‘Content of character’ will dictate who Kenya’s next president will be

By ABDI HASSANPosted Monday, January 31 2011 at 18:16

The season of frantic political jostling is with us again, and with it, all manner of positioning and elbowing, some of it bordering on the foul.

Amid the noise, no one is talking about what the ideal CV of Kenya’s political class, let alone the Fourth President, should look like, especially now that we are at the threshold of a new constitutional order.

Have Kenyans really matured to the point where they genuinely care if those seeking to succeed President Kibaki are egotistical, even egomaniacal enough to assume that theirs will be the next biggest political footprint in independent Kenya?

The truth is, only one in an entire galaxy of wannabes will become our next Head of State.

As things stand, it is becoming increasingly clear that that man or woman who will take over from President Kibaki will have to be as different from his or her predecessors as the new Constitution is from the old one.

Inevitably, the next presidency will require a substantively different executive from the office that Kibaki will exit.

Going by the spirit of the new Constitution, the focus on the presidency come 2012 for those who truly care for a new dawn will be on institutions and how well the Head of State is capable of attracting quality attention from the international community.

A completely new set of skills will, therefore, be needed, foremost among them tested diplomatic abilities.

In fact, a divisive political persona grounded in an ethnic cult of personality will be hopelessly unqualified to be Kenya’s next chief executive.
Kenyans will do well to disqualify, indeed expel, any such pretender to the republican throne of the new presidency at the polls.

Besides, an abrasive and peremptory political style will be as out of place at the 2012 State House as a country bumpkin in the front row of a classical music concert.

Instead, a consummate nuncio, an experienced negotiator, arbitrator and peacemaker will be the stuff the next president of Kenya should be made of.

In Martin Luther King’s immortal words, the yardstick of the “content of their character” will finally come into play as Kenyans choose their next symbol of national unity.

Kenyans must wake up to the fact that the presidency itself will no longer be the imperial, imperious position that it has for too long been perceived to be.

Remember, the next president will be presiding over a Council of Ministers that is not composed of MPs but of the best and brightest that all sectors in Kenya have to offer, a number of them technocrats, others captains of industry and world-class jurists.

These appointees will have undergone an elaborate vetting process, with none of them being beholden to presidential fiat or whim.

Our next president must be possessed of a temperate persona and have the ability to offer seamless interlock between the best of the Kibaki era and the new dawn.

A person with these crucial characteristics will be well-placed to fit into the new-style presidency, which will be much more of a collegiate and corporate executive than the command-performance entity of the past.

Most importantly, this will be a presidency held in trust for other equals and, at the same time, for all Kenyans.

So, the candidate for Kenya’s fourth presidency should be a person who inspires confidence, one able to morally re-arm the country and therefore someone whose conduct can readily appeal to religious formations, cross-cutting all faiths, a man of integrity and unbending principle.

Needless to say, the ideal candidate must respect the rule of law. Among many other considerations, his or her record must evince no utterances against the constitutional order, at any one time in that career, whatever the provocation may have been.

In the emerging order, a hot-head at State House, heading legions of hot-heads on the political street, and erecting a garish cult of personality to celebrate the long road to the presidency, is a sure-fire prescription for disaster at one of the most crucial junctures of Kenya’s post-independence saga — the road to the realisation of the aims and objectives of Vision 2030.

Kenyans must be wary of anyone seeking to be their president if the desire is expressed through breathing hard, menacingly claiming it on account of “inherent entitlement”, fangs bared with sheer naked ambition.

Mr Hassan is a programmes director, North Eastern Pastoralist Forum based in Garissa (abdih38@gmail.com)