By Sarah Elderkins
I saw the three of them sitting there, and I was instantly reminded of a TV programme my children and their friends used to love watching here in the 1970s. It was called ‘The Three Stooges’.
There they sat, Moi’s old three stooges, regrouped once more to try to achieve what they failed to do in 2002. On this occasion, on Tuesday this week at the Laico hotel in Nairobi, William Ruto’s usual slick eloquence had deserted him.
He stumbled over his words as he tried to cobble together a rationale for the new-found ‘alliance’ among the three of them. The toothy megawatt smile, which never quite reaches his eyes, kept fading to nothing as quickly as it appeared.
Uhuru sat silently by his side, occasionally giving him an encouraging half-smile, like an anxious Dad at his child’s school play, possibly hoping to God that his ‘kid’ could pull it off and make all this look credible.
But most shocking of all was the third man, Musalia Muda- vadi, who had on his face all the joy of someone facing immi- nent execution.
He had the look of a man who has spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to negotiate himself out of a corner he has somehow managed to manoeuvre himself into.
Never before have I seen anyone who more accurately personified the phrase “a rabbit caught in the headlights”. And well he might look so.
This is the same Mudavadi who, not many months ago, set out on the self-destruct path (again! he keeps doing it!) by concocting spurious reasons for leaving ODM.
He did this because his ‘community’ was no longer going to be No.2. It was time to go for the big job. It was time for his ‘community’ to see one of its sons go all the way to State House.
So, instead of being No.2 to Raila Odinga, who leads stub- bornly and irresistibly in the polls, and instead of making with Odinga a formidable, ideologically sound, committed team that would probably have handed MM the presidency on a plate perhaps only five years hence, MM now appeared ready (‘eager’ would be stretching it) to take the No.3 posi- tion behind a pair of people facing crimes-against-humanity charges in an international court.
And escaping that rap is the prime source of UhuRuto’s desperation for power at any cost, and through any avenue. They have to hang together or be hanged separately.
That is why these two strange bedfellows keep hugging each other so fiercely on every public occasion. It’s mutual reassurance: You watch my back, I’ll watch yours. (Personally, I’d advise the two of them that they need eyes in the backs of their heads whenever they find themselves in such close proximity to each other.)
The whole thing is primarily about service to self, not service to the nation. And whatever form the agreement among the three of them might take, whatever MM’s number in the final pecking order, he would have had to agree to go along with any plans the other two might have made to modify the course of their legal history as currently anticipated.
At the time of writing, the rumour mills are abuzz with speculation that Mudavadi is in fact slated for the No. 1 slot, and Kenyatta is about to do just what Moi tried to do with Kenyatta in 2002 – pluck Mudavadi from his position of relative political impotence and impose him as a puppet.
Kenyatta would continue pulling the strings and controlling things from behind the scenes, just as Moi planned to do with Kenyatta in 2002.
The child learned well from the master. But, of course, Moi’s plan did not succeed. Whatever the case, it is a matter of, as they say (in France, I presume) Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose – The more things change, the more they remain the same.
These three are still the very same individuals who stood together with Moi and campaigned for their own resounding defeat by the Odinga-engineered Narc team in 2002.
That year, the greenhorn Kenyatta was plucked from politi- cal obscurity by Moi to carry on the ‘Kanu dream’ of perpetual hegemony, and he appeared alongside his master smiling goofily in those ill-fitting clothes and with his arms awkwardly raised as Moi thrust him suddenly into the limelight.
(Kenyatta has spent his entire life in State House, thanks to either his father or his godfather(s), and it certainly seems he doesn’t see why he should give up that ‘entitlement’ at this late stage of his life.) In 2002, as now, there was his henchman, William Ruto.
We have yet to know whether our Bill has ever seen a payslip in his entire life. He came to prominence through YK’92. From being the peanut-seller he likes to portray, he was suddenly a fabulously wealthy man owning land all over the place.
(According to the Leader newspaper of April 20-26, 2007, Ruto acquired eight plots in Nairobi on one day alone in December 1997. The newspaper said in its front-page head- line that “somebody took him to State House one afternoon in 1997. When he went home in the evening he had eight prime plots worth over shs.50 million. He has never looked back.” We all know, too, about the Kenyatta family’s half-mil- lion acres. Isn’t it amazing how these ‘landed gentry’ travel all over the country, especially the coast, commiserating with local people about their land problems? It’s clear UhuRuto have never quite got to grips with the meaning of the word ‘irony’.)
And then there was Musalia Mudavadi. Mudavadi was one of those who in the late 1990s-early 2000s had been hanging on to Moi’s coattails in the hope of being named his heir.
But when it was clear that Moi intended to keep on ruling through the surrogate Kenyatta, it was left to Odinga to mastermind the formation of the Rainbow Alliance and break Kanu’s 40-year stranglehold on power. Most of those who couldn’t stomach the idea of yet more of old Kanu’s imperious ways gravitated to the Rainbow Alliance.
Mudavadi was initially reluctant (apparently he never likes making a firm decision unless it is the wrong one) and Westlands MP Fred Gumo, together with George Khaniri, MP for Hamisi (next door to Mudavadi’s Sabatia) had to sit MM down and give him a good talking-to, so that he could find the courage to overcome this reluctance.
Members of the Rainbow Alliance began touring the country to sell the idea to the electorate. Mudavadi was supposed to be among them. He had finally indicated his support for the group.
But at the last minute, Mudavadi bottled it. He lost his nerve. He called Odinga to say he was throwing in his lot with Moi. And the rest is history.
Kenyatta lost his presidential bid by the rather wide margin of two million votes, Ruto was left looking like the proverbial startled rabbit, and Mudavadi was not only the third man in a badly losing team but he also lost his Sabatia seat and was no longer a player in any sense on the political scene until he was rescued by Odinga in 2007.
And now they want to do the whole thing again? Amazing. Is it a knee-jerk reaction to the massive and spontaneous (that is to say, neither bussed in nor paid to be there) crowd that attended the ODM/Wiper/Ford-Kenya pact-signing at KICC on Tuesday? Who knows?
It certainly looks like panic. And there is one very, very worrying thing about this UhuRuto business. I watched on TV the Nakuru and Tononoka rallies last weekend (thanks to a valiant and commendable effort by Citizen TV, which tried its best to be even-handed and brought us live scenes from both rallies, unlike all the other channels). I saw a crowd in Nakuru apparently composed mainly of the ethnic communities of the two main speakers. (Popular wisdom has it, in fact, that the crowd was more than half composed of people bussed in from another region. I wouldn’t know.)
Then I saw a crowd in Tononoka made up of local coast- dwellers who had attended a rally purely out of personal choice. From the Tononoka rally, I heard the main speaker talk about the new Constitution, and especially about the Constitution’s guiding star of ‘power to the people’ through devol tion.
I heard him talk about alleviating poverty through the industrialisation for which he has long been negotiating extensive investment, and which will create jobs. From the Nakuru rally, I heard speaker after speaker also refer to the new Constitution.
But every one of them mentioned it in only a single context. Speaker after speaker in Nakuru invoked the new Constitution only to say that the people of Kenya had a sovereign right to elect the leaders of their choice.
In other words, the new Constitution’s overriding benefit, according to the UhuRuto crowd, is that it gives YOU the right to elect THEM. Forget about any rights you might have been expecting that would devolve some benefit to yourself.
There was not a single mention of devolution, nor of any of the other crucial issues the new Constitution covers. The only important thing was, we have a right to elect them. Well, well. Aren’t we the lucky ones? Now, what was that we were saying about history repeating itself?
Sarah Elderkins
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