PNU’s future prospects that he dispatched a delegation to China to study management styles of the People’s Communist Party as part of a strategy to strengthen PNU.

At one point, Kiraitu would talk about plans to set up an institute to train “political party workers who are properly inducted in party management as key institutions of governance.”

A close study of PNU Alliance structure has the Communist Party model organisation that was cascaded to the polling station level in each village as opposed to the tradition model inherited from Kanu where the lowest grassroots structure started at the sub-location level. Sadly, analysts say, all these efforts have failed, and unless a miracle happens, PNU is practically headed to ignominious oblivion.

No light ahead

PNU’s negative energy glue melted quickly the moment ODM started to crack from within, starting with acrimonious fallout between Raila and Ruto, followed by Najib Balala and later Musalia Mudavadi.

Historians will be hard put to figure out whether PNU was killed, and by who, or it suffered an unexplained demise similar to a diabolical verdict commonly issued by evasive pathologists hard put to point at cause of death.

Presidential choice

The sudden death of party chair Prof Saitoti in a helicopter crash three months ago, hastened the demise of whatever remained of PNU

One critical eventuality that will exercise pundits and political scholars for a long time to come is not PNU marking its fifth birth day on a deathbed, but what has emerged to occupy its space and what it portends for the country’s immediate future.

As things stand, PNU disintegration has paved way for unencumbered emergence, and firm establishment of Uhuru and Ruto as leading contenders in the Kibaki succession. But had PNU not disintegrated, chances are they would not have emerged so soon as frontline contenders in the race.

Kiraitu’s own PNU Alliance faction, Alliance Party of Kenya (APK), on Friday voted 195-56 votes to endorse Uhuru as the preferred presidential candidate against Kalonzo.

What next?

To Kiraitu, this vote represented the prospects of a final overthrow of negotiated power sharing represented first by Narc (2003-2005), and later PNU and ODM grand coalition (2008-2012), to be replaced by regional chieftains. To their credit, PNU and ODM were broad coalitions of both ideological and geographical interests.

And as Uhuru and Ruto struggle to fill the vacuum left by PNU, pundits are grappling with three questions  ahead of Kibaki succession election in March next year:

What does this portend for Kenya’s immediate future?

While they have evidently demonstrated unrivalled capacity to mobilise support, what is their agenda for maintaining or escalating Kibaki’s rapid economic growth legacy? 

And, finally, what does it all mean for Raila and his presidential ambitions?