How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech

Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second and longest-serving post-independence president, was buried at his Kabarak home on February 12th. His death, eulogy and press coverage by the big commercial media outlets have stoked divisive debates and ambivalent recollections of the past, which recall Fyodor Dostoevsky’s observations that “while nothing is easier to denounce than an evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”

How does one understand the evils of the Nyayo government if Moi was solely responsible for some of the evils of his government, but not all the evils were exclusively his? And what if some of the evils Moi is rightly condemned for, such as crony capitalism, sabotaging democracy, resisting political reforms, political murders and corruption, are also the evils that were perpetuated by his predecessors, Jomo Kenyatta and Mwai Kibaki, and even his successor, Uhuru Kenyatta?

Perhaps one way is not to see Moi as the African Big Man, which Moi’s death has brought back into circulation. Though convenient, the Big Man or strongman reference conceals rather than reveals the kind of state power an authoritarian ruler wields, and the internal and external political forces that also shape the politics of authoritarian regimes. It conceals the wellspring of crimes committed by an evil leader in charge of a highly centralised and unitary state, one where the executive’s power has been concentrated in the presidency in particular, without the mitigating effect of the counter- balancing powers of an independent Parliament and judiciary.

Moi’s evil rule dominated every aspect of Kenya’s political life because his rule, like Jomo Kenyatta’s, was absolute state power, which post-independent statecraft has often wrapped in the rhetoric of sovereignty, patriotism, discipline, order, and development.

Moi’s authoritarian rule wasn’t solely a product of a unique character trait in him as an individual; rather, it was a handmaiden of the statecraft of an unreformed highly centralised and unitary state. By using this form of state power to reward and punish, he adroitly exploited the national or regional political needs of Kenyans and the political schemes and rivalries among his political rivals, and astutely manipulated the greed and the cravings of the clergy, the intelligentsia, and bureaucrats.

Moi’s evil government also had the support of the West during the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher eras, which kept his repressive, corrupt and incompetent government going. Britain and the United States were clear about who the enemies of the West were during the Cold War: communism and radical nationalisms in Africa. They wanted to reconfigure African economies through neoliberalism. So his was hardly a one-man show.

Perhaps the politics of the South Nyanza district in the 1980s, which resonated with the politics of the other marginalised regions of Kenya, offers some answers. At that time, Kenyan elites were jostling for positions in the new political order under Moi, and the Nyanza elite were no exception. Signaling a political truce and an intention to bring back the ostracised Kenya People’s Union politicians back into the fold, Moi appointed Jaramogi Oginga Odinga as the Chairman of the Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing in 1980.

But, as Anyang’ Nyongo regretfully explained in the Star, despite their concerted efforts to keep Jaramogi Oginga Odinga out of the limelight, Jaramogi granted Hillary Ng’weno of the Weekly Review an ill-timed interview. Moreover, in Mombasa, Jaramogi “denounced Kenyatta as a land grabber”. These successive events, as Nyongo notes, torpedoed what would have been the Moi- Odinga rapport because Moi was beholden to the very Jomo Kenyatta era forces that had forced Jaramogi Oginga Odinga out of government and that had jailed him.

After the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga debacle, Moi looked to South Nyanza for new leaders who did not have autonomous political constituencies such as Odinga’s, and leaders who would owe him their allegiance. Moi found willing accomplices in some South Nyanza elite with whom he could fend off political enemies, run a brutal and repressive state security apparatus, and build an alternative political base to Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s. It was a move that stirred the undercurrents of the intra- Luo and inter-district elite competition, resentment, and envy.

Moi understood the Luo intra-ethnic political undercurrents, its elites’ vanities, greed, and opportunism and their region’s developmental challenges. He played one individual’s ambitions against another individual’s ambitions, or one district’s elite faction against another faction, thus keeping his would-be enemies busy and preoccupied with siasa ya kuchimbana.

Legacy of the Seventh Day Adventists

For years, the South Nyanza elite had felt that the district had lagged behind Kisumu and Siaya districts in terms of social and economic development. The area was beleaguered with a huge disease burden and high mortality rates. In Freedom and After, Tom Mboya, suggested that this had partly been the social cost of the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) mission’s anti-educated African attitude and miniscule investment in the education sector.

Referring to a time when the education of the Africans was mainly left to Christian missionaries, Mboya lamented:

“There were also churches—for instance, the Seventh Day Adventists—which thought it immoral to give Africans any academic education, and believed all they should learn was the Bible from the first page to the end, and perhaps how to do some woodwork and manual labour. Until a few years ago the Seventh Day Adventists thought it un-Christian for an African to want to go to high school and university. I know of many cases of Africans who were openly condemned in church for trying to get further academic education. In some cases Africans who defied the church on these matters lost their teaching jobs or the employment. As a result, you have today very few highly educated Africans among the Seventh Day Adventists.”

Mboya’s beef with the SDA mission, the dominant Christian mission in South Nyanza and the islands of Lake Victoria (locally known as Lolwe), can’t be dismissed as the coloured view of a Roman Catholic; missionary education was racially-biased across denominations. But the SDA church of the colonial times, with its Kenyan headquarters at Gendia mission in Kendu-Bay, and its roots in the millennial religions of white North Americans, seemed to have exported America’s virulent racist attitudes towards “free” black people. The SDA church of colonial times seemed to have resolved that the type of education the “natives” needed was apolitical education – the teaching of “technical” or functional education, the kind that would not stir political agitation, but would be good enough for the immediate needs of the white-dominated colonial economy.

In an era when the colonial government assigned various Christian missions particular geographical locations – ostensibly to forestall religious conflicts – only the Anglicans (the Queen’s church) could establish a mission anywhere they fancied. Thus a Christian mission’s formal or informal policy could have a great impact on a region’s socio-economic (mis)fortunes. The white missionaries’ preference for high altitudes and cooler climates meant that there were very few missions and missionary schools in South Nyanza’s mostly hot, mosquito- and tsetse fly-infested areas.

The rise and rise of Hezekiah Oyugi

Tom Mboya’s rise as the ultimate champion of post-independence modernity held great hopes for South Nyanza. But his assassination on July 5, 1969 robbed the region of a grand patron and an impatient moderniser who felt that the colonial government had dealt the region an unfair card. Orphaned by Tom Mboya’s murder, South Nyanza, more than any other district, was a region yearning for a patron and inclusion in government.

But South Nyanza elites’ ambitions and popular needs, a laggard elite formation, poor social and economic welfare, especially when compared with the other Luo-dominated districts of Kisumu and Siaya, played into Daniel Moi’s Machiavellian hands. The failed Oginga Odinga and Moi rapport paved the way for Moi to shift the centre of gravity of Nyanza’s Luo community politics. No one personified Daniel arap Moi’s attempt to shift the centre of gravity of Nyanza politics and to control it more than the late Hezekiah Nelson Oyugi Ogango, aka “Kalam Maduong” or the Big Pen. Oyugi’s nickname attested to the might of Oyugi’s powers, which he derived from his lofty position in the Provincial Administration, and later as Permanent Secretary in charge of internal security, an office he held at the pleasure of President Moi.

Hezekiah Oyugi’s meteoric rise in Moi’s government came as a big surprise, especially after another Hezekiah, and a Luo to boot, Hezekiah Ochuka Rabala, a senior private in the Kenya Air Force, was named as being at the centre of the 1982 abortive coup that was said to have had the blessing of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. No one expected another Luo to come close to state power, and certainly not close to a national security organ.

A Homa Bay legend has it that in the 1980s, a goat had spoken to Hezekiah Oyugi when he was serving as a Provincial Administrator in the Rift Valley. The goat had told him to warn the Kenyan government or the president of an impending drought or famine and request them to build a buffer against such an eventuality. Oyugi promptly relayed the message. President Moi heeded the prophetic warning by building a grain reserve, thus averting a famine. The legend’s Old Testament undertones cast Oyugi as Joseph, the interpreter of dreams in the Pharaoh’s court.

Oyugi, like Simeon Nyachae, was an ambitious workaholic and a stickler for rules who zealously served the Moi government while pursuing his own regional political ambitions and development agenda, especially in South Nyanza. Tired of the streetwise, honey-tongued and rib-tickling political orators with dismal “development” records, such Olouch Kanindo, Oyugi attempted to remake South Nyanza’s politics in the 1980s.

The Moi-Oyugi line-up of the favoured Members of Parliament included politicians such as Peter Nyakiamo, Dalmas Otieno and one maverick – if ever there was one – Professor Ouma Muga, and other loud and loutish Nyayo loyalist types. The new crop of leaders had expansive worldviews, were educated and experienced as administrators of big corporate or academic institutions, and were above all Nyayo loyalists.

In the mid-1980s, Moi came calling at Homa Bay. The KANU’s brass band was bigger and better than St John Seminary Rakwaro’s, which often graced Homa Bay town’s national day celebrations. South Nyanza, it was said, had topped the list of the districts with the highest number of registered KANU supporters for the two consecutive years preceding the presidential visit. This wasn’t entirely voluntary. During those years, KANU youth wingers forcibly recruited party members. They had laid siege at the entrances and exits of the town’s markets and the main bus park, letting in only those who had a KANU membership card and the annual KANU membership stamp (worth five or ten shillings) affixed to it. In addition, the KANU Maendeleo Ya Wanawake women, the party stalwarts who could secure more than five kilos of pishori rice or unga ngano, went door to door, making sure that every adult was a registered and duly paid card-carrying member of the ruling party.

With the rise and rise of Hezekiah Oyugi as the PS in charge of internal security, the fortunes of other Luo leaders, such as David Okiki Amayo (KANU’s national chairman), ministers Dalmas Otieno, James Okwanyo, and Peter Nyakiamo, and several assistant ministers, such as Professor Ouma Muga and Ochola Mak’Anyengo, appeared to be on the rise too. But were they?

When the tide of Nyayoism receded from the shores of South Nyanza in the early 1990s, a mixed bag of harvest was revealed. Some educational institutions, notably Kanga High School and the Migori Institute of Science and Technology, were established. There was employment in the Provincial Administration and the Administration Police. There were other goodies, such as a school bus and a few church buildings.

However, the region faced deepening economic decline: bad roads, collapsed marine transport, beleaguered cotton, sugarcane and fisheries sectors, declining public sector employment or retrenchment (popularly known as “the golden handshake”), and an increasing disease and healthcare burden. Moi’s government was also balkanising the old South Nyanza district, dividing it along its dominant language and clan cleavages, namely, Rachuonyo, Migori, Suba, and Kuria districts.

Around that time, Hezekiah Oyugi had also died mysteriously, which was quite common during the Nyayo era. And Moi was openly and widely resented.

Representation without development

In 1993, the MP for Kasipul Kabondo, Otieno K’Opiyo, asked the Minister of Health why there were no Nyayo wards built in the former South Nyanza district. Yet, in his words, “if you consider the proximity of the previous leaders of South Nyanza, all of them were in cabinet and were very, very close to and were co-operating with the KANU government, but in spite of all this cooperation by nine ministers, nothing was done…why did they not consider South Nyanza where they had the heartbeat of KANU throbbing day in day out?”

Although many Nyayo wards were never completed in several parts of the country, and the Moi government later said that the wards were supposedly mainly a self-help and a partially government- sponsored project, South Nyanza did not get a Nyayo ward despite the fact that Peter Nyakiamo, the MP for Mbita, was the Minister of Health when the Nyayo ward project was initiated.

How could this happen? Can this paradox of good cabinet representation without local development explain the kinds of tweets posted on the debate on Moi’s legacy, but informed by the former North Eastern Province’s harsher experiences? Rashid Abdi stated on Twitter:

“He [Moi] kept North under emergency law, deepened hatred of the ethnic Somalis, forced discriminatory pink card on them, looked on as his troops massacred civilians in Wagalla, ran a prosperous country aground, disappeared & killed ForMin [foreign minister]. Whose legacy history will look to kindly it is Raila Odinga. Raila made his mark in the struggle for democracy, new constitution and devolution (notwithstanding qualms about BBI), on the one hand.”

And then there was Ahmednasir Abdullahi SC’s ambivalent reaction:

Despite the history of NFD, the Independence Referendum of 1963, the war of independence (the shifta wars) and Section 124? Of the constitution that imposed state of emergency on NFD from 1963 to 1992, BABA Moi made Somalis, Borana, Gabra, Rendille et al to part of Kenya.”

Dr Sally Kosgei, Nyayo’s last Head of Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, in her eulogy at Kabakak during Moi’s funeral, put her finger on this paradox of cabinet representation without development when she noted without any sense of irony that Moi “managed the affairs of the state with his civil servants”. (Note: Moi’s civil servants, not Kenya’s civil service.) It was clear to all that in Moi’s government, cabinet positions were largely symbolic and ministers were dispensable. The KBC 1 o’clock news bulletin announcing the sacking of ministers hung over the cabinet ministers’ heads like a guillotine.

In nearly all-key institutions of Kenya’s highly centralised state power, the locus of power was not the elected public face of any particular institution. Rather, Kenya’s state power was deliberately designed to subvert its citizens’ democratic will and aspiration. In some instances, the bureaucrats and henchmen who wielded the most power were invisible or largely unknown beyond their private spheres of influence.

It was clear to all that in Moi’s government, cabinet positions were largely symbolic and ministers were dispensable. The KBC 1 o’clock news bulletin announcing the sacking of ministers hung over the cabinet ministers’ heads like a guillotine.

The locus of power lay in the office of a bureaucrat appointed directly or indirectly by the president, often without security of tenure or with superficial security of tenure. (“His civil servants.”) So it was the Treasury, not the National Assembly, that allocated national resources. Within the National Assembly, the clerk had more authority than the speaker. In the justice sector, it was the Attorney General, not the Chief Justice, who was the ultimate legal authority. In any given ministry, it was the Permanent Secretary, not the minister, who made the important decisions. In local governments, it was the various clerks who wielded power. In the districts, the District Commissioners called the shots as chairmen of the District Development Committees and the District Security Committees. In the villages, it was the chiefs, not the elected councillors, who were the kingpins. Nearly all the elected leaders were subservient to the president’s appointed bureaucrats who had the “Authority to Incur Expenditure” behind the scenes.

An assessment of South Nyanza’s politics in the first decade of Moi’s presidency suggests that the former Kenyan president owed his long rule partly to the Luo elite’s internal divisions and rivalries – often ignited by none other than Moi himself. Moi adroitly and carefully co-opted the regional elite from marginalised ethnic groups, cynically exploiting their yearning for “development”, and keeping them happy and slavish. However, their appointment to key positions did little to bring “development” to their regions.

South Nyanza’s experience also suggests that Moi stayed in power for long because of his brutal repression of the opposition, because of the atomising fear and despondency that his regime of terror induced in the population, as well as because of the international financial support his government received from or through the West, especially Britain and the United States. Kenya under Moi’s authoritarian rule was the proverbial crocodile’s lair where no freedom fighter or radical nationalist sought refuge.

Daniel arap Moi may have fancied himself as an African statesman – and was even eulogised as one by many – but his reign is a study on how authoritarian leaders sustained their grip on power during the Cold War. The evils of the Nyayo era recall Lord Acton’s maxim: absolute power corrupts absolutely.

To think of Moi as either a “Big Man” or a “strongman” is to ignore the institutional distortions that enabled him to rule over Kenya with an iron fist, and the domestic and international support that sustained his presidency. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech

After several weeks of speculative fake versions of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) taskforce’s report, the real report was launched on Wednesday, 27 November 2019 at the Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi. The document turned out to be woolly. What is most apparent are the short-term political intentions of its authors.

At first glance, the BBI report appears to contain everything. It outlines what is wrong with Kenya today and calls for an urgent response. But a closer look at what it says reveals a chilling distrust of democracy. It is an attempt to sabotage democracy – a desire to return to a mythical old order of unquestioned authority and obsequious citizenry. This is most telling in the recommendation to take away from the residents of the city of Nairobi the right to be ruled by a governor of their choice, ostensibly because of the city’s special status as the capital and as a diplomatic hub.

However, the BBI report’s rhetoric ignores the problem at the core of Kenya’s politics that precipitated “the handshake” between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga in the first place. Its rhetoric on electoral competition masks the identity of the political formula and its nefarious mechanisms and protests that since 2007 have produced successive governments with huge political legitimacy deficits and which have left a lot destruction in their wake. By referring to the heart- rending rising cases of femicide, terrorism, divisive elections, the crises within the family, indiscipline, and runaway corruption, the BBI report paints a picture of a once great nation now beleaguered and in decline.

Moreover, the report not only partly attributes Kenya’s woes to the adoption of Western democratic models, but also seeks to reverse them. Whenever rights and responsibilities are mentioned in the report, responsibilities take precedence over rights. The BBI report laments that Kenya has become “a responsibility-light and rights-heavy society”. The authors’ obsession with the word responsibility points to the BBI’s tentative political programme of action: rolling back a human rights-conscious society, curtailing human rights talk, and setting the public against non-governmental and civil society organisations – ostensibly the conduits of such rights ideas and talks.

The BBI is a revisionist project on many fronts. It outlines an ambitious plan that ostensibly seeks to take history to the heart of government. It appeals to Kenyans to look back, and embrace their past – history with a capital H as it were, ostensibly in the name of a desirable “official and inclusive national history of every community and stretching back a thousand years” that includes the creation of an Office of the Historian resident in the National Archive” and a return to “an egalitarian pre-colonial African past” (assuming there ever was one).

The report not only partly attributes Kenya’s woes to the adoption of Western democratic models, but also seeks to reverse them. Whenever rights and responsibilities are mentioned in the report, responsibilities take precedence over rights.

BBI neither critically engages with Kenya’s problematic historiography or politics, particularly presidential election politics that necessitated its formation in the first place. The BBI report seems to invoke history, just as it does the moral panic over current social problems besetting Kenya – a perfect cover for an ambitious multi-pronged short-term and long-term political project that mainly includes changing the structure of the executive arm of the government to suit a new political coalition. This political rhetoric lays the ground for conservative social reforms, the kind of reforms that could promote authoritarianism in the long term.

The Uthamaki crisis

Simply put, Kenya is not in the kind of crisis the BBI report portrays. Arguably, Kenya’s current constitution and social institutions can address or redress most of these problems. The crisis lies in Uthamaki – the ideology of the Gikuyu elite that led to three out of four Kenyan governments dominated mainly by the same Gikuyu elite. It’s mainly a crisis of how Uhtamaki can reproduce itself after Uhuru Kenyatta’s disastrous economic record and of how to avert the possibility of having a president who is hostile to the elite’s interests. Arguably, it’s a crisis which has no ready or credible response. It’s the Uthamakists who are caught in several crises: they have no credible patriarchy-compliant succession plan that can guarantee their selfish interests after Uhuru Kenyatta’s second and last term. Moreover, they no longer have a legitimating myth or ideology that can justify Uhuru Kenyatta’s leading role in defining his own succession, especially after his dismal economic performance that has brought on a revolt against Uthamakists in his core constituency.

What’s more, there is hardly sufficient time or resources to groom a formidable candidate who can mollify a disenchanted political base and steer the succession to Uthamakists’ advantage. The government is broke. And Uthamakists are caught between the possibility of a dreaded William Ruto presidency or a reconstituted executive that could guarantee them representation, and give them more time to groom a suitable successor to Uhuru.

It wouldn’t be a crisis if the presidency wasn’t so consequential and if the incumbent trusted the uncertainties of a truly democratic process. But the Uthamakists don’t trust a credible, free and fair election nor do they respect the outcome, as we have witnessed in recent elections.

Electoral coups

Since 2007, the Uthamakists have found a working formula for seizing and keeping state power. It works, but only perfectly well when an Uthamakist is in power and has a strong preferred “home- grown” male candidate. It’s the formula for the execution of an electoral coup d’état, perhaps Mwai Kibaki’s most enduring legacy.

Arguably, the Johann Kriegler Commission did not identify electoral coups nor did it offer sufficient remedy against them. Instead, the Kriegler reforms and the other security sector reforms were a mixed bag of harvest for Kenya’s electoral coup d’état makers. The Kriegler Commission’s report mainly sought to diffuse the claims and counterclaims of the winner of the disputed 2007 presidential election. It did so by claiming, contestably, that both sides stole the election, making it impossible to determine who won. But it dexterously avoided the question of how Mwai Kibaki ascended to power despite the 2007 presidential electoral contest being so muddled that one could not tell who the winner or loser of the election was.

The Kriegler commissioners kicked the can down the road. They recommended a raft of reforms on how to secure the integrity of future elections, especially reconstituting the electoral management body, and using technology and procedures for voting, vote-counting and tallying. It gave Kenyans a promissory note.

Since 2007, the Uthamakists have found a working formula for seizing and keeping state power…It’s the formula for the execution of an electoral coup d’état, perhaps Mwai Kibaki’s most enduring legacy.

Poignantly, the Kreigler Commission failed to locate the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK)’s fiasco at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) within the country’s history of the executive aiding the stealing of elections. The 2007 election-rigging was writ large on a national platform under the glare of the international media. It was switch-off-the–lights-swap-the-ballot- boxes, declare the government’s preferred candidate the winner, and order police officers to beat up anyone who objects.

