Kibaki can only sink lower with the kind of company he has elected for counsellors

Barrack Muluka Libya's strongman, Muammar Abu Minyar Al-Gaddaffi, sees the ordinary people of Libya in the distorted taxonomy of phylum athropoda and in the order of assorted Periplaneta Americana. When they are not seen in this order, he sees them in the order of restless rodents that he must crush.
The Afro-Arab Bedouin dictator who has ruled the ‘desert rats’ of Libya by fiat for 42 years considers himself a revolutionary. He therefore thinks that the country is his personal property. The rodents must, accordingly, toe the straight and narrow, or be pulverised.
Gaddafi often behaves like a disturbed character, with quixotic inclinations. He dreams of becoming the first emperor of a united Africa. A self-styled revolutionary who overthrew the dynastic rule of King Idris in 1969, he has no compunction dreaming of himself as an emperor. Then he could have close to a billion rats to pound as he may please. Such are the contradictions of life. But beyond irony, it is tragic that Gaddafi is not alone in his convoluted perception of the ordinary people of Africa.
When I was a youth in high school, I often heard President Jomo Kenyatta on Voice of Kenya Radio, speaking in similar imagery. A man who brooked no dissent, Mzee Kenyatta would rain invective against his detractors. He told them about their mothers’ sex life and called them rats. He would threaten to pound them into pulp. Gaddafi has demonstrated to the world what African leaders mean when they say such things.
The leaders’ notion of rodent citizens is everywhere on the continent. The only difference between leaders like Gaddafi and Kenyatta on the one hand, and the rest, on the other, is that the Gaddafis are honest, even if only in a perverted sense.
Together with the rest of their dynastic families, they make it quite plain that they hold the citizenry in contempt. African ‘princes’ are enjoined with their regal and monarchical parents in looking at their countries as family property. When they say ‘our country’ they genuinely understand that to be their family ‘thing’. The rest of us are just rats. That is why Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta throws up childish tantrums whenever he cannot have it his way. It does not matter that what he wants is against the law. For what are laws and rules to children of privilege?
As they say in Greek mythology, we are to these people what flies are to wanton boys. They kill us for their sport. That is why somewhere, in Kangan Kafira, two International Criminal Court suspects from two rival and tribal killer crowds have been hobnobbing as bosom friends. Together, they are said to threaten to ignite fresh war against a third tribe next time Kangan Kafira goes to the polls. This is regardless that questions of the tribal rats, cockroaches, and flies that were killed in the previous electoral violence remain unresolved. Resettlement of the displaced rodents of yesteryear means nothing to these royal lords.
Such are the thoughts that must engage us, even as President Kibaki moves from post to pillar and back in the company of Uhuru and William Ruto, Kenyan leaders whom the ICC Chief Prosecutor Louis Moreno-Ocampo wants indicted for what is said to have been their role in post-election violence of 2008. Tragically for Mzee Kibaki, he does not seem to recognise that Kenya is leaving him behind. If he did, he would not have to eat humble pie in public for decisions he makes in private. This week’s presidential withdrawal of controversial nominations of four people to constitutional offices was easily the most humiliating moment in the history of the presidency.
Ruto and Uhuru festooned the mortified President as he nibbled at the bread of sorrow and drank of the cup of affliction, in public. The question is: What are the two ICC suspects doing advising the President on whom to appoint as Chief Justice, Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecutions?
The only reason one of the President’s chief advisers is not in a prison remand home is that he has money. He would otherwise be undergoing trial for alleged corruption from a prison cell. In plain truth, such is the gentleman who stands next to the President as he reads an important national statement – a veritable hostage on free range.
The one thing that is not debatable is that the Executive has itself been taken hostage by suspects of crimes, under Article 2(6) of the Constitution. Uhuru and Ruto may not be criminals. But they are suspects and we cannot run away from that fact. Besides, Ruto is a criminal suspect in court over corruption. The court may vindicate or acquit him. But he remains a criminal suspect, for now. These are the people sitting next to the President. Next, they would like to take hostage of the Judiciary, and Legislature too. After they have taken hostage of all the three arms of Government, they purpose to use these instruments of State to hold the whole nation hostage. That is why President Kibaki’s retraction of his nominations this week is not sincere.
When a fellow who is breaking the window of your house with felonious intents retreats, just because he has found out that you are at home, he does not stop being a housebreaker. In the final analysis, President Kibaki did not redeem anything with his recoiling, for there was nothing left to redeem. And the Head of State can only sink lower with the kind of company he has elected for counsellors, whatever the pyrrhic gains may be. It is true that when the gods decide to sort you out, they begin by making you impervious to the obvious. They make you stonehearted and incorrigibly scornful. That is the Pharaoh station that Mzee Kibaki and Party of National Unity have reached. The rest is countdown.
The writer is a publishing editor and media consultant