Key members of the Kikuyu power elite were breaking ranks with the Kenyatta family and factor in the Kibaki succession and looking favourably at the Prime Minister at the same time as Raila Odinga was being targeted for a Censure Motion by political formations hell-bent on seeing the PM hamstrung in the race for the Presidential succession.
Raila’s most ardent and active political foes have convinced themselves that they smell blood in the political waters in the matter of the Kazi kwa Vijana (KVK) project and that it is the PM’s blood. Saboti MP Eugene Wamalwa and Ikolomani MP Bonny Khalwale led the charge, demanding that Raila falls on the same sword – resignation or stepping aside in the face of corruption allegations – which he has so vigorously prescribed for other Cabinet ministers.
The Sharks smell Blood
This was not the only shark-like behaviour in the political sector. In Central Kenya, a number of operatives also thought they smelt blood in the region’s choppy political waters and that it was Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta’s. A series of night meetings – over dinner, rich wines and cigars – in a number of palatial residences and five star hotels and members’ clubs has been taking place in capital city Nairobi and outlying areas weighing and considering the region’s options in the event that Uhuru, Eldoret North MP William Ruto and three others’ crime-against-humanity charges at the International Criminal Court proceed to full trials and knock the first two out of contention in the 2012 Presidential race.
Some of Uhuru’s newfound detractors have enlarged the debate in Central from merely the DPM and Ruto’s prospects at The Hague to the core issue of whether a Kikuyu should succeed Kibaki at State House and whether such a scenario is even possible, given Kenya’s highly-ethnicised politics and politicking.
What Raila’s foes are up to by demanding that he step aside this late in the Kibaki succession race and that he puts his fate not in the hands of any Kenyan investigative agency but in those of a World Bank audit of the reportedly missing KKV hundreds of millions of shillings has not been explicitly stated by any of them. Kenyan graft investigators are in the habit of almost invariably clearing members of the Cabinet who step aside in the face of corruption accusations, but World Bank forensic audit sleuths are most unlikely to do any such thing if funds are indeed missing.
Not-Quite-"Free" Primary Education
Bizarrely, on the very same morning – Wednesday – that the PM’s foes were relishing a Prime Minister’s Question Time showdown in Parliament over KKV, it was reported that the Treasury, where Uhuru presides, had re-paid millions of shillings said by British aid agency DfID to have been stolen by top implementing officials from the Free Primary School Fund. What’s more, this shame-faced, behind-the-scenes re-imbursement of stolen donor millions has happened despite the fact that no official has been prosecuted or even surcharged. What Treasury has done is use taxpayers’ money to atone for fraud, thus hitting Kenyans with a double-whammy of impunity in the form of a scheme that is not meant to cost them anything and is therefore a misnomer in being called “Free”, for it has turned out to be anything but.
While it remains unclear how the KKV scandal will be resolved and who in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) will take responsibility, Wamalwa and Khalwale’s intentions in demanding that Raila step aside go far beyond the anti-corruption agenda and are meant to impact the configuration of nothing less than the Kibaki Succession race.
No Chance of Raila Stepping Down
If Raila joins Kibaki, Uhuru and Ruto on the sidelines of the 2012 race for whatever reason, then that rewrites succession factors and dynamics completely. The race would become one of political minnows, which is not the same thing as to say that it would be any the less interesting. Succeeding Kibaki would become even more ferociously competitive if all these vacuums came to pass. Like Nature itself, politics abhors a vacuum and there would be candidates who are not in the mix now, in early November, who would step forward, or be pushed forward by these selfsame powerful players and others, and who would make the post-Kibaki race a true thriller of Presidential politics and power play.
Raila is unlikely to resign or step aside, whatever the truth about KKV, but the other vacuums – Kibaki’s retirement, Uhuru and Ruto’s absence away at The Hague – are more or less guaranteed.
Whatever happens, it also happens to have the PM in centre-stage and in pole position. All this hullabaloo on both sides of the political aisle and often cross-cutting and overlapping serves to accentuate the powerful position that he occupies, a position that looms ever larger the nearer the country gets to retiring Kibaki and making him join Daniel arap Moi in a There-is-life-after-State-House retirement.
The day before PM’s Question Time, Raila cut a particularly high profile when he hosted the Somali Prime Minister at the OPM and discussed the Kenyan Defence Forces’ incursion into Somalia in hot pursuit of the Al Shabaab militia. Kibaki was still out of the country on official business. What’s more, as a number of older folk may well have reminisced, that encounter cast Raila in a very high profile indeed, reminiscent of the first Prime Minister, Jomo Kenyatta, Uhuru’s father, and his role in the Congo crisis in 1963-64, when he was State House-bound.
Smoke and Mirrors
The Presidential succession is an electoral event with the critical decision firmly in the hands of the electorate, some 12-to-15 million adult Kenyans who will have registered to vote ahead of the 11th General Election. The majority of the turnout – high, low or middling – of these voters will usher in the Fourth President of Kenya sometime in 2012. But the political class comports and conducts itself as if it has total control over every voter in its formation and detailed final say on how he or she will vote. This is an electoral charade that is played out in every Presidential election in every democratic country and it actually hoodwinks millions to vote along party, ethnic, racial, gender or class lines or a number of combinations of these factors. No other ritual of courting in the Animal Kingdom is as elaborate, and ultimately grotesque, as a political class’s wooing of the voter in a Presidential poll.
Kenyans are in for many more sleights of hand, halls of mirrors and smokescreens on the way to the 2012 race from all sides of the political process. The only rule of thumb seems to be, Expect the unexpected and the only measure of its genuineness could well be just how stunningly unexpected it is. For instance, Dr. Joe B. Wanjui’s endorsement of Raila bang in the middle of Uhuru’s most desperate times, politically speaking.
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