The success of the strategy rests on a deceptively simple logic: it is easier for a Returning Officer to declare an executive’s preferred candidate the winner than it is to undo such a declaration – whether valid or not – through an election petition or a popular protest. Judges can be leaned on, intimidated or bribed to uphold such a victory. Not even a courageous Supreme Court bench like Justice Maraga’s has changed this logic.

In recent times, this formula has had a patriarchal ethno-chauvinist Gikuyu presidential candidate as the core or as the constant, plus or minus one, two or three substitutable ethnic-other elite. If, however, the disgruntled elite left out of the incumbent’s winning formula or coalition forms a formidable coalition and unexpectedly wins the presidential election, you can still roll back their victory via the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and the control and abuse of security forces. Then, with their backs to the wall, you can press the “losers” to accept half of the Executive’s loaf of bread.

Better still, you can launch a sleek media and academic campaign on a self-fulfilling prophecy of the incumbent’s developmental record or development portal or the invincibility of the demographic strength of the incumbent’s coalition. With the electoral body under your armpit and the multi- agency security forces at your beck and call, you can take the whole loaf of the executive bread after driving the opposition up the judicial cul-de-sac, with a nod from Western powers, the real custodians of Kenya’s state power who fear losing out to the Chinese on lucrative infrastructure projects and trade opportunities.

And presto, you are back as the status quo, standing tall atop the debris of broken institutions of liberal democracy, broken limbs, rapes, destroyed properties, and fresh graves after a general election, and ready for yet another round of this “democratic” three ring circus: the formation of a new coalition; an electoral theft; and a formal or informal power-sharing agreement. It works, but leaves the victor with a huge legitimacy deficit, especially when he reneges on the promise of nusu mkate or the commitment to hand over the whole loaf of bread midstream.

The kumi kumi promise

A case in point is the Jubilee government’s crisis of legitimacy. The legitimating myth, which held the Jubilee’s core patriarchal, ethno-chauvinistic Gikuyu-Kalenjin elite pact and their respective constituencies, is in tatters. It was the myth of the “tyranny of numbers” and the promise of decades of an alternately Kikuyu/Kalenjin mainly male elite dominance over the rest of Kenyans. This is now a mirage, especially for William Ruto’s disbanded United Republican Party faction of the Jubilee government.

“We reluctantly but robustly supported the Uhuruto deal after political propagandists fabricated 07/08 PEV investigations. Some victims were depicted as villains. We justifiably sympathised, defended our own. That’s after quiet efforts by some of us to get a Raila-Uhuru alliance failed,” said Kabando wa Kadando in a thread of tweets, which suggests that William Ruto no longer fits as a variable in the next Mt. Kenya elite’s wining political formula.

“William Ruto, it seems, is very cunning and ambitious, while the Prince slept on the job,” says Kabando wa Kabando. “Ruto controlled both houses of Parliament and the executive. Anyone wanting a fix went to see Ruto. Even governors in trouble with the Senate! He fixed all. We still don’t know why Uhuru let it happen. Everyone knows ‘Annex’ became ‘Extortion Palace’. Well-oiled Sky Team ruled.”

The Gikuyu elite who control state power have walked out of the “kumi kumi” deal, short-changed the Kalenjin elite, and are searching for a new partner and a new coalition deal, as well as new legitimating myths for the next government through the BBI process. They’ve reneged on the “kumi kumi” promise – the promise of a ten-year William Ruto rule following Uhuru Kenyatta’s two five- year presidential terms in office. The Kalenjin are seemingly out of the incumbent’s equation, and William Ruto’s presidential prospect is increasingly looks dim.

Disastrous economic performance

However, substituting Raila Odinga for William Ruto in the incumbent’s victory formula would have been easy but for Uhuru Kenyatta’s disastrous economic performance, the inflexible constitutional provision of the executive, and the burden of history, especially the legacy of Gatundu oaths and the unethical campaigns of the recently closely-fought presidential elections.

But, after six years in power, the economy is listing and a revolt is brewing. He’s no longer the “People’s Prince” among those impoverished by the Jubilee government’s reckless economic choices and unprecedented levels of corruption. The economic downturn has left the president mostly with the coercive instruments of state power with which to intimidate the disgruntled pesky “Tanga Tanga” opponents who are stirring the Central Kenya revolt, and with little fiscal room for a persuasive response to the economic woes fueling the rebellion. This has given his Tanga Tanga critics wide room to chart their own destiny without the Prince and driven the Uthamakists into the arms of a previous implacable foe for help: the much demonised Raila Odinga and his ODM party.

Raila: A hard sell

But Raila Odinga has never been an easy sell among the Gikuyu. He was briefly a njamba nene among the Gikuyu after playing a decisive role in Mwai Kibaki’s victory in 2002. However, in the intervening period between 2003 and 2017, during which Raila Odinga ran for the presidency three times, he has been demonised and characterised as the ultimate enemy of the Gikuyu bourgeoisie, peasants and working class.

As Kabando wa Kabando says, “Central Kenya’s fear of Raila is real. Like Boers feared Mandela. We must courageously crash unjustified phobia. Raila is feared because our grandparents were oathed that Jaramogi was bad. In 2002 Raila was ‘our’ hero. 2005-8 Ruto was ‘our’ enemy. We shall, for Kenya, embrace Raila.”

Before the Jubilee government took Kenya into the deep suffocating waters of debt through reckless borrowing of commercial loans heavily padded with bribes, and drove out SMEs out of business, Uhuru was sold as the filthy rich presidential candidate who will invariably will run a clean government because he doesn’t need money. Raila Odinga and the ODM party may be a hard sell in Central Kenya, but he can be trusted to do the heavy lifting of reforming the executive. He’s been a champion of the parliamentary system of government for long, which is also, as the late John Michuki pointed out, the Uthamakist default position on executive reforms when one of their own is not in State House or, in this instance, when prospects of losing state power looms. And a new political coalition of Uthamaki and the ODM party also provides a ready-made self-fulfilling prophecy or narrative of an electoral victory that a compromised IEBC can deliver.

The BBI brief is to seek to legitimate a previously unthinkable Uthamaki- compliant presidential succession plan, and it does this through historical revisionism. If Uthamaki’s core constituency is shaky, and William Ruto has to be replaced with Raila Odinga because Ruto now poses a greater threat to the Gikuyu bourgeoisie than Raila Odinga, but excites a significant cross-section of Gikuyu petit bourgeoisie, the peasants and the working class, then Uhuru must look for a new legitimating story, especially one that conveniently leaves out Ruto, and brings back Raila into the Uthamakist winning political formula.

Or, better still, a new legitimating myth is being created – one that simultaneously leaves Ruto out while portraying him as the originator of the Jubilee government’s economic sins. This gives the impression of casting out the “kusema, kutenga na ku-tender” tenderpreneur tendencies within the Jubilee government while laying claim to the “pedigree” that Ruto lacks.

A mythical past

The BBI’s first communiqué and report spins a mythical Kenyan past, an exclusive patriotic patrimony of the scions of Kenya’s founding fathers. Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga are the sons of the Republic of Kenya’s first president and vice president, respectively. The BBI seems to have rediscovered the unfulfilled dreams and promises of Kenya’s independence, and has answered the oracle’s call to complete the so-called Kenya’s founding fathers’ independence journey.

In its first March 9, 2018 communiqué, which caught many by surprise, the BBI was billed as the rediscovery of the unfulfilled promises and ideals of Kenya’s Independence. It also conjured a mythical historical past and assigned Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga a larger-than-life leading role in shaping Kenya’s destiny.

A new legitimating myth is being created – one that simultaneously leaves Ruto out while portraying him as the originator of the Jubilee government’s economic sins.

The communiqué claimed that “Kenya has constantly sought to live up to its promise and dreams its founding mothers and fathers had for us,” as if there was ever a common political vision shared by all.

What triumphed after “Independence,” especially after 1965, wasn’t what the KANU coalition fought for and promised at independence; it was what Oginga Oginda would fight against for the rest of his life with little success – Jomo Kenyatta’s ethno-centric authoritarian one-party state system.

The communiqué also gives Kenya a mythical history. It talks about a mythical pre-colonial “Kenya” that was peaceful and conflict-free, and later despoiled by colonialism, which the founding mothers and fathers fought and defeated with the promise of creating a united nation.

These are the myths that legitimize the Uhuru-Raila partnership’s exclusive claim to shepherding the Uhuru succession politics. The BBI did not seek to make amends for the sins of the founding fathers, as the congratulatory speeches at the Bomas of Kenya during the launch of the BBI report demonstrated.

The jubilant mood at Bomas of Kenya was almost spoilt by Senator Kipchumba Murkomen, who is neither a Masinde Muliro reincarnate nor a Junet Mohammed or a Tom Mboya reincarnate by any stretch of imagination. Murkomen’s plea for fair representation of both supporting and opposing sides, and his belligerent call for minorities’ voices to be heard was a complaint that reminded one of KADU’s plea to respect dissenting voices – a cardinal democratic value that KADU (more than KANU) stood for and championed briefly.

The founding fathers’ myth might bridge the political chasm between the Uthamakist and the much- demonised Raila Odinga’s political constituencies, and perhaps bury the Gikuyu bourgeoisie’s fear of a Raila Odinga leadership. But a victory by any means necessary against a Ruto-led coalition of the disgruntled would make Uhuru’s opinion of Raila Odinga quoted in the Washington Post after NASA’s boycott of the repeat 2017 elections ring true: “There is sadness in the decision of my opponent. He fought for decades to make Kenya a multiparty democracy. His opposition to one-party rule and his devotion to winning democracy for Kenya cannot be questioned.”

The desire by the Deep State to steady Uhuru Kenyatta’s succession ship, and guide it through the William Ruto-stirred rough and turbulent political waters by balancing Raila’s political ambitions against Ruto’s hasn’t put wind behind Raila’s sails. But it has assigned to Raila a critical role in Uthamaki’s rebirth project, much to the chagrin of some of Uhuru’s die-hard supporters who have been brought up on a steady diet of “Uthamaki ni witu, thamaki ni ciao”.

The BBI’s Bomas show was a ploy. It was a mock test of a political formula that sabotages Kenya’s democracy, always with the same predictable tragic results every five-year electoral cycle. Though billed as historic, it was in reality the Deep State’s preview of the coming John Michuki “liver- juggling” show.

A new supporting cast

The BBI report inspires little confidence, but serves as a reminder that Kenya is stuck in a deep political rut – held hostage by a cabal of ethno-chauvinists who have perfected the art of subverting democracy and political deception by introducing a new supporting cast of enemies-turned-allies.

That Raila Odinga is aiding and abetting such political calculations (which have repeatedly cost him the presidency) is tragic. It’s a capitulation to the evils of seizing and controlling state power; not a triumph of patriotism over self-interest.

Kenya might be playing Russian roulette in the next presidential election, not with Raila Odinga’s single bullet, but with a half-loaded revolver, particularly if we go back to the Supreme Court to preserve what millions of Kenyans can’t effectively and collectively resist. If Kenya is stuck only with patriarchal options and craves a home-grown solution, then it has to polish up KADU’s plinths instead of mythologising the patrimony of the KANU founding father’s dream and promise.

The evils that KADU stalwarts such Ronald Ngala and Masinde Muliro warned us against have metastasised in Kenya’s body politic. But at least KADU got the diagnosis right: ethnic dominance in the commanding heights of state bureaucracy by one or two ethnic groups is injurious to the interests of those they exclude. KADU’s prescriptions for the cure – a federal system of government, equitable development, a Bill of Rights, and a multiparty system of government – came close to what Kenyans have been earnestly debating since 1992. The desire by the Deep State to steady Uhuru Kenyatta’s succession ship, and guide it through the William Ruto-stirred rough and turbulent political waters by balancing Raila’s political ambitions against Ruto’s hasn’t put wind behind Raila’s sails. But it has assigned to Raila a critical role in Uthamaki’s rebirth project…

It seems the powers that be have turned the evils KADU warned us against into an advantageous political formula. Perhaps the key question one would ask the incumbent and his Western supporters is: Is it ethical to continually stage an electoral coup d’état under the guise of a presidential electoral competition? How many more such coups can Kenya survive?

Kenya’s political problem is not competition as such but rather the lack of ethical competition and the violence it engenders on both sides of any political divide – from the party primaries of various political parties and electoral positions to the presidential election. It’s the current electoral system that lends itself to the electoral coups plots.

Until the Kenyans who benefit from minority rule and electoral coups give up their advantages or those who oppose illegitimate minority rule mount a resistance, BBI-like proposals will always be made. Unfortunately, the deadly recasting of who is the new or not-so-new ethnic enemy or ally of the ethnic-chauvinistic minorities who control state power will not yield democratic ideals. This is the tragedy of “Uhuru”.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech It finally docked on our shores, the shores of the Nam Lolwe, on the 6th of June 2019. Unlike the old steamer, MV Alestes, it blew no loud horn to announce its arrival at the port of Kisumu to tell all within the vicinity to steer clear of the waterway and berth. Rather, it glided smoothly into Kisumu City at the end of a financial year, when government departments hurry to close the books. It creeped up on the residents of the city, stealthily like a crocodile. The 35th of the expected 47 Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) “public consultation” meetings was upon us.

“I got a call from the County Commissioners about a month ago. Something like this cannot be done through an open invitation. The whole of Kisumu would have been here,” said a young man with a chuckle, his face beaming with mischief, the smirk of someone proud of his high connections and who had been let into a well-kept siri-kali. We were queuing for tea and snacks at the Acacia hotel, Kisumu’s high-end hotel where the BBI commissioners were holding a “consultation” meeting on how to build a new Kenya.

I, too, would have missed the meeting, had I not seen in good time a WhatsApp message from a friend who’s a Kisumu government insider. The message had been sent in the wee hours of the morning that Thursday. In keeping with the rising personality cults of Kenya’s county governors, and their penchant for frivolous publicity, the e-invitation card I got bore Professor Anyang’ Nyongo’s picture, smiling, donning a white shirt and a red necktie, and holding a jacket flung over his left shoulder, held tenderly by his index finger. Warwakou duto! (All are welcome!), said the e-card.

As we sat down for tea and snacks, a clergyman wearing a white flowing robe and a red scalp cap (signifying his high position in the one of the many African-instituted Christian churches in Western Kenya) said, “I wouldn’t have known who sent me the money. I got am M-Pesa transfer of 2,028 shillings from a Samuel Otieno but I couldn’t tell who that is until the lady spoke.”

That lady he was referring to was an amiable and handsome woman dressed in a white, loose-fitting linen suit who had spoken towards the end of the meeting, shortly before the closing prayer – the ubiquitous Christian prayer that has become mandatory at public events, which always reminds one that many Kenyans, especially state and public officers, are yet to come to terms with the 2010 Constitution of Kenya, even with the shortest of its articles, Article 8, that states that “there shall be no State religion”. She told the officially invited participants that “if you check your phones, M-pesa imeingia [the Sh2000 transport refund] plus Sh28 ya kuitoa. Usikuje kama ulikua na Fuliza, the money has been chewed.”

The BBI task force is run like a tight deep state ship. But there is nothing transparent or charming about its process of public consultations. Unlike the recent commissions, whose meetings and deliberations were widely publicised, the BBI meetings are carefully and secretly organised, and their deliberations are hardly made public through the radio or the daily newspapers.

BBI has neither a known physical address nor a web page. Nor an expressly parliament-sanctioned legal existence and a budget line. It has an email address only. It works mostly as a sad reminder that despite its enormous constitutional powers, the Kenyan Parliament is yet to exercise effective control over the Office of the President, especially over the conduct of the provincial administration in midwifing political transitions such as the BBI and its latest women-only “popular movement” wing, Team Embrace.

The BBI task force is run like a tight deep state ship…The BBI meetings are carefully and secretly organised, and their deliberations are hardly made public through the radio or the daily newspapers.

Although the activities of the BBI have largely escaped or studiously evaded public scrutiny, the Kisumu event gives us a glimpse into how it works. Its consultative forum was surreal. It had a creepy feeling of an odd combination of a typical District Commissioner-organised public holiday event – with all its attendant display of anxieties over the security of the VIP and crowd control – and a typical NGO seminar at a five-star hotel, but with neither the benefits of a skilled moderator nor an appropriate teaching methodology of getting the best out of the competing and conflicting views of the representative of the various groups present at the meeting.

It was an eerily odd public event. Like a typical District or Provincial Commissioner-organised event, it drew in government officials and civil servants, including the starched khaki, big silver button, crimson red epaulets, and stick-wielding types, such as high-ranking police officers and provincial administrators, who patrolled the corridors of the hotel. While the presence of baton-wielding Administration Police officers at an open-field public event, in jungle-green camouflage uniforms, standing strategically in front of a crowd of spectators, and policing the imaginary wall between the seated and sheltered elite and the sweating crowd conveyed a sense of security and control, the conspicuous presence of the AP officers armed with the G-3 rifles or AK-47 rifles sent a chill down one’s spine. It evoked anxiety and fear rather than security and safety, which were amplified by the antics of an order-obsessed deputy county commander who wore a chocolate brown suit and stood like a sentry at the entrance of the second door to the conference room, alternately keeping an eye on the goings-on along the corridor and in the conference room.

Unlike a typical NGO forum, there were has no hand-written sign up sheets; the organisers simply ticked off the names of the participants on a printed list of invited participants, each sheet bearing the names of only the invited participants from each of the sub-counties of Kisumu County. Luckily, the uninvited (those not vetted by the Provincial Administration) could also walk into the meeting and listen to the proceeding, without signing up.

But like a typical NGO or government event, the meeting was adorned with big banners, which, despite promising dialogue or debate, served more to mark the boundary between the powerful commissioners’ high table and the jam-packed seminar room than to remind the commissioners of their vision and mission. Pleasantly, a female Kenyan sign language interpreter was hard at work, diligently translating the proceedings of the meeting.

The commissioners took turns to frame the problem, to ask questions, and to offer solutions and ways-forward, slicing up their audience into several categories: geographical, generational, gender, political, minority, and disability, soliciting from each participant, a solution for the evils bedeviling Kenya but barely giving the participants a chance to compose their thoughts or debate many contentious views vying for attention.

Nearly all the participants – except the governor, a Member of Parliament (Oduma Awour) and a former Member of Parliament (Prof Ayiecho Olweny) – were given less than three minutes to talk about items on the 9-item agenda, which prompted Father Samuel of the Catholic Peace and Justice Commission to say, “If the we want BBI to succeed, we need to allow people to freely express themselves, not shut down.” But the Commission did not heed to his plea. “We know what has happened, we need the solution. This is not the right forum for venting,” Prof. Oloo Adams responded curtly.

Except for Dr Florence Omosa’s very brief experiment with the Socratic approach, which questioned, teased out the inconsistencies and tested the appropriateness of a solutions offered by the participants, most of the commissioners found a ready-made formula for the classification of problems bedeviling Kenya by categorising them into neat labels: gender, age, geography, and social exclusion (including disability). Their idea of “participation” was to have a member from each category speak about their issues, as if the problem facing them was defined purely by their gender, age, geographical location, or level of social exclusion. Diversity, when in the hands of the securocrats and the commissioners, was reduced to a convenient tool of bureaucracy, generating more controversies than debate.

In a welcome break with the previous briskly sessions, Dr Omosa intoned politely and firmly, “Why do we fight during elections? We don’t trust each other, what should we do so that life goes on? What must happen so that we don’t have so many baby Pendos? Give me specific recommendations.”

Their idea of “participation” was to have a member from each category speak about their issues, as if the problem facing them was defined purely by their gender, age, geographical location, or level of social exclusion.

Not satisfied with the quick, not-well-thought-out responses, Dr Omosa observed, “I know, it’s not meant to be a dialogue, but I must ask you, how can the elders be the solution [to divisive elections], yet they champion exclusive ethnic leadership?” She was responding to a participant’s suggestion that a greater role for community elders in the management of elections is the solution to the tensions Kenyans experience in general elections. “Disband the IEBC [Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission],” opined another participant.

Instead of a facilitating dialogue and debate, the meeting became a forum for contentious hard line views: “Kenya should go for a parliamentary system of government,” said one participant. “The constitution of Kenya has turned Kenya into a killing field,” asserted another. “Bring back the death sentence; let the murderers be locked without bail.” “Arrest and lock up the corrupt without bail,” Prof. Ayiecho Olweny, a former Member of Parliament, pleaded passionately. “We want “Luo kit gi Timbegi” brought back to in our curriculum,” said one participant. “Send the children back home to learn Dholuo,” said another. Ms Grace Jowi Jobita from Muhoroni, paraphrasing the Bible, stated, “If it is your eye that’s causing you a problem, my first recommendation is, let them be castrated, second, let them be castrated, and third, let them be castrated.”

There was also a call to “review the social ethics and education curriculum” in order to address the dearth of ethics among Kenyan youth and the rising cases of violence against women, including rampant cases of rape and defilement. “Amend the Chief’s Act. Our society is yearning for the past order, and is uncomfortable with the recent changes,” said retired Paramount Chief Paul Odero.

