THE PHENOMENON OF 'DOG-WHISTLE' POLITICS IN KENYA

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2013 - 00:00 -- BY JOE ADAMA

Wikipedia defines dog-whistle politics as ‘political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup’. Wikipedia adds, ‘It is an analogy to dog whistles, which are built in such a way that their high- frequency whistle is heard by dogs, but is inaudible to humans’.

Most Kenyans have never heard of the term, including highly educated men and women, some of them toting PhDs in political science, but once they grasp it they never forget it – this is the phenomenon of dog-whistle politics.

However, never having come across it in the English language is not the same thing as saying that many of our politicians are not in fact unwitting experts in dog-whistle politics.

Dog-whistle politics have long been a strategy of Kenyan political oratory, with the foremost exponent being the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and the foremost living exponent being Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

Coded Language

Wikipedia defines dog-whistle politics as “political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup”.

Wikipedia adds, “It is an analogy to dog whistles, which are built in such a way that their high-frequency whistle is heard by dogs, but is inaudible to humans”.

Dog-whistling can take place in many contexts, including a corporate annual general meeting or a church sermon, but it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the political realm.

The most prominent use to which dog-whistle politics has been put in 2013 is easily Raila’s ferocious baiting of Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta on the Land Question.

Raila is the leader of two political formations – the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD) and is seeking the presidency for a third time in a decade-and-a-half at the March 4 General Election.

Similarly, Uhuru heads up two massive formations, The National Alliance (TNA) and the Jubilee Coalition, and is seeking the presidency for the second time in a decade.

These two are the sons, respectively, of Kenya’s founding Vice President, the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and the founding President, Kenyatta. The rivalry between the two men is the culmination of one of the longest political feuds of Kenyan politics, the fallout in the mid-1960s between their fathers which has now crossed a number of generations.

The Kenyattas are among Kenya’s largest landowners of all races and nationalities, with their assets having been acquired during Jomo Kenyatta’s 18 months as the first Prime Minister of Kenya (June 1, 1963, to December 11, 1964) and 14 years as founder-President (December 12, 1964, to August 22, 1978).

The Odingas are also among the wealthiest Kenyans, with assets denominated in the billions of shillings, but clearly not in the Kenyattas’ class, which defines “Old Money” in this country’s African population. There are Europeans and Asians in Kenya who are quietly seriously wealthy and multiple millionaires even in the world’s hardest hard currencies, which makes them multiple shilling billionaires, some of whom are landowners on a scale to rival the Kenyattas, but they remain well under the political, or indeed any other, radar, except the taxman’s.

Who Let the Dog-whistle Politics Out?

However, the Odingas have long cultivated a populist brand of politics, even veering far leftwards towards Marxism-Leninist rhetoric at the height of the Cold War, when Odinga Snr was a frequent and honoured guest in the chancelleries and capitals of the then Soviet Union and China.

The Kenyatta political brand changed from fiery to establishmentarian a long time ago and has remained a pillar of the status quo for 50 years. After the deadly decade of the 1950s, when the British jailed him as “Manager of Mau Mau” and the freedom fighters in the forests promptly rephrased the Christian Lord’s Prayer handed down by Jesus Himself to substitute

“Our Father who art in Kapenguria” for “Our Father who art in Heaven”, the Kenyattas have long defined Kenya’s home-grown capitalist establishment and have had no truck with any flavor of socialism.

Raila denounces Uhuru, his strongest opponent for Fourth President of Kenya, as the status quo incarnate and positions himself as the consistent face and agent of change, reform and social equity.

But it is the land issue, for more than 100 years the most delicate and explosive issue in Kenya, that Raila has seized on and woven a dog-whistle politics narrative around it like none other since Jomo Kenyatta himself was denouncing the Mau Mau and they were claiming him for themselves as godhead and fountainhead in the 1950s.

Raila is travelling the length and breadth of Kenya on the campaign trail with one key message – that the Kenyattas own too much land for Uhuru to be a real reformist or to take Kenya to the next level of reforms, the full implementation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

For a nation of peasants and slum dwellers, and some of the worst income inequality indices in the world, this is a potentially incendiary message. However, Raila’s true audience, his real dog-whistle politics target subgroup, are the Rift Valley grassroots of Uhuru’s running mate Ruto.

Uhuru pulled off the political coup of 2012 when he got Ruto to join him in the Jubilee Coalition. It was a stunning move and it generated the biggest realignment of political forces in a decade, since Raila himself led the exodus from then ruling party Kanu in October 2002 to form the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) and scuttle President Daniel arap Moi’s succession agenda, which had Uhuru as its centerpiece.

Uhuru’s move was based on such a radical proposal, an electoral union of the vast Mt. Kenya region and the Rift Valley vote blocs, that Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka of the Wiper Democratic Movement (WDM) ran all the way into a political union with Raila in CORD.

As we have often noted in these columns, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin have never voted together in a presidential poll or a national referendum. However, the Kalenjin voted wholeheartedly for Uhuru in the 2002 race at President Moi’s urging but the rest of the country went for Mwai Kibaki as Third President of Kenya, overwhelming the Kanu ticket.

A combined force of the Mt. Kenya and Rift Valley vote blocs is a serious numbers game proposal indeed (see “Implications of TNA/CORD Numbers Narratives”).

