Every now and then, a man or woman aspiring to political office will ask me if I have any advice concerning the best way to go about it.
I usually answer with one question: How good are you at telling lies?
Bearing in mind that parliament, the senate, and even the county assemblies, have plenty of good honest folk, this might seem a distortion.
But to me, all the evidence seems to suggest that having some skill in misrepresenting the facts is a huge asset in a political career.
It may not on its own get you very far. But you will have a very hard time indeed, if you set out to tell your voters the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
To illustrate my point, consider the kind of lies that have dominated the public narratives over the last two presidential elections.
Starting with the 2007 General Election, the question we would ask is this: How is it that Raila Odinga was able to move from being the most effective of presidential candidate Mwai Kibaki’s political supporters in 2002, to mounting a near-overwhelming challenge to President Mwai Kibaki in 2007?
I would say that he capitalized on Kibaki’s mistakes: first in Kibaki not honouring the gentlemen’s agreement about an “inclusive leadership team" which was to see Raila himself appointed Prime Minister. And second, in Kibaki later firing Raila alongside other cabinet ministers who had opposed the government’s position in the 2005 referendum.
This allowed Raila to take the role of an “outsider” and to position himself as the champion of all those who felt they had been left out of the prosperity generated by Kibaki’s economic policies.
And speaking of policies, I cannot believe that Raila did not know that when a nation moves from a "command economy” such as we had in the Moi era, to a free market economy, as orchestrated by President Kibaki, the initial benefits will often be most visible within the more aggressively entrepreneurial groups within that country.
In Kenya, what that means, in practice, is that most of the initial wealth generated was bound to find its way into the hands of just three communities: the Asians, the Kikuyu and the Somali.
Raila also must have known that since the Kenyan Asian and ethnic Somali communities are first, very few in numbers; and second, have no political power at all; their increased prosperity would neither be noticed nor resented. But the Kikuyus have large numbers, as well as great political clout – a combination bound to invite toxic resentment, when it combines with conspicuous prosperity.
Hence with hindsight, it is perfectly obvious why it is that Raila had no difficulty persuading a great mass of voters all over the country, that “Kikuyus had eaten alone” for the past five years, and “betrayed” other tribal communities in a clear violation of the mandate that President Kibaki had received from all over the country.
But this was simply not true. Kibaki may have made many mistakes. But he did not devote his time in State House to channeling all economic development exclusively towards Central Kenya.
Come 2013, it was Raila’s turn to be the victim of an insidious lie. And on this I can give a personal example:
I know well-educated people who are indigenous to the Rift Valley and others indigenous to Central Kenya, all of whom went into the 2013 General Election not having the slightest doubt that it was Raila who arranged for our current top leadership, Deputy President William Ruto and President Uhuru Kenyatta, to be “taken to The Hague”. It was simply impossible to convince these people otherwise.
Not only because both Ruto and Uhuru repeatedly made this very point during their campaigns, but also because of what my friends believed to be the “inner logic” of this process: How could it be that Raila himself had not been indicted, when it was his refusal to accept the results of the 2007 presidential election, which had led to all that violence?
I have not had the heart to ask any of these people to explain to me how they now reconcile themselves to what has since been revealed.
Namely, the fact that none other than Ruto’s own lawyer for the ICC trials, Karim Khan, has laid the responsibility for “fixing Ruto” at the feet of key figures within the Kibaki establishment, including some still serving in high office, in the very government in which Ruto is Deputy President.
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