Mr Mathews Owili, the Kisumu County’s deputy governor, concurred with Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o that Kenya needs a parliamentary system of government, but also asked, “If the Prime Minister can be compelled by law to form a government that reflects the face of Kenya, can the Prime Minister be compelled to treat all Kenyans as equals?”

Struck by the repeated demands for more laws that would ensure diversity in public appointments, especially at the top levels of Kenya’s state power, Senator Amos Wako, the former long-serving Attorney General, pointed out, “The law already provides for that…the constitution makes reference to the face of Kenya in more than 22 Articles. What I want is, how can we ensure that the law, the constitution is respected by whomever?”

“The problem may not be Chapter Six [on leadership and integrity], but the law to enable, enforce the chapter. Perhaps the law enacted to enable this chapter does not reflect the letter and the spirit of the constitution of Kenya, 2010,” added Senator Wako.

However, BBI commissioners stuck to their nine-point agenda, briskly running through each item on their tick-off list, even when the more discerning participants, such as Senator Amos Wako, sensed that the problem might not be more laws, as some were suggesting, but a more complicated political process i.e. the lack of good laws and constitutionalism.

Anxious that this meeting might not yield much, Sheikh Masoud pointed out that “Kikao bila matunda ni ufisadi,” cautioning both the commissioners and the participants at the meeting that if the BBI initiative, like past initiatives such as the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), yields nothing, then the participants at BBI public consultation meetings would be complicit in yet another act of corruption.

The TJRC report is silent on or whitewashes some critical aspects of Kenya’s evil past. For example, Volume 11 of the TJRC report airbrushes the 1969 Kisumu massacre out of Kenya’s register of post- independence political massacres. The BBI too looks like yet another lost opportunity to revisit Kenya’s evil past and exorcise the ghosts that haunt Kenya’s post-independence politics.

Sheikh Masoud pointed out that “Kikao bila matunda ni ufisadi,” cautioning both the commissioners and the participants at the meeting that if the BBI initiative…yields nothing, then the participants at BBI public consultation meetings would be complicit in yet another act of corruption.

The BBI’s is a lost cause because it embodies the worst carry-overs from the undemocratic provincial administration’s coercive and manipulative tendencies while pretending to promote progressive and inclusive practices. The BBI seems yet another lost opportunity because the elite have set its course, and are championing narrow, selfish and convenient political causes that hardly go deep enough into the roots of the knotty questions of justice many Kenyans yearn for, and which were not given a fair hearing at the Kisumu forum.

Boniface Akach, a Kondele-based front-line human rights activist, who only learnt of the BBI meeting accidentally while attending a “solidarity” meeting at the same hotel, wrote the following on his Facebook account: “The on-going public participation exercise by BBI is a mockery, a waste of public resources and a rubber-stamping exercise. How can such a public exercise be taken to the Acacia Hotel, a five-star rated hotel, despite other more conducive and accessible spaces being available? The invite-only event is so restricted, with NIS and Police all over. The mobilisation across sub- counties is so well designed apart from Kisumu Central (wajuaji). Mobilisation was strictly done by the Kisumu County Commissioner. But we are not surprised, we all know that the aim the referendum is meant to settle scores as it creates opportunity for recycled, rejected political friends.”

Perhaps, as Akach points out, the perfunctory public consultation meetings, like the one held in Kisumu County, are merely an alibi for a pre-determined political course and cause. In Kisumu, there was a clear divide between the demands made by the ODM elite, on the one hand, and popular demands by the people of Kisumu County, on the other.

According to Kisumu County Governor Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o and the ODM branch leaders, what’s at stake is a referendum to turn Kenya into a proper parliamentary system of government. However, to others, it’s the unfinished business of political violence and justice for the victims of political violence.

“We want inclusivity in compensation. We lost lives in 2007 and again in 2017. Some people were compensated, but not people from this region. We need inclusive compensation for people like baby Pendo,” said Victor Nyasaya. A representative of the National IDP network also expressed a similar concern. “The 2007 IDPs in Kisumu were paid only three thousand shillings, unlike those from Nakuru who were paid ten thousand shillings,” he lamented.

In many ways, the BBI “consultation” made a mockery of the constitution-sanctioned idea of public participation, a realisation that was not lost on many of the participants attending the Kisumu forum. It was a charade. Melania Jackie, representing the youth, lamented, “We were are not involved in the process of formulating public policies. Not the Universal Health Care, not the Huduma Number, we were only given deadlines. No civic education. We don’t have a youth on the BBI high table, even a token of representation.

“Na tuna ambiwa hii sio baraza,” Mitchelle Otieno lamented on Facebook, adding that “the BBI team ought to have held the meeting in Kondele and not Acacia hotel. We lost lives in Kondele, Nyalenda, Manyatta, and not Acacia.”

Orengo Ben Wamaya, who represented Bunge la Mwananchi at the meeting, thundered, “Public participation is never done in a five-star hotel.”

If the TJRC report offers the residents of Kisumu an official amnesia for the 1969 massacre in exchange for the recognition of the years of economic marginalisation which followed it, then what will the BBI report yield? Will it offer restorative justice or compensations for lost life, limb and property to the recent victims of political violence? Who will foot the bill? The perpetrators and the principal beneficiaries of political violence now occupying high offices or the Kenyan taxpayers yet again? Will it be sufficient and equitable? Will there be yet another opportunity for a trade-off between some measures of restorative justice and political support for a new political coalition, like the Uhuruto 2013 bargain? Will it offer retributive justice? Will it recommend memorialisation of the victims of past political evils or yet again endorse a tacit collective amnesia and unofficial amnesty for the perpetrators and principal beneficiaries of the past political evils?

Who decides?

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech To some observers, it was a victory that recalls the Biblical David versus Goliath encounter, which will be told long after the “stone” that fell the giant Orange Democratic Party’s political machinery and its candidate in the 5 April Ugenya by-election has been buried deep in the fecund soils of Ugenya. For others, it was the epic duel, which Senator James Orengo – a living legend in Kenya and in Ugenya’s opposition politics – like Hamlet without the Prince, lost spectacularly to David Ochieng, a political neophyte.

In the 5 April Ugenya constituency by-election, a parliamentary candidate called David Ochieng’ of the little-known Movement for Democracy and Growth (MDG) took on a giant, the Orange Democratic Party (ODM), and floored its candidate, Chris Karan. This was not a first in the colorful history of Ugenya, a constituency whose politics has partly been defined by the political rivalries between in-laws James Orengo and his brother-in-law, Stephen Ondiek, who between them, represented Ugenya constituency for 33 years between 1980 to 2013.

Although there is no love lost between Orengo and Ochieng, Ochieng’s victory recalls James Orengo’s Nyatieng’s’ (the grinding-stone) victory in the 1980 Ugenya constituency by-election against Mathews Ogutu, a pro-establishment and a Jomo Kenyatta era minister for local government. Just like Orengo’s victory in 1980 as a Jaramogi Odinga colyte was a slap in the face of pro- establishment politics of acquiescence in the face of betrayals of independence ideals and KANU’s suffocating post-independence one-party state, Ochieng’s, too, is a rejection of Raila Odinga’s pro- status quo politics, which in the face of suffocating party politics demands acquiescence with politics of incompetence or ineptitude at the local level.

The victory was too sweet to be savoured only by Ochieng’ and his constituents. By saying that the by-election was a Raila versus Ruto contest and casting it as a proxy battle for Kenya’s soul…the ODM party barons had invited the dissident United Republican Party (URP) wing of the ruling Jubilee Party to the Ugenya party. Or so, it seems.

Ochieng’s was a sweet victory, a crowning of a successful and drawn out election petition against the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)’s declaration of Chris Karan as the victor of the 2017 Ugenya parliamentary election, in which he handed ODM, especially his Ugenya nemesis, Senator James Orengo, a humiliating defeat.

The victory was too sweet to be savoured only by Ochieng’ and his constituents. By saying that the by-election was a Raila versus Ruto contest and casting it as a proxy battle for Kenya’s soul – where a vote cast for Chris Karan is a vote for Raila Odinga, and a vote cast for David is a vote for William Ruto – the ODM party barons had invited the dissident United Republican Party (URP) wing of the ruling Jubilee Party to the Ugenya party. Or so, it seems.

As if on cue, the “hustler’s” nation, for whom everything ni kujipanga without compunction, showed up for the party, honouring ODM’s ill-thought, and perhaps proxy invitation, to a propaganda-fest. William Ruto, Kenya’s Deputy President, who craves an earthly kingdom, took a celestial leap for it, and tweeted, “Jameni wacheni MUNGU aitwe MUNGU. The hustler nation has spoken, the people have decided”, thereby quickly claiming David’s victory for the “hustler” Christian nation and milking it for its propaganda value: Odinga’s loss is a Ruto’s or self-declared hustler-in-chief’s gain.

Ostensibly, Ochieng’s victory now symbolised the miraculous ways of God, foretelling the coming victory of the kingdom of the hustler-in-chief over his nemesis Raila Odinga, the longed-for Godless earthly kingdom of Kenyans who seldom give a damn about justice or ethics in pursuit of power or wealth.

Ochieng’s MGD victory was a godsend. Irresistible. And they grabbed it, perhaps with the ease with which billions of shillings in dollar denominations is nowadays spirited out of Kenya’s public coffers to a few individual’s secret accounts abroad or safe boxes in local banks under the Jubilee government’s watch.

Senator Susan Kihika, a Ruto disciple, took a less optimistic but a more earthly view of Ochieng’s victory. She tweeted, “Is ODM’s loss in Ugenya & Embakasi South an indication of changing times? Ugenya being ODM stronghold begs the question, is the electorate finally ready to defy dictatorship vote & independently? Perhaps. Interesting times ahead. Kitaeleweka sooner than later!”

“Not a big deal,” Raila Odinga said repeatedly, and rather strenuously, for the “just a drop in the ocean” loss of two parliamentary seats in a week when the twin ODM loss, especially the Ugenya by- election, was trending in the major call-ins in Dholuo breakfast and late night radio broadcasts.

For some of the diehard ODM supporters, the twin parliamentary electoral loss is symptomatic of ODM’s diseased body politic. “It’s suffering a T.B. Not the dreadful respiratory disease, tuberculosis, but the equally devastating “Tugni gi Bagni,” or “conflict and confusion,” for a party that has had a relative clear political vision,” said a disillusioned ODM supporter in a call-in breakfast radio show.

Still, others opined, the victory of these candidates raises several questions that the party ought to answer: why do sitting ODM MPs, who ably discharge their parliamentary responsibilities or good candidates seeking an ODM ticket lose to those said to be the party-anointed but lacklustre performers? Is it the region’s six-piece voting pattern or how the six-pieces of the ODM leaders is put together? Is it because, as some callers opined, “party ni gi wegi” (the party has its owners)? And therefore, have the party nominations, not just the ODM’s, but also other Raila Odinga-led parties’ nominations, been a charade? Does the party respect the wishes and interests of the majority? “Certificate e omo malo.” (Has the party been imposing candidates on the voters?) Is it because we’ve been electing charlatans who claim “wadhi konyo Jakom goyo lweny?” (Is it those who claim they are going to help Raila Odinga fight a war?)

Beyond the biblical analogies, evangelical Christian rhetoric, and the denials of ODM party barons, what does Ochieng’s victory mean? What does it tell us about Luo politics? What hopes does it hold, especially for those from the counties of Siaya, Homa Bay, Migori and Kisumu, who are disgruntled with ODM, especially the party nominations, and increasingly see Raila Odinga’s dominance in Luo politics as a stranglehold on regional democracy? What about those who yearn either for a change or a revolution in the ODM strongholds?

Unlike ODM power barons’ denials, the candid and passionate debates on Ochieng’s victory and ODM’s poor performance in the two by-elections throws up more than Ochieng’s winning formula or ODM’s ways of losing an election, which, for some rank and file members of the party, shouldn’t be waved aside.

Many ODM supporters who called various Dholuo radio stations last week blamed Senator James Orengo for the loss of the Ugenya seat to the MDG party. They put it down to the rivalry between Orengo and Opiyo Wandayi, said to be driven by competing ambitions for the Siaya County’s 2022 gubernatorial election. ODM had wrongly pitched the contest as a national issue, with little local touch, and favoured big roadshow events – which entertain the youth, but which scarcely educate the electorate – and counterproductive threats by Siaya governor, Amoth Rasanga, to punish his Ugenya constituents if they voted for Ochieng’. Yet Ochieng’ has a better development record in Ugenya than the Siaya County government, and carried out a more effective door-to-door campaign attuned to the hopes of Ugenya voters, especially women.

Ochieng is a young and ambitious politician who first came to parliament as an ODM Member of Parliament. His victory points to a deeper crisis gnawing at the heart of the Orange Democratic Movement. ODM not only failed to live up to its name and to its political ideals, but is suffered from a crisis of vision, as some callers pointed out. It also stalled intra-party, inter-generational succession, which is now simmering and might come to the boil before or by 2022.

However, listening to ODM supporters who are still smarting from the party’s loss of Ugenya constituency does suggest that Ochieng’s victory is significant but that it is no more significant than the past victories of “independents” in the current Luo politics. Ochieng joins the league of politicians, such as Olago Aluoch, the MP for Kisumu West on a Ford Kenya ticket, Shakeel Shabbir of Kisumu Town East, who ran as independent in the 2017 general election, and even of the disgraced Okoth Obado, now an ODM governor, who was elected on a PDP ticket in 2013.

Ochieng’s victory, like that of the other “independents”, suggests that ODM or Raila Odinga are not invincible. However, winning an election is still an uphill task. You’ve got to factor Raila Odinga into your winning formula or circumvent it in your campaigns. Strategically, you must be an ally or be seen to be an ally of Raila Odinga’s cause. And as some callers said, those who have successfully run against the ODM wave, such as Olago Aluoch of Kisumu Town West or Shakeel Shabbir, have simultaneously avoided casting their quest for elective office as contests between them and Raila Odinga. They ran on a Raila-zone friendly party or no political party, and thoroughly localised the parliamentary contest while pledging loyalty to Raila’s cause or claiming him as their undisputed leader or leader of the Luo community.

Shakeel Shabbir, popularly known as “Onyango woun Mogo” (Onyango, the owner of maize flour), like Ochieng, bolted out of the ODM in 2017, but ran successfully as an independent. Upon winning, he said, “I still share ODM ideals and want to assure my people that I will stand with the party and leader Raila Odinga.”

Similarly, speaking to the Star after winning, Ochieng’ said, “I avoided the media like the plague since they were going to hype it as a war between me and Raila,” and added, “I have no issue with Raila. In fact, we kept talking when I was in court. There is no bad blood between him and myself. I respect him. I support the handshake, which is the best thing ever to happen to this country.”

Salim Odeny, a suave and eloquent ODM ideologue with a priestly mastery of the Bible, an ecumenical mastery of many Christian denominational hymns, liturgy, and rituals, and a mastery of dead-pan Dholuo put-downs or sexist insults, said that the ODM bigwigs in charge of the Chris Karan campaigns didn’t set the Raila trap well. He says that ODM lost the Ugenya seat, not only because the infighting within the Senator James Orengo-led campaign team, but also because they didn’t frame the contest in terms that resonates with the Ugenya electorate. “They should have asked, who does Uhuru Kenyatta deal with when he wants to deal with a Luo leader, a party leader called Raila Odinga of ODM or a party leader called David Ochieng’ of MDG?” said Odeny. The contest should have been framed as the battle between Raila and Ochieng’ for the leadership of the Luos – who of the two embodies the community’s fears and hopes? – not as a Raila versus Ruto contest.

Ochieng’ saw the trap and lifted the safety hatch. He simply asked his constituents, “Ka udhi ma ok uneno Raila e debe, gone David Ochieng’,” (If you go to the polling booth, and you don’t find Raila’s name on the ballot, then vote for David Ochieng), some callers pointed out. Raila’s absences, literary and figuratively, also worked in Ochieng’s favour.

Citing African Union engagements, Raila made only a single appearance at a funeral in Ugenya during the campaign period. Since the handshake, what he embodies or stands for, the larger-than- life cause cryptically referred to as “lweny” (the war), and the political cause that he has embodied in Luo politics (which gives him a free hand to choose who’s a loyal lieutenant and who’s not) has become foggy at best.

What’s more, “the handshake” has blunted the sharp edge of the “mole” label, the traitor charge, which can cut down one’s political career short, especially for Luo politicians who work with the establishment, either in times of opposition or outside the Raila Odinga umbrella, in times of co- optation.

In 2017, David Ochieng’, who had been dubbed a mole, bore this burden. In 2019, after the handshake, the sharp opposition-establishment distinction is blurred, and the burden has lifted off a little bit. Moreover, unlike James Orengo, who was once a cabinet minister (a minister for lands), Ochieng’ seems to have leveraged his first term pro-establishment connections and delivered collective material goods to his Ugenya constituents better than both James Orengo and the County of Government of Siaya: a medical training centre, a teachers’ training college, a technical institute, subsidised fertilizer to farmers, and a forestry school in the making.

Tactically, by framing the by-election as a local contest and conducting a door-to-door campaign, Ochieng’ outflanked the ODM bigwigs who mounted colourful roadshows and pitched the battle as a national contest between Raila Odinga and William Ruto. Backed by Ugenya professionals, he turned his first term development record as an ODM MP into an asset and bait: “I have built a TTC, and a MTC here, but the MTC College could collapse, because it offers only one course. Give me a chance to complete this project,” Ochieng, reportedly pitched.

But David Ochieng’, the ambitious rebel politician who says he eschews “politics of lies, personality cult, where you identify a figure of hate”, derides and is disdainful of Orengo’s brand of politics – what he dismissively calls “university type of politics, which no longer works for the masses” – as the kind of politics that has long reached its sell-by date and is a product the fallout that followed the ODM’s post-2013 generational succession politics in Luo politics.

Ochieng told the Star that he left ODM because “the party machinery was not taking my views. There is a lot of suspicion about me and how I work. At some point, I felt I didn’t want to go to parliament.” Moreover, “My party did not like people who can innovate or those giving views. I thought I did not want to go through that, hence, the birth of MDG,” Ochieng’ added, without mentioning the source of this suspicion.

That suspicion was borne out a the Sega Declaration in 2014. David Ochieng’, together with some youthful and freshly elected first-term members of parliament, such as Jared K’Opiyo, Silvanus Osele, Agostino Neto, Junet Mohamed, Millie Odhiambo, Ken Obura, and John Mbadi, sought to reform and re-energise the party after the loss of the 2013 presidential election and to change its leadership. But the doyens of opposition politics, such as Raila Odinga, Anyang’ Nyong’o, and Otieno Ka’jwang,’ read mischief in this move. The ODM MPs, who were party to the Sega Declaration, were viewed with suspicion as fifth columnists.

ODM power barons scattered this group, but didn’t adequately address the discontent, the injustice of the party nomination process, and the feeling of being left out of both the national party power structures and in the ODM county governments, which many youthful members of the party, including the rank and file, feel to date. Dubbed “moles,” the unrepentant signatories to the Sega Declaration faced a stiff challenge for the ODM ticket or opted for alternative political parties. Some, like John Mbadi and Junet Mohamed, beat a retreat and were rewarded with high party positions. Others, like Ken Obura and Silvanus Osele, fell by the wayside. A few, like David Ochieng, and Millie Odhiambo, retreated to their constituencies and worked hard to fortify their hold on them.

Labeled a Jubilee mole, David Ochieng’ felt it doubly, in 2017 and 2019. “There were days we could spend up to shillings 1 million in a day,” Ochieng’ told the Star, without disclosing either what he spent the money on or the total amount of money he spent to secure the seat. Clearly, one million shillings a day, even for a few days of campaigning in a rural constituency, is a little over the top, particularly, for a candidate who says his popularity rests solidly on his unmatched development record.

Ochieng’s triumph over the ODM was sweet, hard-won, and crowning, but still an expensive victory. It reeks of a BUY-election. Although Ochieng says that his solid development record as an ODM member of parliament put him in good stead, he spent heavily to secure the seat, even when he avoided a “big entourage” and occasionally rode a bicycle while looking for votes.

Ochieng’s victory reminds the ODM party, and Raila Odinga, in particular, that that until ODM embraces internal party democracy, addresses the generational succession question, and Raila unequivocally states what the party stands for, the independents (who voters say are good leaders, but often fall out of favour with the ODM party barons) will always eat Baba’s lunch in a free and fair election – especially when the voters can’t tell what Raila Odinga stands for or what the political vision of ODM is since he signed a truce with the Jubilee government.

Questions arise: Is Raila still hunting, holding the leopard by the tail or has he domesticated the beast? Or is he stroking its fur, cleaning its bloodstained paws and its incisors while his core constituency, clawed or killed by the beast in the last electoral encounters, cries for justice? Does ODM fight for democracy and good government only at the national level? What about the ODM-led constituencies and the counties?