At the core of the Land Question in Kenya is Kikuyu settlement in the Rift Valley. The political violence, both pre- and post-polls, of the multiparty era that begun in 1992, with the exception of the presidential transition poll of 2002, has had Rift Valley and the Kikuyu-Kalenjin divide as its focal point. The feat Uhuru and Ruto achieved in coming together ahead of only the second presidential transition poll in Kenyan history (and the first one with a runoff option) is the promise of erasing the Kikuyu-Kalenjin divide.

It is a promise that Raila clearly has no intention of seeing delivered. Raila’s dog-whistling about disproportionate Kenyatta land ownership is aimed not at the Taita of the Coast or any other Kenyan community in the midst of which the Founding Father’s family happens to have substantial landholdings, in fact it is not even about Kenyatta family acres per se.

It is very specifically aimed at the Kalenjin in their Rift Valley redoubt. Raila is cleverly contriving to remind the Kalenjin that Rift Valley land was acquired on a massive scale by Kenya’s biggest and therefore most land-hungry community – the Kikuyu – at a time when the region’s most senior politician, Daniel Moi, was Vice President of the Republic.

And though the Kalenjin then had no numbers imposing land hunger on them, their population has since exploded. Raila’s intention is to downgrade and degrade Ruto’s value to the Uhuru presidential campaign by reminding the Kalenjin that another Kikuyu President, a Kenyatta, imposed his terrific will on another Kalenjin deputy president, Moi, and if Jubilee takes State House history is likely to repeat itself.

But only the Rift Valley audience hears this narrative, hence the dog-whistle paradigm. And that is exactly what Raila intends – that the Kalenjin Rift Valley audience hears him.

In Central Kenya, Raila’s dog-whistling on land issues is perceived quite differently. There, it is detonating all manner of conspiracies theories, including very dark suspicions indeed that Raila has a land redistribution agenda up his sleeve.

This is a dreadful prospect for well-to-do Mt. Kenyans and an intriguing one for the millions of landless. The Kikuyu FM stations are full of speculative talk all the way into the wee hours of Raila’s real portent in harassing Uhuru so relentlessly on the land issue.

Caller after caller says Raila will change the Constitution to factor in land-grabs and redistribution as a way of addressing historical injustices; will therefore destabilize Kenya Big Time; will keep the Mt. Kenyans tied up in endless litigation over land issues; will make the Rift Valley, now pacified after such hard work by Uhuru and Ruto, once again a dangerous place.

Early in the week, Inspector General of Police David Kimaiyo issued a security advisory urging politicians not to revisit contentious land issues on the campaign trail.

But the Prime Minister promptly ignored him, declaring “Hakuna mtu ambaye hajui umiliki wa ardhi ni swala nyeti kwa nchi hii(everyone knows land ownership is a major issue in this country)”.

Responding directly to Kimaiyo in a campaign speech at Migori in his Luo Nyanza political backyard, Raila declared: “The police cannot prescribe what we should or should not discuss.The directive also negates free speech, which is guaranteed in the Constitution”.

This spectacle generated a shiver up and down Mt. Kenya and social media and the FM stations, including online, with Diaspora Mt. Kenyans, also commenting.

Kimaiyo is not just another senior police officer in Raila’s perspective. He was his security consultant during the ill-fated 2007 presidential campaign; his candidature for the top Kenya Police Service position was a very special one indeed as he maintains the most cordial relations with Ruto and Uhuru on top of receiving the PM’s own endorsement; and he hails from the Rift Valley, the nation’s epicenter of controversial land issues. Raila was instrumental, too, in the appointment of the Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya, Dr. Willy Mutunga, a one-time fellow political detainee and exile.  

There has not been a top cop in Kenya of Kimaiyo’s political fault-line-bridging credentials since the late James Kanyotu, Kenya’s longest-serving national spymaster. For Raila to treat him so brusquely so promptly on the issue of the Land Question is a signal being interpreted in Mt. Kenya as a sure-fire indication of the strength of the PM’s near-future intentions for a radical rethink of land policy in Kenya.

Such a rethink has long been dreaded by the landed Mt. Kenya elite, owners of the nation’s choicest agricultural land and real estate. The real estate boom of the Kibaki era has signaled the arrival of Kenya’s biggest and richest middle class yet – and it is still overwhelmingly Central Kenyan.  

Also joining in the fray were Government Spokesman Muthui Kariuki and National Integration and Cohesion Commission Chairman Mzalendo Kivunjia, both of whom asserted that controversial land ownership issues belong to forums other than emotive political rallies, for instance the courts and other arbitration channels. Kariuki spoke of discussing land issues at political rallies as “a powder keg” and called it potentially “lethal”.

Raila and Kalonzo strenuously disagreed with Kimaiyo, Kariuki and Kivunjia. The VP, a lawyer, said he had reviewed the top cop’s advisory and it amounted to gagging the political class and Kenyans generally on a burning issue of national interest.

Is Raila’s dog-whistling strategy on land issues a vote winner? His treatment of IG Kimaiyo’s pioneering security advisory for campaigning politicians would seem to indicate that the strategy is too important for him to amend, let alone drop.

This can only mean there must be some indications on the ground of some success, or likely success, for Raila to hold on with such tenacity to the dog whistle on the land issue.