It’s no surprise that the anti-Mary Wambui scheme in Othaya flopped

SHARE BOOKMARKPRINTRATING

Gitau Warigi 

By GITAU WARIGI
Posted  Saturday, January 26  2013 at  17:17

IN SUMMARY

• Eyesore: If the kind of energy expended to fight Wambui had been used to resettle IDPs, we would not be having the problem today

SHARE THIS STORY

  

 0
inShare

Let me be quite upfront. I am not a political green horn to imagine electoral rigging shouldn’t occur. It is a fact of political life everywhere in the world. The only thing that should matter is: does it add value to the one perpetrating it?

For much of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency, the good people of Kiambaa constituency never got to vote. Old Jomo would not countenance chancing on the voters’ verdict regarding his soulmate Mbiyu Koinange, whose companionship is what got him going in his twilight years.

Yet Mzee had the courtesy not to let the Kiambaa people waste their time queuing for hours to vote. Our subsequent tragedy is when the leadership pretends to allow Wanjiku to make her choice, then that choice is cynically countermanded.

It is cruel. It is heartless. The apogee of this nonsense was the 1988 mlolongo “election” during Daniel arap Moi’s regime. The debacle marked the beginning of the decline of the Nyayo kleptocracy.

For rigging to be effective, it requires to be managed well. That is how Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his lackeys succeeded in pulling off a win for his brother George W. Bush in the year 2000.

Indeed it was none other than Mwai Kibaki who said during the 1988 Nyayo mess that rigging requires intelligence.

But some people who should know better seem to have forgotten this advice. The camp of Othaya’s Mary Wambui has categorically accused the President’s son, Jimmy, of being the frontman of the clumsy scheme to bar her as the TNA nominee for Othaya constituency.

I don’t know if Jimmy is a member of TNA. The party has been built from scratch by Uhuru Kenyatta and I don’t know how much Jimmy has invested in that effort.

All I know is that Jimmy is a lightweight, though obviously one cannot tell this from his girth. He also tends to overrate the potency of the Kibaki name, in Nyeri and nationally.

Truth be told, his dad can learn a thing or two from Mr Kenyatta on how to build a powerful political movement that pulsates at the grassroots.

I am hardly surprised that the anti-Wambui conspiracy has flopped, and its schemers exposed as bungling and inept. But, more importantly, it is not too late in the day to demand to know why important national business keeps getting disrupted by some top-level forces whenever this Wambui woman comes into the picture.

The Wambui circus has been going on for far too long. If the kind of energy expended to fight this woman had been used to resettle IDPs, the worst eyesore of the Kibaki tenure would not be still with us.

ODM’s mess as exposed in the party primaries is of another order of magnitude altogether. Here, it is the naked nepotism that really stinks. It is crude. It is unbelievable.

I don’t want to imagine what will happen if the same gets transplanted to State House. Pray, what value does Oburu Oginga add to ODM such that he had initially to be bulldozed into place as a governor candidate?

* * *
There is absolutely no doubt that the two political shows that pulled the greatest viewership in the history of local TV were Citizen TV’s recent interviews with Ferdinand Clifford “Baba Yao” Waititu and Mike “Mtoto wa Mtaa” Sonko. The frenzied responses on Facebook and Twitter said it all.

Now, our self-appointed NGO and civil society “spokesmen” of the poor and the disposed, get warned. The people you pretend to speak for have now acquired their own authentic spokesmen. They don’t speak with the glibness you hear in seminars nor do they even have a mastery of figures. But their word is resonating powerfully on the street and in the slum.

gwarigi@ke.nationmedia.com