Ochieng’s victory too, is just an exception that proves the rule: the common sense that binds Raila Odinga and his die-hard political base still holds a contested sway, However, the yawning democratic deficits of the ODM party, which the ODM rank and file complain about on radio, and the ineptitudes of Raila’s lieutenants in local politics and in organising a smooth ODM generational succession, coupled with the incompetence, corruption, and nepotism of county governments, especially in Siaya, Homa Bay, and Migori counties, will ultimately claim ODM’s dominance in Luo politics.

Ochieng’s victory is good news, especially to those who find Raila’s two-decade long dominance in Luo politics too suffocating and too stifling for democratic aspirations. It reveals a chink in Raila’s amour. However, those yearning for a change or revolution in ODM have a tough task ahead. Electoral defeats, like Ugenya’s, though highly embarrassing, hardly chip at the Odingas’ dominance in Luo politics.

The twin electoral defeats, a recoil from a third, and the Wajir senatorial election reminds ODM that a coalition of widely different political dynasties, united only by a common fear of the prospects of a Ruto presidency, is unlikely to energise the ODM support base. ODM could suffer humiliating defeats in the hands of a wily, tenacious, and daredevil opponent bound by no compunction.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Akoko Akech

David Murathe’s cameo appearance in the drama of the Kenyatta II debates seems to have provoked many questions about the Uhuru Kenyatta succession: Is the Kenyatta II succession unfolding in the mould of the Kenyatta I succession? Is history repeating itself? Will William Samoei Ruto, like Daniel arap Moi, ascend to the presidency, either in spite or because of opposition to his ambition by a cross-section of the Gikuyu elite? Does Ruto have a historic date with destiny, one that has all the marks of Moi’s tribulations, and complete with a happy ending? And what will Ruto do if the Kenyatta II courtiers were to force a crown of thorns on his head instead?

Intrigued by Murathe’s declaration of a multi-pronged war against William Ruto’s ascension to the presidency, one might be tempted to quickly dust off Joseph Karimi and Philip Ochieng’s 1980s’ potboiler, The Kenyatta Succession, which details the machinations of a cross-section of the Jomo Kenyatta era chauvinistic Gikuyu elite’s opposition to Moi’s ascension to the presidency.

Dusting off Karimi and Ochieng’s The Kenyatta Succession may be a good idea, despite the misgivings of both Bart Joseph Kibati and Professor Micheal Chege about the veracity of the existence of the Ngorokos as a stand-by assassination squad under the command of some of the then Nakuru-based powerful Gikuyu civil servants opposed to Moi becoming the second president of Kenya.

Still, the current presidential succession battle retains some of the complicated dynastic plots of the Kenyatta Succession: the heady State House courtiers’ cocktail of conspiracies, intrigues, jealousy, greed, ambition, betrayal, revenge, back-stabbing, murder, and the spectre of all-consuming political violence. Like Moi, Ruto is viewed by the ethnic chauvinists either as a temporary guest or a gatecrasher in the presidential succession party.

@HistoryKE, a history buff, who runs an online museum of Kenya’s colonial and post-independence history, posted some facts about the 1976 Change-the-Constitution movement’s rally in Nakuru. At this historic rally, some of the most rabid of the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (GEMA) ethnic chauvinists, MPs and cabinet ministers, such as Kihika Kimani, Njoroge Mungai, Njenga Karume and a few of their allies from other ethnic communities, held a historic rally to openly ratchet up their opposition against the then Vice President Moi’s constitutional ascension to power in the event of the death of Jomo Kenyatta, the then sitting president.

The tweets drew varied responses. One Kioko@Done_Dusted retorted, in part, “Give us a break with your Ruto obsessions subtly disguised as history…”, to which @HistoryKE responded, “Sir. Please re-read my article and stop seeing shadows behind every bush,” a response that seems rather evasive about @HistoryKE intentions. The tweet seemed to speak so eloquently to the present political debates, which had been provoked by Murathe’s no-holds-barred attack on Ruto, who was assumed to be the undisputed Jubilee Party’s flag-bearer for the next presidential election, and the successor to Uhuru Kenyatta.

It’s tempting to draw parallels between the Kenyatta I and the Kenyatta II successions, especially after Murathe’s cameo appearance. On the surface, it looks like history is repeating itself. William Samoei Ruto, the Deputy President, a Kalenjin, the constitutional heir-apparent, and an ethnic outsider, who is presumably the undisputed presidential candidate of the Jubilee Party, is waiting in the wings, only a heartbeat away from the presidency, to succeed Uhuru Kenyatta (a scion of Jomo Kenyatta, a Mugikuyu), the sitting president.

Yet William Ruto, like Daniel arap Moi in the mid-1970s, now faces “a cabal of powerful” Kenyatta II Gikuyu elite who are also contemplating a constitutional change, among other measures, to stop him from becoming Kenya’s fifth president upon the end of Uhuru Kenyatta’s constitutionally-mandated two terms as the president of Kenya, barring any constitutional amendment.

Will William “the Czar of Sugoi” Ruto, as @JerotichSeii calls him – he of humble peasantry background, chicken-hawking-by-the-railway-crossing origins, and able hatchet man for various Kenyan political dynasties – having waited in the wings for ten years, finally turn the tables on his past masters, and alas, be ensconced in the bosom of Kenya’s state power, the presidency?

Looking at the Kenyatta II succession solely through Karimi and Ochieng’s book could block one’s view of the surprises and new elements in the Kenyatta II succession. The Kenyatta II succession has got the makings of a rollercoaster of a political drama, unfolding as a great Greek tragedy, with Ruto cast as the tragic hero who is tone deaf to the chorus of civil society human rights and democracy pleas.

The Kenyatta II succession might be couched as a democratic contest, complete with a referendum, but it will be anything but democratic; it will be a struggle, styled as constitutional and democratic, but lacking the substance of either. It’s a succession defined more by the character of the protagonist, chance, conspiracies, intrigues of a palace coup and the risk of political violence.

Moi’s lucky break

If Jomo Kenyatta’s second stroke in 1968, as Charles Hornsby tells us, had sent him into the mythical world of Weru wa Mukaaga, as the former Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, Duncan Ndegwa, recalls, then perhaps his ailing heart dictated the frequency and pace of the Kenyatta I succession. With hindsight, it seems, the Kenyatta I courtiers, with an ear to Kenyatta’s failing health, were in panic mode, which landed a bullet in Tom Mboya’s heart in 1969, and in J.M. Kariuki’s body in 1975, eliminating the most credible threats to their dream of succeeding Kenyatta. Only Daniel arap Moi, the constitutional heir-apparent, was left standing between them and the presidency by 1976.

But, as Daniel Kalinaki points out, the controversial visit of Dr. Christian Bernard, a leading apartheid era South African cardiologist, threw spanners into the works. His visit sent the elite Gikuyu chauvinists’ song of Change-the-Constitution chorus to a crescendo in 1976. Daniel Kalinaki writes that Dr. Bernard examined Jomo Kenyatta and returned a not-so-clean bill of health. At a dinner held in his honour, he told the Kenyatta I courtiers that “Mzee had two years, tops, to live.”

Stopping Moi’s ascension to the presidency then became even more urgent. But unlike the charming and charismatic Tom Mboya and J.M. Kariuki, Moi was lucky. Several times lucky. The Kenyatta I era Gikuyu courtiers were divided. Moi’s character flaws, too, worked in his favour. Where charm, flamboyance and charisma brought Mboya and J.M. squarely within the cross hairs of the regime’s assassins, colourlessness kept Moi safe. Moi was variously thought of as stoic, humble, naïve, uneducated, gullible, and overawed by the settlers, Jomo Kenyatta and state power generally. He was just “a passing cloud” while the State House courtiers searched for a worthy successor to the king.

However, they had underestimated Moi, who got the support of some of the most feared and effective members of Kenyatta’s kitchen cabinet, the unelected deep state civilian servant types, who were strategically placed in the security, provincial administration and the Attorney General’s office. His humble character earned him the sympathy of some of the most powerful men in Jomo Kenyatta’s kitchen cabinet, civil service, and cabinet, men such as Charles Njonjo, the Attorney General, Geoffrey Kariithi, the head of the civil service, Charles Nyachae, the Provincial Commissioner of Central Province, and Eluid Mahihu, the Provincial Commissioner of Coast Province, men who, perhaps, thought that they could take advantage of his presidency or easily overthrow him. These men were more than effective counterweights to their rabidly ethnic counterparts in Nakuru, who included James Mungai, Isaiah Mathenge, Arthur Nganga Njuguna Ndoro, George Karanu, and Kim Gatende, the men, who Bart Mugo tells us, had no respect for Moi, and “gave Moi sleepless nights” when he was the vice president. As Charles Hornsby points out, Moi was also lucky that Jomo Kenyatta died in his ally’s fiefdom, Eluid Mahihu’s Mombasa, and not Isaiah Mathenge’s Nakuru.

What’s more, the ailing president, who treasured large landholdings, having exported Central Kenya’s land crises mostly to the Rift Valley, seemed to have seen in Moi a worthy successor, a man who not only facilitated his government’s export of the Central Kenyan land problem to the Rift Valley against a strong regional opposition from his rivals, such as Jean Marie Seroney, but one who could also secure his legacy and landholdings – because Moi also had substantial landholdings.

Duncan Ndegwa says that Jomo Kenyatta, speaking in riddles, asked Kihika Kimani, a leading proponent of the 1976 Change-the-Constitution Movement, to think about a situation in which a dying man wants to pass on his herds of cattle. “Would he hand over his herd to a man who has his own or to a man who has none? This man you fear will, in fact, take care of the herd while minding his own. You want to hand over the stewardship of your land to a man who has no land? He will say, ‘Those lands owned by these people are too large. Let us give them away.’”

Ruto: Not quite Moi

However, Ruto, it seems, is everything but what Moi was at the height of the Kenyatta I succession. Unlike Moi, the legends, true or false, about Ruto’s rise within Kenya’s politics cast him as a megalomaniac, a ruthless, arrogant, condescending, diabolical, acquisitive, vindictive, and hardly ever magnanimous character in victory. Ask Reuben Chesire, the late former MP for Eldoret North, his onetime allies such as Raila Odinga or his namesake, Isaac, the former Governor of Bomet, and the whole lot of Mt Kenya leadership who lost the Jubilee 2017 nominations.

In victory, Ruto gloats. His lieutenants, like Adan Duale, gloat even more. Ruto’s angry disposition and penchant for mocking other leaders, gloating, and chest-thumping, can easily goad his nemesis into a strong coalition against his presidential bid, especially if he loses Uhuru’s support – just the kind of coalition David Murathe proposes.

If Ruto and Uhuru were joined at the hip by the International Criminal Court (ICC) dilemma (which is now water under the bridge), does the Kenyatta family’s recent acquisition spree and its consolidation of its economic hold on Kenya’s financial, media and dairy sectors be the glue that binds the two together? Can the Kenyatta family, which is now in the process of strengthening its political and economic stranglehold on Kenya, truly trust Ruto to be a good custodian of their most recent acquisitions? Does Ruto, a character who has variously been described as a wannabe king, vicious, vindictive, megalomaniac, and hardly magnanimous in victory, fit the bill of a good custodian of such wealth? Can he be trusted in this era of footloose international finance capital to not upset the apple cart? What does the trauma of the Moi presidency portend for his political ambition?

If Ruto and Uhuru were joined at the hip by the International Criminal Court (ICC) dilemma…does the Kenyatta family’s recent acquisition spree and its consolidation of its economic hold on Kenya’s financial, media and dairy sectors be the glue that binds the two together? Can the Kenyatta family, which is now in the process of strengthening its political and economic stranglehold on Kenya, truly trust Ruto to be a good custodian of their most recent acquisitions?

It’s hard to tell what type of deep state support Ruto enjoys. But in the dust-up between the pro-Ruto Tanga Tanga group and the anti-Ruto Kieleweke group, we got a glimpse of what a piqued Ruto might do and where sympathies for his presidency presently lie in Central Kenya and the Rift Valley. Unlike Moi, he did not turn the other cheek for the legendary James Mungai or Isaiah Mathenge’s political slap. He hit right back and hard through some of the most rabid Gikuyu and Kalenjin ethnic chauvinists, who are probably a retinue of elected politicians on weekly or monthly retainers, more driven by the convenience of cash rather than conviction.

In the Kenyatta I succession, Charles Njonjo, speaking in a Hobbesian dialect, astutely put an end to the debate by invoking the law on high treason: “It is a criminal offence for any person to encompass, imagine, devise or intend the death or disposition of the president.”

In contrast, the heads that bobbed out in defence of William Ruto, including elected leaders such as Moses Kuria, Kimani Ngunjiri, and Oscar Sudi, spewed out some of the ugliest, most nauseating, and inflammatory political rhetoric. (It is worth noting that not a single hawkers’ association chairperson came out in Ruto’s defence.)

Oscar Sudi, one of many intellectual Lilliputians in Ruto’s orbit, has admitted that Jubilee is a two- ethnic-group racket, with a few non-Kalenjin and non-Gikuyu tokens thrown in to lend the Jubilee elite a veneer of national inclusivity, the mythical face of Kenya. The anti-Uhuru rhetoric on the failure of the Jubilee government to develop Central Kenya energised Ruto’s base, but it also galvanised Central Kenya’s opposition to Ruto’s lieutenants. It saw the return of leaders like Peter Kenneth and Martha Karua into the fray.

Ruto’s patronage network in Central Kenya is thus being tested. It seems to rest with some of the vilest elected ethnic chauvinists of questionable political clout or those who can’t stand their ground. If Ruto’s sympathisers are the rent-weekly or rent-monthly political types, then Uhuru Kenyatta’s selective war on corruption, which Ruto’s legal adviser laments, and the termination of some of the lucrative contracts between companies owned by Ruto and the Government of Kenya, such as the Kenya police housing, could easily downgrade Ruto’s patronage capacity, that is, his ability to rent and resist.

The question remains on how State House courtiers will treat the Rift Valley question. Will they see it as a political problem or a security problem, or both? If push comes to shove, will Ruto, like Moi in the 1990s, drive a Faustian bargain: State power or slaughter and eviction and dispossession of non- Kalenjin farmhands, peasants and small traders, especially the Agikuyu in the Rift Valley? Will he, like Moi, rage, and rage, and extract his fair share of political and economic pound of flesh if he ascends to the presidency against all odds?

Or, in defeat, will he, like Raila Odinga, mourn, forgive, and find friendship at last? Does Ruto represent the sum of all the fears of the political dynasties in Kenya? What does the spoken and the unspoken trauma of the Moi presidency, especially among a cross-section of the Gikuyu elite, portend for Ruto’s presidency?

Pedigree and dynastic politics

Kenya’s dynastic politics of self-preservation might have renounced some unsavoury political tricks of the Kenyatta I succession, such as the assassination of political competitors, but it hasn’t renounced the advantages of evil, the dirty and devious tricks, of seizing state power, securing economic interests, and dynastic longevity. The Ngorokos may well be phantoms of Moi’s propaganda machinery, but since the days of James Mungai, presidential elections have greatly been defined by Kenya’s lack of effective democratic control of the security forces and strategic roles of militias.

Certainly, Ruto has a date with history. But his biggest stumbling block to the State House is neither the Gikuyu elite, who have reneged on the promise to coronate him as the fifth president of the Republic of Kenya, nor the sudden vapourisation of the much-touted Jubilee Party’s stellar development record in Central Kenya, which in the heat of the first round of the debates on the Kenyatta II succession, seems to vapourised, like ethanol, into thin air. Rather, Ruto is caught in the strong cross-currents of the political dynasties he’s excelled in manipulating and through which he has amassed a fortune and built a war chest while undermining democracy and human rights. The biggest hurdle in Ruto’s race to State House, is, to say it pithily, in the words of the late Job Omino, the MP for Kisumu Town: “Dr. Ruto is all degree(s), no pedigree.” Historically, he’s not a biological son of any of the dynasties of Kenya’s politics, and he hasn’t any traction with the struggle for liberal or social democracy.

Ruto has neither the pedigree of Kenya’s dynastic politics nor the credibility and gravitas of those who participated in Kenya’s struggle for democracy, human rights and transitional justice. As David Ndii once pointed out, together with Uhuru Kenyatta, he missed the democratic lessons of the 1990s. He’s caught in the twirling currents of these political forces in a vortex of opposed political forces now shaping his destiny.

Yet he seems to think he can beat the dynasties in their game by faking an ordinary citizen’s credentials or feigning a new-found affection for the common mwananchi, posturing as their leader, and winning either the party ticket or the presidency without a credible, free, fair and democratic system in place. As @JuliuMmasi’s tweets suggest, Ruto has been an astute student and co-builder of the three leading Kenyan political dynasties: the Moi, the Odinga and the Kenyatta. But he now decries these dynasties as the stumbling block to his quest for presidency. If the Moi, Kenyatta and Odinga are dynasties, all defined by similarities and no differences, then charitably, Ruto can only be a stepson, or worse, a son who’s twice removed from the State House patrimony – not an heir- apparent, but an heir-presumptive who represents the sum of the worst fears of all these dynasties.

As a fresh graduate and a member of the venal youth movement, Youth for KANU (YK92), Ruto fought against multiparty political reforms in the 1990s. In 2002, as a minister in Moi’s government, he notably supported Moi’s bid to enthrone Uhuru Kenyatta as the third president of Kenya. In 2007, he reluctantly supported Raila Odinga’s bid for the presidency, bending more towards the pro- Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) regional political pressure in the Rift Valley than towards a confidence in Raila’s leadership. He promptly bolted out of ODM in the wake of the maize import scandal, and in 2010 led the NO-Campaign against the current constitution.

More recently, he’s firmly been in Uhuru Kenyatta’s corner in a joint desire to sabotage the ICC cases of crimes against humanity against them. He has run a mostly male-dominated and alternately Gikuyu or Kalenjin elite-led government, fighting against justice for the victims of the 2007/8 political violence, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) process, free, fair and credible elections, and rolling back Kenya’s nascent democratic gains in several sectors, especially security reforms.

Development as a substitute for democracy

Ruto might be regretting the political life he’s led. He’s been working at cross-purposes, and is not about to stop. With a religious zeal, he’s championed development as a perfect substitute for liberal democracy, thinking that personal prosperity, by hook or by crook, heavy investment in nation-wide patronage networks, and a strong identification with various “development” projects across the country will generate popular support for his candidature.

Yet the Jubilee government, unlike the Chinese or the Rwandan governments, is too undisciplined and corrupt to generate popular legitimacy out of the ability to deliver services. Instead, Jubilee’s development projects have mostly been conduits for kickbacks and procurement rackets, bleeding the public coffer dry, and generating windfalls for a few rather than real economic opportunities for the multitudes of unemployed youth. Some, like the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) have auctioned Kenya’s sovereignty, committed Kenyans to Beijing bondage, and, as the loan repayments kick in, effectively taken away Kenya’s ability to formulate a friendly tax and revenue policy for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In his quest for the presidency, Ruto now postures as the representative of the ordinary suffering citizens, a self-styled “hustler” who lives precariously, mostly from hand to mouth, occasionally visiting a kiosk or stopping by the roadside for a cob of roasted maize to lend his presidential bid a common citizen’s touch.

But Ruto has never had a stake in Kenya’s social/liberal democracy or human rights game. He’s never championed the common citizen’s cause or fought against power or income inequalities. Instead, he has an unrelenting and ruthless desire to pursue state power without compassion for the ordinary citizens. He told Rift Valley farmers to grow avocados instead of maize after a cartel bolted with the Kenya Cereals and Produce Board’s national maize kitty, leaving maize farmers in his own stronghold desolate. He’s reportedly built a palace worth Sh1 billion (US$10 million) in Sugoi, where he regularly entertains delegations of mostly self-seeking leaders of various ethnic groups and holds court. Like Daniel arap Moi, he wears evangelical Christianity on his sleeves, ostensibly investing in heaven through fund-raising and various donations to the clergy, perhaps to deodorise an ever- strong whiff of sleaze that swirls around him and his close associates.

Ruto knows in his bones the pain of losing or winning the Kenyan presidential elections. Unlike the ancient Olympics, in which only the Greeks – by blood and character and bound by a code of honour, “to respect just decisions, use no fraud or guile, to secure victory” – competed for a priceless branch of wild olive, Kenya’s competition for state power knows no ethical bounds. It’s not a patriots’ game, either, and the victor’s prize is the bottomless national and transnational material spoils: Eurobonds, capture and monopolistic control of key national markets, and Chinese business kickbacks. Loots, only for keeps, if you can hold onto state power.

In 2007, Ruto was in ODM, the team that lost. Subsequently, he joined the team that has won all the disputed presidential elections since 2013. He knows too well that all the winners of the presidential election since 2007 have won, in spite of the popular vote, and not because of it. The winners of these presidential elections have approached the election as a coup d’état: state power to be seized through a conspiracy to subvert popular will, the use of deception, and control and use of strategic levers of state power, especially the security organs, the electoral commission, and the courts.

If the Kenyatta I succession played out as the politics of a dynasty (because Kenya was then a de facto one-party state) then the Kenyatta II succession might also play out as the politics of dynasty, in spite of Kenya’s lauded democratic reforms, and because, since 2007, the incumbents have successfully subverted the popular democratic will of the people by executing electoral coup d’états. In contrast, the losers of all the presidential elections since 2007 have approached the elections as an exercise in liberal democracy. They have campaigned hard, written good manifestos, mobilised aggrieved and disaffected voters and sometimes, gone to court to seek reprieve, where they have faced non-democratic forces.

Chickens coming home to roost

Ruto’s quest for the presidency is a bid to bring down Kenya’s political dynasties. He wants to be king, an insider of sorts, taking on the dynasties in their own terrain. But he will be taking on the dynasties like a tragic hero, a hero whose character flaws and tribulations in the hands of mentors- turned- tormentors are strikingly different from those of Raila Odinga and Daniel arap Moi. But he still might generate some sympathy in various constituencies, especially if, as Dauti Kahura shows, he can deftly lay blame for the failures of the Jubilee government on Uhuru Kenyatta. Still, he’ll have a hard time turning these sympathies into popular votes.

Ruto’s chickens, it seems, are coming home to roost. In the week when the Kenyatta II succession talks were crackling, two of his legal and political advisers, Korir Sing’oei, and Kipchumba Murkomen, took to a newspaper and television, respectively, to extol some aspects of liberal democracy. Sing’oei, once a human rights activist, had a year ago, in the wake of the Jubilee government’s violation of a Kenyan’s rights – when Miguna Miguna was illegally detained, abducted, exiled and stripped of his Kenyan citizenship – argued that the government had broken no law. Now he argues that the Director of Public Prosecution’s “gung-ho and gunslinger approach” to fighting corruption smacks of abuse of public office and that it is more a pursuit of political vendetta than of justice.

Kipchumba Murkomen, Jubilee Party’s Senate Majority leader, now sees a big democratic deficit in the ruling party. It has dawned on Murkomen that internal party democracy matters and that it is better to hold regular party or parliamentary group meetings than to wait for the occasional trumpet from State House to assemble for the latest presidential edict.

Both Sing’oei and Murkomen seem to have swiveled 180 degrees – from legitimising impunity to thinking about what should be the ethical limits of state power or good democratic practice. No prize for guessing why they’ve taken the sudden shift. Since the Jubilee government’s selective prosecution of the corrupt, the boot is firmly on the other foot, William Ruto’s. And they’ve rediscovered that some salutary aspects of liberal democracy are sorely missing in Kenya’s political context and contests.

It’s a belated but heartening rediscovery. It’s heartening because William Ruto’s camp seems to have woken up and smelt the Mt Kenya coffee: only a truly liberal democratic system can sufficiently guarantee anyone and everyone a fair shot at the presidency. But presently, the ethos of the competitors for Kenya’s state power is as far removed from the ethos of the ancient Greece’s Olympics as the Czar’s of Sugoi’s multi-billion seat of power is from State House.

In the battle between the Kenyatta, Odinga, Moi, and Mudavadi dynasties, Ruto might remain the eternal outsider. Without Daniel arap Moi’s good luck and the help of highly placed Mt Kenya movers and shakers who have successfully executed several electoral coup d’états (two bloody ones in 2007 and 2017, one bloodless one in 2013 and one abortive coup on 1 September 2017), it might be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Ruto to capture the highest political office in the land.

It will be extremely hard for Ruto to win an amoral dynastic political game, however big his election war chest is, if the contest for state power is largely defined by the dynasties’ control of state power and by a retrogressive political ethos – a political competition that brooks no internal dissident and eschews fair play in regional strongholds or at the national level, or both, and which is hell-bent on self-perpetuation.

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How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech

With a spring in his step, fresh from defending – for the second time in two years after having fallen short in 2016 – a PhD thesis on “The impact of human activities on riparian reserves at Saiwa Swamp in Trans Nzoia County” at the University of Nairobi’s School of Biological Sciences, and in a week when his portrait was plastered over all the Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET) newspaper adverts, William Samoei Ruto, Kenya’s deputy president, was at it again: caricaturing, castigating, and scapegoating the liberal arts for the failures of Kenya’s labour market, and imagining a Chinese Wall between university liberal arts education and TVET education, where none exists nor ought not to be built.

Perhaps buoyed up by the ease with which he’s wedged PhD studies (he failed to graduate between a busy weekday schedule as the deputy president and weekend harambees, Ruto couldn’t have picked a better occasion to devalue the study of liberal arts than the launch of the TVET policy at the serene campus of Kenya Teachers’ Technical College (KTTC) in Gigiri.

Ruto said: “It’s acquisition of knowledge, skill and competences that will make a difference. We must deliberately move our education system in that direction…Not everybody is good in history, not everybody is good in geography and mathematics… People are gifted differently… You don’t have to know English to paint. There is no painting in English my friends. Painting is painting….”

He then singled out the discipline of history for ridicule, adding that: “I was a very good student of history myself, but while it is okay for historians to tell us how Vasco da Gama came, went somewhere and discovered this, he died. We need the gentlemen or the ladies who will fix our sewerage system or electricity when something is wrong.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Ruto’s criticism of liberal arts education as misinformed or the ranting of a bully who’s never seen a pulpit he didn’t want to mount. It’s also easy to brush off his remarks as those of an intellectual simplifier, who, it seems, thinks that the study of history is merely remembering the names of notable individuals, places and dates.

Exasperated, one Dr Amunyunzu-Nyamongo, an anthropologist whose work cuts across health, social protection and development, wondered on Twitter: “I am a trained anthropologist up to PhD level. Should I worry about my future since this is one of the courses declared redundant by the Deputy President of Kenya? Asking for all anthropologists and those sympathetic to our profession.” Professor Peter Mbithi, the Vice Chancellor the University of Nairobi, tweeted in response: “Needless to worry, you are a global citizen.” Yet Ruto’s words will worry Kenyan citizens who have no exit option out of a poorly thought-out, though politically expedient, shift in education policy.

As Wandia Njoya points out, this says something about Ruto’s crisis of identity, and why he may have missed some of the benefits that a good liberal arts education can provide. It also reflects the Jubilee government’s statecraft and its concerted effort to create an educational system that reduces Kenyans to automatons, presumably the ideal citizen to deliver the elusive double-digit GDP growth despite Jubilee’s continuing mismanagement of the economy.

As Dr Njoya says, Ruto seems undecided whether he’s a hustler or an aristocrat; he is caught between frequent visits to roadside kiosks for PR stunts, on the one hand, and hopping into his chopper to show off power and privilege, on the other. He is torn between embracing the grit of those who roast maize by the roadside to eke out a living in hard economic times and holding them up as symbols of a failed education system.

Yet for a self-confessed “very good student” of what seems to have been a very bad history and someone who thinks studying is rote learning of “facts”, Ruto’s inability to stick to the hustler-PR script betrays a strikingly short memory. Arguably, there is nothing in his own public service record that demonstrates that he’s ever brought his expansive knowledge on botany and zoology either as a legislature or a cabinet minister or a deputy president to bear upon law- or policy-making.

Although Ruto presses universities hard to teach courses that are directly linked to industries, his own pursuit of botany and zoology seemingly exemplifies the pursuit of education for its own sake. That is a good thing. But it shouldn’t be the privilege of a few, and a choice a politician like Ruto makes for the others.

The deputy president singled out history for ridicule because since the rise of neoliberal education reforms, departments of liberal arts at public universities have been under pressure to justify their existence as public-funded disciplines, to show the products they sell in the market, and to demonstrate that there is demand for the subjects they teach. Some, like the good old University of Nairobi’s Department of History and Archaeology, even embraced studies such as tourism. But that, too, seems not have gone far enough for politicians who don’t know how to value skills such as critical thinking, analytical writing, creativity, and imagination.

Yet the burden that Ruto places on the shoulders of Kenyan students and universities is a burden he’s never borne. Ruto’s biography suggests that sometimes there is no necessary connection between a degree course one pursues at a university and how one earns a living or notoriety. Therefore, to measure the success of a university by a perfect fit between disciplines and industry would be too rigid a yardstick for measuring returns on university education.

Still, Ruto’s glee at the fact that “this year we have more students joining TVET than university” implies that the Jubilee government has reset the education system back to its immediate post- colonial setting. In parodying the British system, Kenya’s education system was designed precisely to produce a limited number of graduates – a few queen bees and thousands of worker bees. Under the onslaught of neoliberalism, political leaders forgot the essence of the model and turned polytechnics into instruments of patronage (ethnic universities). They sold only the prestige of a university degree without due regard to class size, library resources, and optimum student-teacher ratio. As a result, both the value and prestige of public university education took a beating.

When Ruto says, “We need the gentlemen or the ladies who will fix our sewerage system or electricity when something is wrong”, he is not just projecting Britain’s class-obsessed, industrialised society onto Kenya’s denuded industrial base, he is also reflecting the attitudes of the privileged few who are incapable of empathy.

Moreover, his insinuation that painters do not need a good command of the English language to ply their trade in a country whose laws, by-laws, public policies and tender documents are mostly written in English is a call for a civically incompetent citizen. His preference is for the type of maleducation that would make it hard for a TVET graduate to question and to hold leaders to account. When Ruto says, “We need the gentlemen or the ladies who will fix our sewerage system or electricity when something is wrong”, he is not just projecting Britain’s class- obsessed, industrialised society onto Kenya’s denuded industrial base, he is also reflecting the attitudes of the privileged few who are incapable of empathy.

Perhaps it never occurred to the deputy president that in a country where one frequently encounters billboards in the countryside with warnings like “This is not an open defecation area” and where urban slums lack even pit latrines, the “we” who need sewerage systems fixed excludes the majority of Kenyan citizens, and that constructing an inclusive sewerage system, let alone fixing it, should come first.

But that’s hardly surprising. The undergraduate student of Ruto’s era imbibed more than the technical competence offered through the open curriculum. Its hidden curriculum taught obsession with privilege, entitlement, status, as well as detachment from the realities of the majority. The University of Nairobi – whose founding vice-chancellor, Dr. Josephat Karanja, as Kamuhanda Byaruhanga tells us, was one of six students at Makerere College who led a strike in 1952 demanding European instead of African food – was designed to alienate its graduates from their rural and working-class roots.

True to the kind of food that Karanja and his colleagues wanted at Makerere, University of Nairobi students were fed a four-course meal that sometimes included ice cream, jelly or bread pudding for dessert. Students also received a stipend that could buy drinks at any of Nairobi’s five-star hotels.

Some students cultivated a taste for the finer things, a comfortable city life and indifference to the realities of the majority of their compatriots. Many of the conformists, those whose mantra was “we want to finish and go”, cultivated urban tastes that could only be satiated when they became heads of department in government, holding the much sought-after “Authority to Incur Expenditure” or, as Kwendo Opanga renders it, “Authority to Initiate Eating”. Others rebelled, dreamt and imagined not only their own freedoms, but also the freedoms of workers and peasants.

Others like Ruto gatecrashed the party of the sons of privilege in the notorious Youth for KANU 92 and became errand boys for the likes of Cyrus Jirongo. Ultimately, having learnt the tricks of turning access to the corridors of power into real estate, their ambitions grew. Today Ruto is so filthy rich that he reportedly doesn’t think twice about paying Sh100,000 for a cup of tea and a mandazi. Yet he is still considered a parvenu sitting among the old money in the hotels of Nairobi. To them, Ruto is still an errand boy, often sent to deflect attention away from the disastrous failures of the Jubilee government or to hawk the latest snake oil like TVET.

Ruto may publicly ridicule liberal arts education and find “over 1,000 students learning sociology and anthropology…graduates many of whom cannot be placed in a proper job environment” but privately, Jubilee securocrats are enlisting scholars in these disciplines to causes such as countering violent extremism.

Jubilee’s policy responses to youth unemployment, notably TVET as the study of “technical” skills only, will likely reproduce the usual outcome: a windfall for a few. Yet a well thought-out and taught liberal arts curriculum, which teaches critical thinking, creativity, imagination, and human values such as compassion, would not only be more cost-effective, but would also reduce Kenyans’ vulnerability to political and religious charlatans, whatever garb or gown they adorn. Ruto rants against liberal arts students because it is easy to blame the victims of a dysfunctional economic system.

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How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech Barack Obama’s eagerly awaited homecoming in July jolted many, especially the Luos, out of a romantic stupor. Obama’s meteoric rise to the pinnacle of America’s state power as the first African- American president with strong Kenyan roots had held out much promise for the far-flung villages in his father’s homeland, such as K’ogelo Nyangoma in Siaya County, where Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was raised.

The launch of his half-sister Auma Obama’s Sauti Kuu, a K’ogelo-based learning and resource centre, was full of tensions and contradictions. It revealed not only the limits of Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric on human equality and democracy, but also Auma Obama’s feminist politics, which was nearly drowned in the din of corporate accolades and her diatribe against the Luo have-nots for their practice of “gonya gonya” and “konya konya” (soliciting hand-outs).

Of the eight children sired by Barack Obama Sr., Auma Obama is closest to her famous half-brother Barack. She is also among the most educated of her siblings, having attained a PhD from Bayreuth University in Germany. Auma and Barack’s fondness for each other was evident when the latter made an official visit to Kenya in July 2015 when he was the US president – Auma not only was at the airport to receive him but had the unusual privilege of sharing his armoured limousine – popularly known as “The Beast” – with him. This bond is probably what prompted Barack Obama to agree to attend the opening ceremony of Sauti Kuu, a project that Auma initiated to improve the lives of youth in her home village.

Speaking at the opening of the Sauti Kuu centre, Barack Obama said he was “really coming back as a citizen of the world, with so many people who are family to me, as a brother, as a citizen of the world, as someone with a connection to Africa.”

“I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision, I believe in the vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln,” Obama thundered when delivering the Nelson Mandela annual lecture in Johannesburg shortly after his Kenya visit. “I believe in a vision of equality and a vision of justice and freedom and multiracial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal and they are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. I believe that a world governed by such principles is possible,” he said, extolling the virtues of liberal democracy.

But a day before, in Nyangoma-K’ogelo, the Barack Obama-Auma Obama tag-team’s performance showed that the rhetoric of human equality was just that — rhetoric. Sauti Kuu’s launch reflected the failure of the Obamas to mitigate the power and material inequalities that often characterise human relations.

Obama’s return to Kenya was low-key, some said. Disappointing, others noted. But it served many sobering lessons – lessons well known by the residents of coastal cities such as Mombasa or Malindi, whose wisdom and maritime experience span the ebb and flow of geopolitics and commerce, from the days of the dhow to the coming of cruise ships. They will tell you that when a big ship docks at a quay near you, it doesn’t lift up every canoe ashore; no one rides atop the crest of its waves. It comes ashore with sharks in tow that feed off its jetsam; its powerful engines and propellers generate waves that can easily keel one’s canoes over, producing ripples that can easily drown, rather than buoy up, even the strongest swimmer.

Sailing in a skiff, rowing a boat, or swimming too close to such a ship is a perilous undertaking, unless, of course, you are a corporate shark or a ticket-carrying passenger aboard the ship. Only those aboard and the sharks know the unalloyed joy of disembarking to the ecstatic reception of crowds, expectant with hope.

A disappointing homecoming Barack Obama might be free of the cumbersome security restrictions of a sitting US president, but he is still captive to the restrictions of Brand Obama, which eschews radical black politics at home in the United States – as Aziz Rana, a law professor at Cornell University, points out – and avoids the murky politics of “home square” in Kenya. Since his rise to the presidency of the United States, Obama has avoided sailing too close to Kenya’s politics, especially Luo politics. He has assiduously avoided Kenya’s narrow ethnic or national capture, but has embraced and celebrated corporate capture, which has taken away the warmth, charm and spontaneity that endeared him to so many, especially in Siaya and Kisumu, when he first came calling when he was a senator from Illinois.

Barack Obama might be free of the cumbersome security restrictions of a sitting US president, but he is still captive to the restrictions of Brand Obama, which eschews radical black politics at home in the United States…and avoids the murky politics of “home square” in Kenya.

In 2006, Senator Obama courted the affection of Kenyans, addressing crowds of people in Nairobi, Kisumu, and Siaya. On that occasion, Raila Odinga, whose political future looked bright too, accompanied him and his wife, Michelle, on their home square stretch of the journey. The Obamas took an HIV test at the Nyanza General Hospital to publicly demonstrate individual responsibility on matters of sexuality and sexual health as well as to demonstrate moral leadership on a serious health concern as crowds of Kisumu residents looked on from afar. He addressed the residents of K’ogelo at a primary school, speaking a word or two in Dholuo, acts that greatly endeared him the Luo/K’ogelo community, with many spinning yarns of kinship connections to the Obama family after his visit. But on his return to his father’s homeland this year, Obama spurned the Luo/K’ogelo community, claiming to be “a citizen of the world” and took this visit as an opportunity to take a dig at those “who claim to be family” (a reference to those who have used their kinship ties to the Obama family to lay claim on him).

Since he became the president of the United States, Obama’s visits to Kenya have become stilted, served to carefully selected and canned audiences in a heavily guarded stadium or hall. In Nyangoma-K’ogelo, no effort was made to extend the joy of seeing and listening to Barack Obama to the hundreds of villagers and admirers who were not invited to the Sauti Kuu launch. Not even a giant TV screen, like the one put up far away in Kisumu’s Kenyatta Sport Grounds for some residents of Kisumu, was put up for the villagers of K’ogelo.

Instead, hundreds of sweat-drenched villagers stood by the roadside on a hot sunny day eagerly waiting, hours on end, to catch a glimpse of or to wave at K’ogelo’s most famous son under the watch of hawk-eyed police officers. There was the occasional pulling and pushing, as the crowds surged forward to catch a glimpse of the dignitary. “We are disappointed that after spending more than nine hours here, it was in vain. We never came to beg, but we just wanted to see our son and greet him,” Ms. Mary Awour told the Nation. “We are happy he came, but angry that they have not allowed us to access the venue,” Mr. Kennedy Owino told the Standard.

“We are disappointed that after spending more than nine hours here, it was in vain. We never came to beg, but we just wanted to see our son and greet him,” Ms. Mary Awour told the Nation.

Some Kenyans on Twitter mocked Barack Obama, saying he “is facing the same challenge African men face…spouses refusing to accompany you to your ancestral home,” a reference to the fact that Michelle Obama chose to go to a Beyoncé concert in Paris rather than accompany her husband to the Sauti Kuu launch in K’ogelo.

In Siaya County, Cornel Rasanga, the governor, experienced the emasculating power of Obama’s security detail: “My friend, I’m the host here. I don’t need to be searched,” he is reported to have said. His Kisumu County counterpart, Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo, and his deputy, Mathews Owili, however, submitted to the checks at the gate of Sauti Kuu without a fuss.

Governor Rasanga could neither count on the fabled Luo kinship ties that bind every Luo to the Obamas nor on the prestige of his office to get a dignified hearing. He had to boldly waylay Obama’s entourage as it made its way to the main hall to get in a word edgewise.

In the main hall, the chosen ones – a motley crew of celebrities and corporate types – were entertained by talented dance troupes. A sumptuous lunch awaited them at the end of the event.

Challenging patriarchy

Auma Obama’s stage was set. Her finest moment was also a moment of some hard-hitting truths for the Luos – spoken and unspoken. By design, the event assiduously avoided Luo patriarchal, parochial political capture, but embraced and celebrated corporate capture. Auma Obama stoked insurgency against Luo patriarchs, symbolically silencing the governors of Kisumu and Siaya, other patriarchal Luo voices, and perhaps those of their accomplices, such as Ida Odinga, who also attended the launch. However, she amplified resilient Luo women, such as Phoebe Asiyo, a Luo elder and former Member of Parliament for Karachuonyo Constituency in Homa Bay County.

The Luo society’s male-dominated leadership was reduced to peripheral or perfunctory roles. Prof. Nyongo welcomed Obama at the Kisumu International airport. Strictly observing protocol and official business, unlike the welcoming of the Cuban doctors in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport a few weeks before, there was no time for the multilingual governor to wax lyrical in Dholuo, English or Spanish. Together with Governor Rasanga, Prof. Nyongo and other leaders were part of the audience, assigned a minor role in K’ogelo. No elected leader from the area spoke at the event.

Only Phoebe Asiyo, spoke, signaling a welcome endorsement of strong women leadership among Luo society. She, in turn, symbolically endorsed Auma Obama’s leadership, perhaps signaling a long overdue inter-generational succession in Luo politics.

Although Mrs. Odinga’s presence was hardly publicly acknowledged, contrary to the custom in this part of the world, where she enjoys the title and privilege of being a Min piny (mother of a people/nation/territory). Was her voice silenced at the launch because she too is a leftover from the past political struggles though now part of the Luo leadership for whom the struggle is past?

Auma Obama’s launch ruffled many feathers, not just of Luo leaders, but also of the Luo have-nots, the riff-raffs who supposedly don’t want to earn their keep. When she first broached the contentious conversation on the practice of “gonya gonya,” as an irritating act of begging or dependency by the Luo have-nots on the Luo haves, she sounded urban chic. Her remarks, like a sting in the tail, came at the end of a wide-ranging interview with Ann Kiguta of Citizen TV on a number of issues: Kenyan students burning schools; parenting; education; NGOs; slums and development; Barack Obama’s legacy; and the upcoming launch of Sauti Kuu. “This is this gonya gonya … gimme, gimme. Stop guys, stop… In the time that Obama has been president, up until now, what have you done? What have you done to make a difference in your country, in your life, in your community? Because you cannot sit and just wait for Obama. I can tell you what I have done… Do something. Stop gonya gonya,” she said. In yet another interview with the KTN TV, Auma was emphatic: “We are trying to change the mentality of gonya gonya, give me give me, help me, help me. Don’t keep begging.”

Auma Obama’s launch ruffled many feathers, not just of Luo leaders, but also of the Luo have-nots, the riff-raffs who supposedly don’t want to earn their keep.

On the auspicious occasion of the launch of Sauti Kuu, Asiyo reiterated Auma’s message. Speaking in Dholuo, she said: “Adwaro nyiso oganda Luo niya, ng’ama ja kwecho e piny oganda Luo, onge dwol. Ok nyal goyo mbaka kata e anyuola. Auma en nyako ma eluungo ni migogo, ka ne een dichuo waluonge ni Migosi. Etimo gima lich ne oganda Luo….” (I want to tell groups that make up the Luo community that one who begs among us has no voice. You can’t even participate in a conversation among your kin. Auma is a woman called a Migogo. If she were a man we would call her a Migosi. You have done something great for the Luos).

Unbowed, Auma Obama said, “We need to start taking care of ourselves, we can…let’s stop the gonya gonya syndrome. Let’s stop, and I repeat it even if I get a lot of flak on social media, let us stop the gonya gonya, konya konya, syndrome. I insist, and if you think you are mad at me come and join me let us work together and I’ll show you how not to do it.”

The Sauti Kuu initiative and the criticism of the Luo have-nots echoed her brother Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative in America, with its emphasis on hard work, individual responsibility and self-reliance. However, Auma failed to address the social and political contexts that give rise the practice of gonya gonya. Her criticism evoked furious responses. Some took offence with the manner in which she broached and took up the conversation on gonya gonya, first on national television, where ethnic pride is at stake, and second, in the glare of the international press at the launch, where the community was stripped of its pride and dignity on a global platform. Perhaps those who took to tweeting in Dholuo (but who normally tweet in English) were expressing a wish that this was a Ramogi-FM kind of conversation, an in-group, internal critique. It hurt many who also find the pesky practice of begging for hand-outs shameful but yearn for a safe space for this kind of conversation.

Some took to Twitter, saying that Auma “oelo dugwa,” (Auma has exposed) rather than covered up communal nakedness, a response that expresses a shared sense of shame that the practice of begging brings to a community whose members once lived by mantras such as “adak makata ee oonge,” (I do or can live without you) while sustaining opposition politics against one party-state repression, and without asking for relief food even during severe famines.

But the loudest responses were viscerally misogynistic, couched in the caustic and retrogressive terms that have characterised Luo politics from the days of Grace Akinyi, Kenya’s first post- independence female mayor and the first woman Member of Parliament, to those of Phoebe Asiyo and Millie Odhiambo, the twice-elected Member of Parliament for Suba North. The responses reflected castration angst, misogyny, and sexism, captured in a concept frequently used to stoke the patrilineal and patrilocal prejudices of Luo society: “en migogo or tend migogo rach,” (a married woman’s leadership is bad or being led by a married woman is a bad thing).” A male-centric reading of who a migogo is holds that as once married, a daughter or a sister might have some stake in the affairs of her father’s home, but has no voice over issues that matter. She may contribute material resources but can neither sit where binding decisions are made nor lead the rest of the family and clan on such matters. Instead, she must defer to her uncles and brothers on matters affecting her natal homestead.

Migogo means different things to different people but it is mostly a misogynistic slur.

A male-centric reading of who a migogo is holds that as once married, a daughter or a sister might have some stake in the affairs of her father’s home, but has no voice over issues that matter. She may contribute material resources but can neither sit where binding decisions are made nor lead the rest of the family and clan on such matters.

Millie Odhiambo blows a raspberry at those who use the concept to denigrate and exclude women from active involvement in their family, community and constituency politics. She provides alternative reading of the concept. “Migogo connotes I am a daughter and not a stranger. Migogo had a special place. If she visited she was allowed to go to the dero (granary) and pick whatever she wanted. I went to the dero and picked leadership,” she told the Sunday Nation four years ago.

As Gilbert Ogutu points out, the fisherfolk of Nam Lolwe (the Luo name for Lake Victoria), who include Millie Odhiambo’s constituents in Rusinga and Mfangano islands, named their boats after a grandparent, or someone of great achievement. Ogutu notes that these fisherfolk say Yie en migogo as well as Yie en mgongo and that one can easily miss the difference between migogo (married woman) and mgongo (the keel of a boat); this difference completely collapses when they quip that “yie en migogo,” (a boat is a married daughter).

Auma Obama, like Millie Odhiambo, seems to have “returned,” to her father’s homestead and picked out leadership too, but did she get Sauti Kuu’s keel right? Did she place Sauti Kuu on an even keel in the choppy patriarchal waters of Nam Lolwe as well as those of black politics of education and freedom?

Gonya gonya double standards

At the launch of Sauti Kuu, it seems not all kinds of “asking,” “help me,” or “begging” riled Auma Obama. Asiyo’s “askings” or “help us” at the launch did appear odd but did not merit a strong public response from Auma. Speaking in Dholuo, Asiyo asked Auma Obama to build a Sauti Kuu in Homa Bay County, where Hussein Onyango Obama, Auma’s grandfather, migrated from. Speaking in English, Asiyo also asked Barack Obama to use his connections and get someone from America to help the Luos get rid of the hyacinth weed that has impeded fishing and navigation in Lake Victoria since the early 1990s.

It seems that the gonya gonya that riles Auma Obama is the kind that doesn’t do her political bidding. What irks Auma are the hand-outs that the Luo haves give to the Luo have-nots, the kind of donor funding that stigmatises its beneficiary because it comes without a written proposal or a memorandum of understanding between the giver and the taker.

Nurtured mostly by opportunistic politicians whose political agenda was out of sync with the Luo society’s aspirations, “gonya,” also translates to “untie me” or “set me free”, in English. It is a code word for a hand-out and is mostly used on politicians by a cynical and demoralised electorate. Its seeds were sowed by KANU politicians who thought they could buy their way out of the strong waves of Luo opposition politics. The Luo, in turn, used it as a mechanism of extracting a pound of flesh out of the elite, especially the politicians, who once ensconced in public office or because they were rich, disengaged from the affairs of the village and became unreachable.

Ironically, gonya gonya, in its irritating form, is partly nurtured by the Auma Obama rural development model: top-down, elite know-it-all-driven projects executed without any meaningful participation of the “beneficiary or host community”, who presumably know nothing about what’s good for them and who have no preferences. It is noblesse oblige par excellence, underpinned by no reciprocal horizontal relationship between the giver and the receiver, thereby displacing collective communal action and its positive effects.

Listening to Auma Obama’s tributes to “my donors, my sponsors, my partners, my family”, one is hard pressed to point out what the K’ogelo Nyangoma community’s contribution to Sauti Kuu is, apart from being the immediate beneficiaries of the project. Auma thanked the Red Cross, Kenya Airways, the Eagles, Toyota, and the Gina Din Group. But the Nyangoma-K’ogelo community’s offer of 24 acres of land for a proposed Barack Obama University of Leadership and Technology was lost in the din of corporate accolades.

What excites Auma Obama’s community project is offers from abroad, such as that from Yale University for a programme on emotional intelligence. “Hey, hey, Yale University is looking at us,” Auma said, with hardly a word about Nicholas Rajula, the Nyangoma-K’ogelo community spokesman and his plans of turning Siaya Agricultural Training Centre into a constituent college of the proposed Barack Obama University, as reported by the Nation on the eve of the launch.

Auma Obama’s project is not novel, it seems. It is underpinned by a vertical relationship of accountability between the director of the project and the donors/sponsors/partners. It is a supply- driven project in the name of development made popular by NGOs, which thrived in the gaps left by the state and market failures, especially among the Luo, after the onslaught of neoliberalism in the 1990s. The combined effect of this NGO model of development and the sell-out politics of gonya gonya is a generation of youth who’ve refused or are reluctant to earn their keep, and who are often found loitering and shooting the breeze by the roadside or sitting in betting dens days on end.

Auma describes Sauti Kuu as “a space” – abstract postmodern speak which suggests that centre’s potential is multiple yet still undefined by any particular activity, product or character. If and when it becomes a place, one hopes it will not only be defined by excellence in sports and vocational training, but also by the kind of education that can reproduce a Barack Obama Sr., whose agnostic but liberal critique of Kenya’s development “Bible”, “Problems Facing Our Socialism: Another Critique of Sessional Paper no. 10”, stands vindicated by the return of Sauti Kuu-like initiatives to the countryside 55 years after Kenya’s independence, ostensibly as a solution to unemployment, slums, economic inequality and rural-urban migration.

If Barack Obama’s winning political identity was partly constructed by successfully dropping radical black politics and leftist imaginations that connected black resistance against oppression worldwide and partly by enmeshing his autobiography with the American Creed, as Aziz Rana says, then Auma Obama is constructing her political identity partly by spurning Luo patriarchs and Kenya’s toxic ethnic politics as well as by championing a conservative creed: hard work, individual responsibility and self-reliance.

Still, Sauti Kuu will have to contend with the fact, to paraphrase Barack Obama Sr., that economic issues cannot be divorced from the political-social-cultural context in which we find ourselves.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech

Kisumu city’s landscape, like the bodies of some of its residents, bears the scars of recent political protests and state repression in the aftermath of the August 8 election that was annulled by the Supreme Court and the 26 October “Jubilee election” that was completely ignored by four counties in Kenya’s western region (Homa Bay, Kisumu, Migori and Siaya).

The visceral scars are a testimony to a cityscape whose residents are yearning for a total break from the politics of despondency and for a muting or re-writing of its political history, a history that will not be absolved or corrected by the Uhuru Kenyatta–Raila Odinga handshake that took place on March 9, 2018, its bewildering symbolism notwithstanding.

The fact that the city yearns for a fresh start is apparent to David Ndii, the National Super Alliance (NASA)’s economic advisor and strategist, but not to the Raila-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) MPs, whose narrow articulation of the Uhuru-Raila rapprochement simply calls for the compensation of life or limb lost during the protests.

Crowds of protestors, some of whom are still nursing their injuries, may have dispersed, but their political aspirations are indelibly etched in the city’s landscape

Kisumu yearns for what Ndii refers to as Kenya’s kairos, but whether or not there is a consensus that this is the moment, and whether Kisumu’s scars equally constitute this moment, is debatable.

Crowds of protestors, some of whom are still nursing their injuries, may have dispersed, but their political aspirations are indelibly etched in the city’s landscape, especially along the highway road signage. Charcoal black powder from burnt car tyres pepper many intersections on Kisumu’s roads, despite the recent heavy rains. At the Kenya Commercial Bank’s T-junction, where the Jomo Kenyatta Highway and the Oginga Odinga Street meet, angry protestors scratched off Jomo Kenyatta’s name from the road sign. Like the silver surface of an airtime scratch card, this left a dull metallic gray centre on the white metallic arrows where the words Jomo Kenyatta had been.

Across the road, on the walls of the city park’s main building, also known as Od Mikai, the name JARAMOGI, Palimpsest-like, has been superimposed on KENYATTA’s name. Never in Kisumu city’s history have the residents expressed such a strong desire to re-write, mute or erase the Kenyattas from the city’s political history and to obliterate memories of the traumas inflicted by the city’s bloody encounters with state brutality.

Despite the 1969 political tragedies – the annus horribilis in Kisumu’s post- independence history when Argwings Kodhek, the Mau Mau lawyer, died mysteriously in a road accident, when Tom Mboya was shot dead in broad daylight in in Nairobi and when Jomo Kenyatta’s security forces massacred at least 100 unarmed citizens, including children, during the official launch of the Kisumu Hospital (Russia Hospital) – Jomo Kenyatta’s name has always held pride of place in Kisumu’s central business district. The biggest public park and the longest road in Kisumu are named after Kenya’s first president.

Raila, it seems, has abandoned the resistance struggle for the woolly cause of “national reconciliation and unity”, a political process which, unlike the 2008 political pact, is bound neither by a deadline nor by a timeline, nor by a credible threat that can hold either the Jubilee party’s or President Uhuru’s feet to the fire.

Further afield, Kisumu city’s market, officially named Jubilee Market, was popularly and hurriedly re-named Orengo Market by protestors in honour of the Luo lawyer and opposition leader James Orengo. Locally known as Chiro Mbero, it’s the market where the Kenyan historian, the late E.S Atieno Odhiambo, tells us the independence-era women traders sang “dine onge Odinga, nyithiwa dine Jomo otho e jela” (without Odinga, Jomo would have died in prison). Protestors scratched the name JUBILEE off the market’s signpost, and in uneven uppercase letters, scribbled the name ORENGO on the signpost’s half-scratched surface.

It seems Kisumu residents want nothing do with the Kenyattas or the type of government they represent. A few months ago, they swore to fight to the last man and woman standing for electoral justice. Angered by the conduct of the August 8 general election, the repeat presidential poll on October 26 and the state-orchestrated violence against civilians, many turned up for successive street protests, shouting in Kiswahili “ua ua…kill…kill” as volleys of teargas canisters were thrown at them by paramilitary or regular police and in defiance of the blood-curdling sounds of bullets that pierced through clouds of teargas.

Undeterred, certainly not by the rising death toll, these unarmed protestors were unflinching, angry, and contemptuous of the Jubilee government’s deadly use of force, shouting “ong’e ringo,” (no relenting) as they courted martyrdom, drawing cold comfort in the fact that their resolve to press for electoral justice was stronger than the government’s resolve to violently quell the unceasing protests. “Ok gi bi nego wa te,” (Kill they will, but they will not kill all of us.) Some of us will live to tell the tales of this war, others will be killed, but all will bequeath the next the generation with a different political world, they shouted.

Then, just when Kisumu residents thought they were done and dusted with the Kenyattas, Raila sued for peace in the name of “national reconciliation and unity”, pulling them out of their absolute resolve to detach themselves from their debilitating history and pushing them right back to the doorsteps of Harambee House, the seat of Kenya’s oppressive state power.

Raila’s handshake with Uhuru has effectively revived Kisumu residents’ cruel memories (memories they had hoped they could erase) of Kenya’s contested and chequered political history, a history that can neither be re-written from below, ORENGO Market style, nor from above, in the style of the famous handshake between the two leaders.

In the street corners of Kisumu, sounds of grand betrayal reverberate. The reverberations feel more like a spirited protest movement rather than the promising beginning of a national dialogue. At Kisumu’s K-city market, a scowl-faced middle-aged woman rhetorically asks, “Kalonzo, Wakamba osetho kodwa didi? Waluhya to….Nyithindo mane otho ne?” (How many time has Kalonzo, Wakamba died with us in this cause? And how about the Luhya…the children or the youth who died for him [Raila]?)

It’s ordinary times when one can use brute force and still talk about “development, peace and service delivery” while civil and political rights and the Judiciary – the last bastion of resistance against the Jubilee party’s quest for complete control of all the arms of government – are pulverised.

There is a feeling among Raila’s core constituency that he has betrayed his comrades and their support base for a brotherhood fellowship that is as confounding as it difficult to swallow. The net result has been the gradual disintegration of NASA, the once formidable opposition coalition.

“Wa chung Kanye?” (Where do we stand?), asks the woman at K-City market, as the news of the opposition NASA senator Moses Wetangula’s ouster and his replacement with James Orengo as the minority leader is broadcast in the car stereo next to the washing bay. It is now truly mindboggling to tell what either Raila Odinga or James Orengo now stand for after the handshake. Raila, it seems, has abandoned the resistance struggle for the woolly cause of “national reconciliation and unity”, a political process which, unlike the 2008 political pact, is bound neither by a deadline nor by a timeline, nor by a credible threat that can hold either the Jubilee party’s or President Uhuru’s feet to the fire. The handshake has left Raila’s political base utterly confused. It’s a covenant that recalls Thomas Hobbes’ pithy quip: “Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

Currently, only David Ndii’s take resonates with the protest scars on Kisumu’s cityscape. The protest crowds want to rake up the past. The ODM MPs’ talk of compensation as opposed to the 12-point gamut of the Uhuru-Raila handshake agreement certainly misses the significance of the marks on Kisumu’s roads signs.

In an interview with Citizen TV, Ndii strenuously and variously suggested that the handshake signaled Kenya’s Kairos – that opportune moment when the tensions and contradictions of Kenya’s neocolonial state, laid bare by the bloody 2007 presidential election, must be resolved. It is an opportunity for Kenyans, on their own or led by Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta, to reconstitute the Kenyan nation and its moral underpinnings and to resolve its contradictions: It should be a moment when Kenyans decide whether we want to continue with dictatorship or want to embrace democracy. It should be a moment where we decide to do away with ethnic domination and consider ethnic inclusivity, through cross-party and cross-ethnic dialogues.

Ndii seems to suggests that the handshake signaled the end of ordinary times, times for everyday Kenyan political talk of “development,” “peace,” “unity,” “power-sharing or nusu-mkate”, the stock- in-trade phrases that the state and many reactionary Kenyans bandy around to silence dissent and to dismiss critics as unconstructive and unworthy interlocutors. For Ndii, Kairos is the moment for a markedly different kind of political conversation and action, which could rescue Kenya from its existential threat and ethnic implosion.

This moment underpins the desires of the Kisumu protest crowds, who have become cynical about both ODM and the Jubilee party.

Both the ODM and Jubilee’s disparate talks seem to be rewinding the historical clock, away from Ndii’s kairos, a historical watershed, and back to the Aden Duale–Fred Matiangi’s chronos, ordinary times, when and where evils still pays, and the soul of the men in charge of the government’s coercive powers is unrepentant. It’s ordinary times when one can use brute force and still talk about “development, peace and service delivery” while civil and political rights and the Judiciary – the last bastion of resistance against the Jubilee party’s quest for complete control of all the arms of government – are pulverised.

ODM MPs, having smelt state power, now have a spring in their steps as they arrogantly exert their powers within the now wobbly NASA coalition. Orengo, ensconced in his new position as the Senate’s minority chief whip, has now also come to symbolise betrayal. Increasingly, these MPs’ talk seems to be narrowing down people grievances to mostly to one type of injury: physical injury. They are also shifting towards the development/peace talk within the party’s core support base.

Uhuru and Raila’s widely reported handshake is still evoking mixed feelings: a sense of betrayal and confusion, but now giving way to a creeping and begrudging acceptance of the promise of the Harambee House deal.

At a newsstand in Nyalenda, one of Kisumu’s bustling ghettos, a young man quips, “Kalonzo odhi omos Ruto…wan waduaro kwe…wanwiwa ruko…mono jopinje moko keto mwandu gi Kisumu,” (Kalonzo should go and shake Ruto’s hands…we want peace…our penchant for protest discourages others from investing in Kisumu.) It a remarkable shift, a shift that echoes mostly ODM party officials’ and MPs’ views regarding the handshake and which also elevates Raila above his comrades-in-arm, Kalonzo Musyoka, Moses Wetangula and Musalia Mudavadi.

It is a disappointing end to a protracted struggle driven from below by fearless foot soldiers who had put their lives on the line for electoral justice and a Raila presidency. Kenya’s nascent broad-based opposition coalition has suffered a major setback. And the Jubilee Party has scored a major victory, albeit a momentary one.

The Jubilee securocrats believe that the opposition comprises dispensable actors in a liberal democracy, not insurgents who can defeat them through extralegal warfare. Uhuru and Raila’s widely reported handshake is still evoking mixed feelings: a sense of betrayal and confusion, but now giving way to a creeping and begrudging acceptance of the promise of the Harambee House deal. “Baba is always right,” say many, either as a way of expressing unquestioning loyalty to Raila Odinga or granting him the benefit of the doubt that he did not throw the opposition under the bus.

What will the two midwives of the Harambee House deal, Martin Kimani and Paul Mwangi, a counter-insurgent securocat and Raila’s everyday lawyer, respectively, deliver? Will they initiate a process to re-write the tragic history of the neocolonial Kenyan state? Or will they recast recent events as merely a glitch that temporarily halted the country’s relentless pursuit of “development”?

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule

By Akoko Akech The epic legal battles which have defined Kenya’s presidential contest this year ended, not with the loud bang of the Chief Justice David Maraga’s gavel, but with a whimper and muted celebrations. In the end, it seems, even the resolute Justice David Maraga-led Supreme Court succumbed to political intimidations and Jubilee secured a hard-wrung, bloodstained but Pyrrhic victory.

But for the executioners of Kenya’s electoral coup, the legitimacy deficit occasioned by a low voter turnout, dubious legal victories and political violence, counts for little. The end justifies the means.

However, how Jubilee secured this victory -and the resistance it had engendered- provides insights into what we might expect to define political struggles in Kenya’s competitive authoritarian regime, in the coming season of street battles.

It should worry all and sundry, who care for Kenya’s liberal democratic aspirations. It is the harbinger of a political struggle characterized by civic activism and state sanctioned political violence, by the police and allied militias, as well as by resistance from the National Super Alliance/National Resistance Movement, but without any trusted arbiters of deep seated political grievances.

Jubilee secured the ultimate legal stamp of approval through a legal but morally dubious political processes, made possible by the Executive’s sleight of hand that outwitted both the Chief Justice and other litigants, buttressed by the government-instigated credible threat of apocalyptic genocidal political violence in the slums of Nairobi, and some instances of resistance by undisciplined and easily infiltrated protests by the opposition.

The epic legal battles which have defined Kenya’s presidential contest this year ended, not with the loud bang of the Chief Justice David Maraga’s gavel, but with a whimper and muted celebrations.

The destructions of nascent democratic institutions, which Jubilee’s twin tactics, legal and extralegal, have left in their wake, may well mean that in Kenya’s struggle for change, where civic action (lawfare) led by the urban middle class competes with, and sometimes complements, street fights between the urban poor and police, the latter encounters may dominate the struggle in the coming months. A look at how these have played out points to several worrying trends. Lawfare first.

Judiciary

If the execution of the August 8 electoral coup had claimed the independent electoral commission, the police service, the police oversight authority, and Kenya’s “main-street” media, then its backlash against the Supreme Court following the September 1 setback may have claimed the nascent independence of the judiciary, its transparent methods of determining disputes, and its polite but firm approach to litigants. And more.

In a first in Kenya’s electoral history, the Cabinet Secretary in charge of security declared the day before the October 26 repeat presidential poll a public holiday. The decision rendered most courts inoperative, except the High Court and the Supreme Court, which had express permission from the Chief Justice to hear all the pending and urgent election-related cases, before them.

But something happened. First, the Supreme Court failed to muster the necessary quorum, at least five out of seven judges, to listen to a case filed by democracy activists seeking to stop the poll. Justice Maraga was hard pressed to explain the absence of some of the judges.

Despite his efforts, it is still hard to understand why only he and Justice Isaac Lenaola had reported to work on that day. The absence of the indisposed Justice Ibrahim and Philomena Mwilu, the Deputy Chief Justice, whose driver had been shot and wounded the previous day, may indeed be excused but where were Justices Njoki Ndungu, J.B. Ojwang’ and Smokin Wanjala?

Jubilee’s bloodstained victory has come at a great cost to the nascent institutions of Kenya’s democracy: judicial reforms, police reforms, and electoral reforms. It now boasts the legal imprimatur of Kenya’s apex court

Then, three judges at the Court of Appeal held a late night sitting which delivered a significant judgment, in curious circumstances and without listening to both parties to the case, which overturned an earlier ruling by the High Court that had declared the appointment of election officials unconstitutional. It was eerily reminiscent of the travesties of justice during the late- night Mwakenya trials of the 1980s.

The Court of Appeal did not have express permission from the Chief Justice to meet on this day as it was not one of the courts mentioned his October 24 memo which allowed sittings on the public holiday. But it received and determined a petition, late at night, filed by one of the litigants, while during the day, other litigants could neither find a register nor a duty judge.

What’s more, in marked departure from the Court of Appeal’s judicial tradition, this late-night Court, without listening to both parties to the case, rescinded an earlier High Court decision that ruled that the IEBC had irregularly appointed the returning officers who were to preside over the re-run. Why did the grant of ex-parte orders under such circumstance? Why did the Court of Appeal President, Justice Kihara Kariuki, empanel only this court for only one of the many litigants on this day?

Glossed over by Kenya’s ‘main-street media,’ this act and the subsequent ruling by Justices Erastus Githinji, Martha Koome and Fatuma Sichale, point to a judiciary with two centers of power- one de jure, under the authority of the Chief Justice, and another de facto one, but answerable to Justice Karikui or a power higher than the Chief Justice’s, located somewhere else. Justice Kihara’s action bodes ill for the rule of law. Courts should be predictable and accessible to all. Late-night courts must be the anti-thesis of justice which must not only be done, but also be seen to be done, sometimes literally under the glare of television cameras, and especially when political stakes are high.

In November, the Supreme Court returned. If the six-judge bench of September 1 was firm, patient and polite, this time, they were irascible, a little impetuous and imperious. If last time the court was a lot more engaged, taking both an adversarial and inquisitorial approach to determine the first petition, this time round the court seemed detached. It took a purely adversarial approach, allowing the litigants to slug it out, more in its 2013 mode.

Unlike the confident, but split bench that delivered the historic September 1 ruling, the judges returned to work united but subdued.

This time, the Court was quorate with all but one of the seven judges present. They reported for duty without fail for seven consecutive days. But true to the black and crimson red robes and white bibs, the traditional colors of Kenya’s judiciary, they were conservative to the core.

The court seemed disinterested in several aspects of the two petitions. It threw out most of the petitioners’ prayers which suggests two possibilities: the petitions were either irredeemably defective, or that the court recoiled at the prospect of another bruising battle with the executive.

If it is the first, then there is little cause for alarm. No doubt, the Court’s full judgment, when released, will shed light on why, in their eyes, the two petitions had “no merit.”

The second possibility, however, also deserves attention. Was the court acting out of an instinct for self-preservation? Was it trying to avoid the kind of assault that the Jubilee government, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, as well as its own Justice Njoki Ndungu, had launched following the invalidation of the August election?

The judiciary had come under unrelenting assault after the September judgment. The executive had attacked the Court and its partners mostly on the strength of Justice Ndungu’s claims that the majority judges did not scrutinize the relevant electoral reforms, something supposedly corroborated by Ezra Chiloba, the IEBC’s chief executive officer. It targeted the Registrar of the Supreme Court, and the International Development Law Organization, which it accused of inappropriately influencing subversive jurisprudence, threatening the separation of powers between it and the judiciary.

In the second set of presidential petitions, the Supreme Court judges steered clear of the whole kit and caboodle of the IEBC’s paraphernalia: the servers, the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management System (KIEMS), the numerical and alphabetically designated forms: 34A, 34B, 34C, and 32C.

This was a big victory for the IEBC. The compromised electoral management body would no doubt welcome a process that neither made reference to servers and KIEMS kits, nor pressed hard to produce a voter register, without placing unreasonable financial barriers on the path of petitioners. These were black boxes of this year’s general election, keeping the all-important record of how many Kenyans voted and whom they voted for.

The path to Kenya’s Supreme Court denouement has been long and convoluted, sometimes defying easy comprehension, and has arguably left Kenya with a weaker, much less confident Judiciary. When finally delivered the ruling, Chief Justice Maraga was brief. There was no grand opening statement, no more soaring ecclesiastical aspirations or temporally lofty nationalist ambitions as in September. Faith and courage seemed to have deserted the now united six-judge bench. The court, it seems, had been “fixed” to its rightful Third World size.

And, in Pontius Pilate like response to the Kenyans competing cries, “Give us Uhuruto or Democracy,” they seem to have unanimously delivered all Kenyans into the hands of Uhuruto’s well- planned conservative backlash against the 2010 constitution.

They gave Jubilee government a Tano Tena, five more years, without the hearty high-fives and thunderous applause that greeted the September’s landmark decision. Rather, the good news was received with a tad luke-warm celebration within the wood-paneled courtroom, even among the battery of lawyers who had fought to hard to secure it. Clearly, the court didn’t quite surprise the winning team.

The path to Kenya’s Supreme Court denouement has been long and convoluted, sometimes defying easy comprehension, and has arguably left Kenya with a weaker, much less confident Judiciary.

These events point to sinister happenings within the Judiciary and, possibly, an on-going internecine power struggle, captured in the condescending and hectoring tone of the Supreme Court minority’s dissenting judgment in the first petition, and the rogue conduct of the Court of Appeal of dispensing selective late-night justice.

They do not augur well for the administration of justice. Not only is the ruling party contesting the Chief Justice’s authority, but also his own colleagues are. Can the Supreme Court’s newfound unity following the unanimous second verdict heal this rift and restore Justice Maraga’s administrative authority over the entire judiciary?

The erosion of the legitimacy of the court, especially of the Chief Justice’s authority and transparent procedures of determining political disputes, will increasingly only leave one avenue open for those who oppose Jubilee government, but are outnumbered in all the formal political arenas of Kenya’s democracy including parliament: the streets. However, this is a rough terrain, especially for the easily baited and undisciplined NASA street protestors, as recent events demonstrate.

Street protests

Kenya’s street struggle for democracy has in part always been a gladiatorial contest between the police (including the paramilitary General Service Unit) and the urban poor. Since 2007, the securocrats opposed to Kenya’s democratization process have built a formidable and lethal police capacity against organized protest.

How the state has policed the street protest has also changed, borrowing a great deal from Apartheid South Africa: through masculine and menacing deployment of troops and specialized vehicles, mostly aimed at containing the protests within the slums, and turning broad party political disputes into a narrow ethnic and intra-slum violence. But this year’s pattern of state orchestrated violence suggests something more insidious.

The State has kept the protests far away from the business districts of cities like Nairobi and Kisumu, and from the high-income neighborhoods adjoining the hundreds of urban slums. This provocative posture by the police has easily lured the NASA protestors to respond in kind, but with slings, and acts of arson, which is clearly no match for the deadly arsenal of the police. The protestors’ casualties and location attest to this asymmetrical warfare. Nairobi’s Kibra, Mathare, Kawangware, Lucky Summer and Baba Dogo, as well as Kisumu’s Kondele, Obunga and Nyalenda “Carwash”, have borne the brunt of the political violence this year.

However, in pattern reminiscent of the Apartheid police’s repression of urban protests in South Africa, Julia Steers notes that police violence in the slums this August was aimed at decapitating the urban-poor’s political community’s leadership by turning some residents of the urban slums into snitches, who identify “ protest organizers and known opposition supporters” who are then marked for murder. These tactics tear apart the social fabric of the urban poor, brew mistrust, and valorize intra-urban poor violence.

Similarly, in a replay of the 1969 anti-KPU strategy of repressing protests, the Jubilee government has particularly trained its guns on the protestors in the counties of Kisumu, Homa-Bay, Migori and Siaya, with deadly outcomes. By targeting the beachhead of NASA’s core support base, this kind of violence courts a collective ethnic Luo backlash against the real or imagined supporters of the Jubilee party in living in these areas.

It also seeks to draw out a loud Luo response, which can be manipulated to reduce the broad-based NASA resistance against the Jubilee government into “a Luo only affair” for which several ready “cultural” and binary explanations abound. Such the “ dynastic feuds between the Jaramogi Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta families” or “the Luo-Kikuyu historical rivalries,” which mask the question of electoral justice at the heart of the current political conflicts.

In 2007, Mwai Kibaki’s regime executed political violence against the real or imagined opposition supporters, from above through the police, and GSU, as well as from below through the Kikuyu militia known as the Mungiki. In this, the police, and the Mungiki, largely acted separately. Conversely, ODM, the opposition, executed political violence through spontaneous protests and various organized militia groups in the urban slums of Nairobi, in particular and in the Rift Valley.

When finally delivered the ruling, Chief Justice Maraga was brief. There was no grand opening statement, no more soaring ecclesiastical aspirations or temporally lofty nationalist ambitions as in September. Faith and courage seemed to have deserted the now united six-judge bench. The court, it seems, had been “fixed” to its rightful Third World size.

This year, though, the police and a militia group widely thought to be the Mungiki were acting jointly against the real or imagined opposition supporters. Many news reports suggest that the Mungiki were camouflaged in military fatigues or police uniforms. Numerous accounts of dread-locked police wearing jeans, gunfire from unmarked cars, of police armed with both machetes and guns as well as protesters in opposition strongholds with gun wounds, slit-throats or deep machete wounds, suggest a blurring of boundaries between the police and the urban slum militias.

If police violence against protestors was previously justified in the name of protecting private property, the recent footage of policemen, including those in senior ranks, hurling rocks at or lobbing tear-gas canisters or shooting into vehicles carrying the NASA politicians, suggests that the police now act as agent-provocateurs.

At any rate, how Jubilee has unleashed state violence and how the police have largely stood by as “unknown gunmen” shoot and kill hapless slam dwellers, tells a story of a regime that desperately wants to retain state power at any cost.

Politically expedient, these acts by the incumbent were calculated to achieve several outcomes: increase the cost of individual’s participation in protests, drive Kenya to the edge of apocalyptic genocidal violence and thus force the judges to rule in a particular way.

These acts suggests that Kenya’s dreams of ever bringing the armed forces under democratic control, through institutions such the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA), and getting rid of political militias, especially during the elections, are slowly evaporating. Ominously, Kenya is increasingly criminalizing the police and militarizing the criminals.

The blurring of the difference between the police and the militia, or the police as the militia of the ruling regime, delegitimizes the Police. It might lead to an increase in the formation of gangs by the urban communities on the receiving end of the violence of the police-militia violence and an arms race within the slums.

It is a victory that has not only left many Kenya without a credible arbiter of political conflicts, precisely at the moment when political conflicts are escalating and divisions hardening, but also weakened both the Judiciary and criminalized the police. The police is steadily becoming the ruling party’s militia-writ large, with oversight institutions such as IPOA standing by as mere spectators in the agora of a deadly gladiatorial combat between the police and the urban poor. Kenya’s judiciary is shaken, precisely at the moment when Kenyans need a strong judiciary as the bulwark against Jubilee’s majoritarianism, its dictatorial ambitions, and a trigger-happy police force. While NASA’s protest movement has shown some creativity, it hasn’t truly demonstrated a disciplined non-violent or civic street protests, perhaps the only viable option out of the coming gladiatorial encounters.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

How Moi Manipulated Luo Politics to Entrench His Authoritarian Rule By Akoko Akech

The Supreme Court’s courageous act of annulling Kenya’s August 8, 2017 presidential election seems to have plunged Kenya into a deep political crisis, especially after the withdrawal of Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka from the October 26 re-run. However, if the court’s decision compounded Kenya’s political crisis, it was not so much because it radically departed from Africa’s well-thumped jurisprudence on presidential election disputes. Rather, it was because the court inadvertently saddled Kenyans with an electoral coup — something that neither a resolute and courageous court nor a beleaguered and isolated opposition could contain, singly or jointly.

The Supreme Court judges and a renegade commissioner blew the cover off the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). The strategically located co-conspirators within the IEBC were identified and named, but unashamedly stayed put. The IEBC threatened to revert to its factory settings.

Ominous indicators

The Supreme Court expected nothing but a fresh election held in strict accordance with the constitution and the law. However, barring a last-minute court intervention out of the many cases now before the judges of High Court and the Supreme Court, Kenya looked set for a coup.

Several ominous indicators pointed to the possibility of a coup: Externally, the contested presidential election re-run on 26 October was notably and explicitly endorsed by the United Nations, the African Election Observer Group, and the US-led “international community”, which downplayed fears expressed by the IEBC’s commissioner Roselyne Akombe and its chairman Wafula Chebukati that the IEBC, as currently constituted, could not hold a credible election. These officials told the world that the IEBC was compromised and was held captive by four commissioners, some members of staff and the Chief Executive Officer, who opposed the chairman’s proposed reforms.

Internally, signs that a coup was in the offing included the military-like poses of the Jubilee party’s leaders, who were seen wearing red berets and military fatigues (contrary to the law) in readiness to salute any order given by their commander. The subliminal message of this militant posturing was not lost on the Kenyan public. In a show of military might, the government sent the paramilitary and police mostly to opposition strongholds of Western Kenya, Coast, Nairobi and parts of the Rift Valley. There were also reports of militia groups allied to the Jubilee party taking a new form of Nthenge oaths in Nairobi’s Lucky Summer estate to the chants of “thaiya thai thai”.

On its part, the opposition withdrew from the presidential election and vowed that there would be no election on 26 October. It violently disrupted IEBC preparations for the new election in the counties of Siaya, Homa Bay, Migori and Kisumu. It remained intransigent, bloodied but unbowed, mobilised and charged, but isolated internationally.

The counter-coup

The C-word (coup) has been used by some Kenyans to define the significance of the 1 September 2017 Supreme Court verdict nullifying the 8 August election. None other than Uhuru Kenyatta, the would-be principal beneficiary of the IEBC’s “illegalities and irregularities”, rattled and rankled by the court’s decision, called the court’s verdict a judicial coup. He was echoing the dissenting Supreme Court judge Njoki Ndungu’s verdict in which she cast aspersions on the integrity of the majority of her fellow Supreme Court judges and of the judicial process that led to the nullification of the election.

However, Uhuru’s charge of a judicial coup is a non-starter. It lacks the watermarks of one. There is no credible evidence that by annulling the presidential results the majority in the Supreme Court bench acted in haste, exercised their powers in an extra-constitutional or illegal manner, or declared an underserving candidate the winner of the 2017 presidential election – all backed by the threat or use of violence, against anyone and everyone resisting such a plot.

Uhuru’s charge of a judicial coup, therefore, served to divert attention from what truly imperils Kenya’s democracy: electoral coups.

An electoral coup is a fairly recent phenomenon but has striking similarities to a military coup d’état. In both electoral and military coups, the conspirators identify the strategic locus or loci of state power, which they attempt to infiltrate and control. They then use these centres of power to acquire the remaining levers of state machinery, and eventually the state.

But before we get to that point, we must ask whether the concept of a coup hold the key to understanding the complexity of Kenya’s electoral politics at this juncture? Technically no, because in a classic coup d’état, the state is overthrown (usually through the use of violence) by a rebel or military group. In this case, it was the state that engineered a coup to subvert or overthrow state institutions, particularly the electoral commission. So if the Supreme Court ruling was a judicial coup, then the 26 October election could be described as an electoral coup, or a counter-coup that sought to defy or invalidate the Supreme Court decision.

The coup plotters deploy threat or use of violence against those who may resist them, and carefully identify their friends as well as their enemies and opponents whose capacity for resistance must be sabotaged or neutered sequentially or simultaneously. Some of these enemies must be targeted through a long-term process, but others must be taken by surprise on the day of the coup.

Electoral coups also adopt military warfare techniques, such as the use of psychological operation tactics (pys-ops) and the use of civic spaces of democracy, such as Kenya’s oligopolistic “mainstream” media, PR agencies and social media. These tactics are used to create and sustain a perception of the incumbent’s inevitable victory or invincibility, to fan and exploit citizens’ fear of political violence, to intimidate the opposition, to sustain a façade of the independence of the electoral commission, and to dominate the framing of the political contest and narratives of victory and loss. Electoral coups can be bloody or bloodless.

Kenya’s experience in its last three elections suggests that electoral coups are made up of these elements and more. The preferred locus of execution of these coups has been the electoral management body, the Supreme Court, or both. It usually harangues the opposition to go to court, not for justice, but as means of obtaining judicial imprimatur for its politically cathartic and legitimating value.

Military coups

Pictures of army tanks rolling down the city’s main street, soldiers in military fatigues with belts of bullets strapped across their chests patrolling the streets or standing guard around iconic public buildings within a capital city, the seizure and control of the state-owned national radio and television station by these forces, the continuous broadcasting of political martial music and “revolutionary” messages by “a redemption council” or “a revolutionary council” – these images are usually associated with military coup d’états, which generally set an organised army unit or units against the rest of the armed forces and society, which they dominate both by the threat or use of force, superior organisational ability, weaponry and the capacity to outlast any resistance.

In a paper published by the Albert Einstein Institution, Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins define a coup as “a rapid seizure of physical and political control of the state apparatuses by illegal action of a conspiratorial group backed by the threat or use of violence.” This speaks to the surprise, speed, means and the immediate strategic targets of coup makers.

However, there is more to the making of military or other types of coups. A military coup d’état is typically the ultimate pitched battle, asymmetrical warfare between the coup plotters who command an army or units of armed formations, on the one hand, and the armed formations of the state that are not party to the plot, on the other. The state could or could not be aided in its resistance to this power grab by civic institutions and unarmed but organised political groups, as well as rag-tag militia.

Coups are executed with speed, but take a long time to plan. They involve the identification, infiltration and control of strategic loci of state power. Usually, coup makers recruit key persons in charge of critical functions at strategic loci of state power, people whose simultaneous or separate but sequential acts, under the instruction of the coup plotters, enable the coup makers to take control of a strategic centre of state power, and use that to take control of the rest of the state machinery and to impose their rule on a people.

Coups in competitive authoritarian regimes

Competitive authoritarian regimes are states whose politics is defined by an odd mix of nascent liberal democracy and authoritarian carry-overs from one-party rule. These regimes are torn between democracy (with its strong local support base) and declining international support of its yesteryear benefactors (the West) who are playing catch-up with the rising authoritarian pull of a Chinese debt-bondage driven by a multipolar global system. Their politics is asymmetrical warfare, neither wholly determined by brute force (by the state security apparatus, state-sanctioned militia or opposition sanctioned militia) nor by civic actions, but by a mix of both, especially during general elections. Courts play an important role in recalibrating the balance of forces in this warfare.

Although military tanks on the streets of a capital city represent the dominant image of a coup d’état, there can be many other types of coups, defined by the locus of their execution, as there are centrally located levers of state power in a competitive authoritarian regime. The conspirators can seize these strategically-placed levers of state power and use them to control the rest of the state machinery.

In a competitive authoritarian regime such as Kenya, it is these loci of power – defined by highly centralised bureaucratic structures and decision making in the hands of a few – that are the prized targets of coup makers. The IEBC’s national tallying centre and the Supreme Court of Kenya fall into this category.

Elections are a perilous moment for such regimes. They present the ruling party with a dilemma: how to stage electoral contests that do not threaten the status quo but lend the regime a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Such democratic charades have great purchasing power among the self- declared “international community” (Western powers), especially in a world where political stability, as opposed to democratic niceties, is gaining currency.

Elections are anxious moments because they are a time when state power rests and shifts from one temporary locus to the other – from the substantive holder of the office of the presidency to the electoral commission or the judiciary. The electoral commission or the judiciary act as temporary custodians of state power, with enormous fiduciary powers. As the interim custodians of both state power and the people’s will, the chairman of the electoral commission or Supreme Court judges, acting singly or jointly, can declare any presidential candidate a winner according or contrary to the democratic will of the voters, the constitution and electoral laws.

Several acts, sequentially executed, in the run-up to and after the last three general elections in Kenya, seem to suggest that electoral coups have become the preferred mode of grabbing state power under the guise of a competitive election. What’s more, an electoral moment throws up multiple strategic vulnerabilities: the counting, tallying and declaration of election results and the resolution of any dispute arising from such an exercise. Any of these loci of state power can be seized and used to acquire the rest of the state machinery. Or a combination of all these points can be captured and used to acquire the rest.

Kenya’s electoral coups

Several acts, sequentially executed, in the run-up to and after the last three general elections in Kenya, seem to suggest that electoral coups have become the preferred mode of grabbing state power under the guise of a competitive election. These coups are executed through a process of infiltration, seizure and control of the electoral management body to produce preferred outcomes and through the use of a cross-section of state security to put down any resistance.

Since 2007, Kenya has experienced this form of power grab, partly made possible by the electoral management body’s acts of “human error, fatigue, and technological failure” – which always happen only in favour of the incumbent or the incumbent’s preferred candidates – and by the cynical invocation or use of the judicial system to legitimise such a power grab.

The 2007 Kibaki coup

Mwai Kibaki’s 2007 power grab surprised many, not least the Kriegler Commission, which noted the strange circumstances surrounding the final announcement of the results of the presidential election and the low-key swearing-in ceremony at State House on the evening of 30 December 2007, a day before the official expiry of Kibaki’s first term in office.

Protracted political stalemate at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), the national tallying centre, could have spilled over into a crisis of legitimacy for the incumbent, denying Kibaki the strategic advantage of bargaining with his opponent from an advantaged position as the commander-in-chief of the all the armed forces who could exercise the full powers of the office of the president.

Many Kenyans were surprised by the sight of the “Ninja turtles” that descended on the KICC just before the results were announced. These police officers – dubbed “Ninja turtles” by Kenyans because of their striking resemblance to the fictional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon characters – are mostly from the Rapid Deployment Unit of the Administration Police, the police unit that is under the command of the Minister of Internal Security and which had grown spectacularly in strength, capability and numbers during the Kibaki regime.

The political significance of the chaos at KICC – with the chairman of the electoral commission, Samuel Kivuitu, literally under siege – the hasty swearing-in of Kibaki at dusk and the growth in numbers and strength of a civilian-commanded police force under a regime that ostensibly upheld citizens’ right to protest and picket was not lost on the majority of Kenyans.

Similarly, the political significance of the lack of preparedness of all the armed forces, except the military, and the lack of co-ordination among security chiefs at various levels (district, provincial and national) was not lost on the Waki Commission that was set up to look into the violence that erupted after that disputed election. These acts, coupled with the cordoning off of the KICC by the General Service Unit (GSU), the revelation that the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) had been infiltrated by the National Intelligence Service and rogue returning officers, and the opaque system of counting and tallying results at the KICC, suggested a coup plot via the electoral locus.

Kibaki’s 2007 “victory” out of a muddled electoral process was a coup; it relied on sequential or simultaneous acts of infiltration and control of a strategic locus of state power (the ECK) and used the threat of violence to neutralise resistance. It deployed police around the main entrances and exits of urban slums, cordoned off public spaces, such as Uhuru Park, for months on end and restricted public broadcasts to weaken the opposition’s ability to organise or mobilise protests against the regime.

The successful execution of a coup requires the active participation of some armed formations that have the capability to repress any anticipated forms of armed or civilian resistance. It also requires “neutral” or “professional” police and military forces – an unprepared police force, security committees that didn’t meet, and a prepared but professional army, which maintains its neutrality while the coup plot unfolds. Such a coup can gain legitimacy through the tacit or explicit approval of the international community, particularly countries whose military bases are located in Kenya, the UN headquarters in Nairobi, and strategic countries that Kenya relies on for military support.

Simply put, a Kibaki-style coup plot succeeds when it faces no credible or active internal threat from any other armed formation, except the unarmed civilian mobs of protestors or gangs armed with bows and arrows, who can easily be contained by the police and the paramilitary under the guise of maintaining law and order.

Kenya’s first successful electoral coup in 2007 was bloody. But if the securocrats and the Kibaki- aligned political elite hewed Kenya’s body politic “like a carcass fit for the hounds,” in 2007, then in 2013 they “carved it as a dish fit for the gods” with peace campaigns and “accept and move on,” messages.

How the Kibaki coup was executed and the resistance against it has informed the subsequent attempts. Though successful, Kibaki’s 2007 seizure of state power was seen to have had several weaknesses, which cost him the complete control of state power (a “nusu mkate” coalition government) and endangered real or perceived Kibaki supporters in opposition strongholds, especially in the Rift Valley. The resistance against it, nationally and internationally, nearly consumed the regime’s success.

Importantly, Kibaki’s plot had failed to create a perception of victory. His Party of National Unity’s campaign was seen as lethargic and as lacking an effective communication strategy: it failed to manage public perception (opinion polls) and to trumpet Kibaki’s economic achievements. Even its successful attempts to rope in top editors who authored “Save Our Country’ headlines was seen as a little too late.

Kenya’s 2013 electoral experience was sublime. The electoral process was a well- designed psychological operation to create and sustain a perception of victory, coupled with mediated reportage and embedded intellectuals, as well as co-option of a cross- section of the civil society groups to preach peace.

Similarly, its diplomacy was wanting and no match for the diplomatic charm offensive of some of Kenya’s astute human rights and democracy activists who had contacts in high places in the West. It strengthened the opposition, the pro-democracy forces and the reform agenda against the regime. Importantly, it allowed too many concessions, especially the enactment of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya.

The 2013 digital coup

The evil genius of the Jubilee party’s 2013 electoral coup was to turn Kibaki’s coup on its head: rewrite the old military coup d’état manual and distill out of it evil lessons with which to subvert Kenya’s democratic processes and institutions.

Kenya’s 2013 electoral experience was sublime. The electoral process was a well-designed psychological operation to create and sustain a perception of victory, coupled with mediated reportage and embedded intellectuals, as well as co-option of a cross-section of the civil society groups to preach peace.

Critical media coverage was disarmed through peace journalism. Media coverage critical of the IEBC was equated with inciting political violence. Claims by the opposition, which deserved a critical look, were brushed aside as acts of incitement. Jubilee ran a glitzy and energetic campaign. Its victory was prophesised by the talk of a “tyranny of numbers” that assured a win for the UhuRuto alliance.

In 2013, the locus of the electoral machinery was relocated to the Bomas of Kenya (a rondavel-like auditorium that was created to host cultural events), away from Nairobi central business district and an easy location to secure. The election was choreographed as a national cultural event or a public holiday that culminates in the appearance and address by the president. Choirs sang to soothe the anxieties of a nation still smarting from the trauma of the 2007 general election, anxiously awaiting the announcement of the winner, while the electoral body’s commissioners, like members of a cultural troupe, took turns to announce the results.

Yet something was amiss. The biometric voter identification and electronic transmission of results failed. The numbers being beamed on the screen were not adding up; they were not even divisible by a factor that Isaak Hassan, the then chairman of the commission, said was the multiplier. Rejected votes seemed to have been the unnamed candidate in the race. There was no way to verify that the numbers presented by the IEBC truly reflected the will of Kenyan voters.

The result was strategically announced in the middle of the night to give security forces ample time to plan for any form of resistance. As many as 150,000 officers from different armed formations (Kenya Police, GSU, Prisons, Kenya Wildlife) had been mobilised, trained and deployed to secure the 2013 election, though this was not made public.

The coup de grace was delivered through a pys-op that at once painted Raila Odinga as the personification of political violence and harangued him to accept the results of the presidential election, and if he was dissatisfied, to seek judicial redress.

Aggrieved by the results, the Raila-led opposition went to court. The newness of the Supreme Court, the refreshing leadership of Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, a well-known human rights defender, and the court’s new olive green and yellow striped robes and no-wigs-or-bibs attire inspired confidence. However, the judges unanimously disallowed the bulk of the evidence the opposition had hoped would prove its case, citing constitutional time constraints.

The IEBC numbers on the 2013 presidential election, like its voter register, kept changing, and took an extraordinarily long time to finally be posted for public scrutiny. Without a stable register of voters, the “tyranny of numbers” became a self-fulfilling prophecy that no one could test, but a valuable tool for creating and sustaining a perception of invincibility.

The Supreme Court’s own self-initiated process of examining the records of the IEBC failed the integrity test. The court let the IEBC off the hook.

Kenyans had to wait for the 2017 new-look Supreme Court bench to get a glimpse into how the bureaucratic mischief, malfeasance and malice by the IEBC secretariat works to produce winners of presidential elections, and to get a sense of what goes on within secured spaces, away from the public glare, where IEBC clerks verify and tally the results of various polling stations.

August 2017: Robbery with violence

This year’s script was an amalgam of the 2013 and the 2007 experiences. Several reform processes and anxieties around insecurity during elections provided a perfect cover. The locus of the execution of the coup was the IEBC, buoyed by the mantra that no court in Africa has ever nullified a presidential election.

The 8 August 2017 election was preceded by a number of preemptive strategies and strikes, variously aimed at pro-democracy non-governmental organisations and foundations associated with key opposition figures with the aim of incapacitating resistance against the regime. The NGO Coordination Board’s attempts to close down the accounts of the Kalonzo Musyoka Foundation, the Kidero Foundation, and a foundation associated with Rosemary Odinga, Raila’s daughter, fall into this category. Libel laws enacted by the Jubilee government and the creation of a central government advertisement agency also came in handy when manipulating Kenya’s oligopolistic main-street media.

Resistance to an electoral coup was largely expected to rise from the core of Raila Odinga’s constituency and a few human rights and democracy non-governmental organisations. Jubilee went for both with speed once the result had been declared: indiscriminate state violence and attempts to close AFRICOG and the Kenya Human Rights Commission fall into this pattern.

How Jubilee executed this year’s scheme is a classic study on how a coup strategy was interwoven into Kenya’s electoral process and performed through routine acts of government functions, using the very institutions democracy depends on, without rousing suspicion among the citizens. A look at its key aspects demonstrates how an electoral coup works.

The Jubilee campaign, like the one in 2013, was energetic and glitzy. It was largely amplified by the President’s Delivery Unit’s advertisements: “GoK Delivers”; “+254 Tuko na Plus Kibao”; advertisements that claimed that Kenya had registered exceptional achievements in many fields, such as provision of “free” maternity services amidst a protracted strike by health workers. Jubilee made several campaign forays into what were considered swing constituencies or loose pro- opposition strongholds in Kisii, Bugoma, Kajiado and other areas.

If issues do not count in Kenya’s politics, and only ethnicity does, then how could the government improve its electoral chances when the Jubilee government is widely perceived to be dominated mostly by the elite of just two ethnic groups and didn’t even attract any significant symbolic defection of notable ethnic leaders in the run-up to the August 8 election?

Regime-aligned intellectuals, like Misigo Amatsimbi, writing two days before the poll, predicted Jubilee’s victory, complete with the numbers and the expected ethnic shifts in voting patterns. These numbers, expressed in percentage form, bear an uncanny resemblance to the figures IEBC would later disown in court, and variously call “data, provisional text data or statistics”.

Narratives of Jubilee’s victory, mostly by analysts who had simply ignored the confounding figures IEBC was beaming through the public portal, used “data” from secondary sources, used only form 34B, or relied on the incomplete records of the polling station results, the form 34A.

Vowing that Kenya’s presidential election was nothing but an ethnic census, where issues count for little, Misigo used the last census figures to approximate the number of votes that either Raila Odinga or Uhuru Kenyatta would get at varied levels of voter turnout among various Kenyan ethnic groups. In this analysis, Jubilee recorded a remarkable improved performance among the following ethnic groups: Somali, Samburu, Borana, Luhya, Maasai, Kamba and Kisii. Amatsimbi predicted 10.6 million votes (54%) in Uhuru’s first round win against Raila Odinga’s 8.8 million votes (44%). Misigo’s narrative and numbers don’t just add up.

Charles Hornsby had a similar prediction, which was based on a more sophisticated model that was gleefully rehashed by Bitange Ndemo, another regime intellectual, but which curiously sought validation in the hard-to-vouch form 34B after the declaration of the results.

Nor does “the Jubilee inroads into the opposition stronghold” narrative hold water. If issues do not count in Kenya’s politics, and only ethnicity does, then how could the government improve its electoral chances when the Jubilee government is widely perceived to be dominated mostly by the elite of just two ethnic groups and didn’t even attract any significant symbolic defection of notable ethnic leaders in the run-up to the August 8 election?

Infiltration and control of the commission

These numbers served an important role. They conditioned Kenyans to accept a Jubilee victory as something that had been scientifically foretold. They also enabled the narratives of certain victory, which gained currency immediately after the IEBC announced the results.

However, it is now clear that no one, not even the IEBC, could vouch for them. What is more, it is now clear how bureaucratic mischief, malice and malfeasance account for what was previously excused as “human error, fatigue and technological failure,” and how these acts produce presidential victory.

Wafula Chubukati, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared Uhuru Kenyatta the winner of the presidential election without receiving results from a substantial number of polling stations. Why did Chebukati declare the results of the election prematurely when the law allowed a few more days for a thorough job? Why was he waffling, lost in procedure, before declaring the results of the August 8 presidential election?

The Supreme Court found that numerous election return papers, notably form 34 C for the declaration of presidential results, lacked the mandatory security features, which raised suspicions that they could be fake. Why did Ezra Chiloba, the CEO of the IEBC, repeatedly remind Kenyans that the results being beamed through the public portal were results from 288 out of 290 constituencies shortly before the results were declared, only for the IEBC to disown these results as “data, provisional text data, statistics”?

Chiloba also told the BBC that some data entry clerk created an email account in the chairman’s name without the chairman’s knowledge, and used it to conduct about 9,000 transactions in the electoral database. Chiloba’s only regret was that the account was not created under a different (institutional) name. He did not question the ethical issue it raised: Why were these transactions conducted without the knowledge of the chairman? What motive was behind this?

According to the IEBC, in the 8 August election, there were more than 11,000 polling stations that were out of reach of the network coverage of Kenya’s three mobile service providers. However, in the fresh election on 26 October, this number had reduced drastically to only 300. This reduced figure was not accompanied by any report that showed that the mobile phone companies had made massive investments to improve network coverage between the August election date and the election date in October.

IEBC’s conduct reeks of bureaucratic mischief, malice and malfeasance. Chebukati and Akombe’s memos indicating that not everything was above board point to this. There can be no doubt that the IEBC is a compromised institution, infiltrated and controlled by those who control four of the now six commissioners. The devil is in the malicious detail of everyday bureaucratic decisions, procedures, rules and regulations. In the Maina Kiai versus the IEBC case, the Court of Appeal warned the IEBC against this kind of mischief. However, the IEBC’s defiance of court orders points to a compromised institution that enjoys the protection of the powers that be.

Hotspots talk

In the run-up to the August 8 election, claiming to have learnt from history, the Kenya Police, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission and the IEBC mapped, profiled and marked regions that they referred as hotspots. The state mobilised an unprecedented 180,000 officers from various armed formations, over 30 specialised armoured anti-protest vehicles and helicopters for rapid deployment. (Coup plots work best with a mixed force, capable of executing orders as given, but incapable of executing a countercoup.)

At first glance, the list of places labeled hotspots appeared inclusive, it contained both the incumbent’s and the opposition’s strongholds, areas that had experienced political violence in the past general elections. However, some state action told a different story. The police held protest control simulation only in Kisumu and Nairobi. Only Kisumu and Oyugis, both in the opposition stronghold, received body bags, ostensibly as part of first aid kits donated by an NGO. That’s a Kenyan first in the history of first aid.

The lopsided deployment of the armoured vehicles, body bags and rehearsals for protest control told a different story. It suggested a strategy informed by a predetermined electoral outcome, a contest with a known winner and loser, and predictably, where the results of the presidential election would either bring joy or disappointment.

The Supreme Court stood up to something insidious that has been gnawing at the heart of Kenya’s democracy since 2007, something that neither the Johann Kreigler Commission in 2007 nor the Supreme Court in 2013 managed to correct. Unlike Kibaki’s 2007 coup, which unintentionally produced comprehensive reforms, the 2017 plot seeks to upend the 2010 Constitution of Kenya. Hotspots talk was a camouflage. It provided a perfect cover for an armed repression of protests against the IEBC’s attempt to unconstitutionally and illegally make Uhuru Kenyatta the president of Kenya. Recent human rights reports now confirm that the police may have killed up to 67 people, mostly in opposition strongholds, and especially in urban slums.

Monopolising the narrative

If the violence of an electoral coup looks strikingly similar to that of a classic military coup, then how it monopolises communication in a pluralistic media landscape sets it apart from the latter. In a typical military coup in a state-owned media era, the seizure and control of the only broadcast house more or less guarantees the coup makers a monopoly over the most effective means of communication.

Kenya’s experience suggests that the electoral coup plotters used a markedly different approach to attain the same results. The idea was not so much to seize a broadcast house as it was to dominate the narrative on the critical aspects of the electoral process. This was achieved through various approaches, including intimidation of media houses, ordering broadcasting stations to not announce unofficial presidential results, imposing a reliance on the IEBC “public portal” (the pot of statistics and provisional text data, which the commission itself disowned), and investment in heavily PR- mediated news reporting and analysis.

PR spins

The PR spin on the results was remarkable. As Wandia Njoya pointed out, in reporting the results, the burden of proof was put on the opposition to “substantiate the claims”, not on the IEBC, the principal author of the confounding statistics, to explain the anomalies and irregularities, the processes, and the missing polling station data (forms 34A). Any coverage that deflected attention away from the IEBC was welcome. Favourable observer reports were amplified, while those critical of the process were suppressed.

The Cabinet Secretary in charge of communication and the government’s communication authority repeatedly warned Kenya’s “main-street” media against broadcasting unofficial results and threatened sanctions on any media house that would dare to broadcast them. These directives of questionable legal basis had one effect: they allowed the government to control the narratives on the election. Moreover, the government raided the opposition parallel vote-tallying center in Nairobi. This was an attempt to neutralise any competing source of information and make the citizenry dependent on the only one source of information, the one controlled by the compromised electoral commission.

Rollback of reforms

Whether or not the Supreme Court upheld or annulled the results of the August 8 presidential election, Kenya’s democracy was damned either way. The judicial coup would inevitably be followed by an electoral counter-coup.

The Court exposed the Jubilee government’s attempt to rewrite the Kibaki plot, whose ambition included the control of all centres of power that check the presidency. Momentarily, the court had wrong-footed a well laid-out coup plot whose full scope will, hopefully, become clearer once the unprecedented 300 election petitions filed against various candidates in the just concluded general election, especially those from the “inroad” constituencies, are determined.

A weird reversal of aspirations seems afoot. The government has created an incumbent-friendly electoral commission. It only awaits presidential ascent or tweaking to take care of any contingency, for example, the resignation of its chairman. If this becomes law, it will institutionalise all the IEBC’s bureaucratic mischief, malfeasance and malice that led to the annulment of the August 8 presidential election.

By Akoko Akech Akoko Akech, presently a graduate student at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, was the program officer in charge of the Society for International Development (SID-East Africa) and Institute for Development Studies’ book project, Karuti Kanyinga and Duncan Okello (eds.,) Tensions and Reversals in Democratic Transition: Kenya’s 2007 General Election, and the Working Paper Series on the Constitution of Kenya, 2010.

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