It is fairly obvious that Prime Minister Raila Odinga has a very keen focus on the 2012 General Election, which he hopes will at last see him ascend to the top of the political totem pole.

This compels him to constantly seek to ally himself with issues which the general public feels strongly about, and to act with long-term advantages in mind, rather than any immediate difficulties that he might face.

On the other hand President Kibaki has no such reelection campaigns on his agenda. He need not worry whether he is personally popular or not.

Indeed he has revealed a rare mastery of passive resistance: he just sits there and ignores all the noise. As a man who does not have to worry about reelection, why should he care if dropping two ministers will make him popular with the public? What has he to gain from taking such difficult decisions now?

Given this disparity, it could only be a matter of time before there was a parting of ways between the two.

But I have also argued that there is no inherent danger to the republic in this quarrel between the two principals. And I base my reasoning on the assessment that the two ministers whose careers are at stake are not important enough to cause a permanent falling out between the two
principals.

My guess is that Kibaki was all along bound to dismiss these two Cabinet ministers, only that he wanted to do so at his own time. After all, who is Prof Ongeri and what makes him so important to the President that he would willingly undergo continued public criticism just to keep him in office? The President has dumped men who were much closer to him in the past. He has no compelling reason to keep Ongeri in the Cabinet at all.

And as for William Ruto, these recent developments have been rich in political irony: here is a man being hounded out of office by the PM whom he struggled so hard to help ascend to power; and being kept hi office only by the intervention of a president whom he did everything he could to eject from State House.

I am inclined to speculate that the President would very much prefer that Ruto was not in his Cabinet at all. And that he is indifferent to the fate of Ongeri. So, why did he intervene to keep them in office?

I would argue that unless he was willing to allow us all to conclude that it is the PM who is really running the country, Kibaki really had no choice but to distance himself from Raila's action in "suspending" the ministers.

However the PM too had no choice but to take such a step: Would he really be able to go out campaigning in 2012 on his usual anti-corruption platform if he kept quiet at this time, over the two scandals which have most outraged the common citizens of this country?

Whatever the truth about Ruto and Ongeri concerning the corruption scandals in their ministries, at this time when the public is demanding resignations, a clever politician steps out and adds his voice to those demands. And this is what the PM did.

And I would add to this, that the PM's feelings on all this very likely mirror those of the President: he too would prefer to have Ruto out of the Cabinet; and he too is indifferent to Ongeri's fate.

It may be unfair, but it is just the reality of politics, as so many other ministers have found out to their horror — when the public decides that you are guilty, no argument you bring forward will change their perception. Your best bet is to step aside and hope that a few months later, most people will have forgotten all about it and you can quietly return to the Cabinet.

Still, as I say, neither Ruto nor Ongeri is important enough to bring about any serious cleavage in the coalition government. And sooner or later, the President and the PM are going to sit down and come to some kind of understanding over this.

In the end, the PM will have burnished his anti-corruption credentials in anticipation of the 2012 elections, and the President will have demonstrated clearly that he is in charge. Both will have gained something that matters to them.

And I think Ruto and Ongeri will then find out that the President, all along, had no intention of keeping them in his Cabinet.

Wycliffe Muga comments on topical issues.

DID Prime Minister Raila Odinga and some of his ODM colleagues start plotting long to paralyse the government?

Or did the overturned suspension of Agriculture minister William Ruto and Education minister Sam Ongeri last Sunday unexpectedly precipitate a crisis in the coalition?

Raila wrote the African Union on February 8 requesting the return of Chief Mediator Kofi Annan to Kenya because the failure to tackle corruption could lead to "a complete paralysis in government". That was a full six days before the fateful suspension.

But three months ago, when Annan was in Kenya in November, the PM verbally complained that President Kibaki had refused his request to reshuffle ministers.

"Dr Annan confirmed that he had raised the issue with President Kibaki who promised to have the changes made early in January," said a source in Raila's office, Raila reportedly wanted a mini reshuffle with Ruto demoted to a junior ministry and Sports minister Hellen Sambili sacked.

Yesterday Gem MP Jakoyo Midiwo, a close confidant of Raila's insisted that Kibaki had refused Raila's request to reshuffle the Cabinet.

Agriculture minister Ruto issued a statement yesterday saying there was no crisis in government "except that which had been orchestrated by a few individuals which exists in their scheme".

"These leaders should not be allowed to create despair in the country through orchestrated disputes, fermented paralysis or engineered confusion and Kenyans should treat their schemes with the contempt it deserves," said Ruto.

He said the escalation of hostilities was linked to ODM's changed position on the Naivasha draft and "the crisis has been orchestrated to derail efforts to have a new constitution".

The PNU supporters are claiming that Raila plotted long ago to cause a crisis within the Cabinet to shift attention from the maize scandal to power sharing and the National Accord.

Last night ODM secretary general Anyang Nyong'o dismissed claims by PNU that the crisis was manufactured.

"PNU is crazy and illogical. They argue with their bellies and not their heads," said Nyong'o.

The ODM chief whip Jakoyo Midiwo also denied that Raila planned the crisis and instead accused the PNU side of disrespect.

"To say that we planned the crisis is utter rubbish," said Midiwo.

To prove its conspiracy theory, PNU has questioned why Raila wrote to the AU on February 8 predicting a breakdown in government well before he purported to suspend Ruto and Ongeri last Sunday.

"There exists a serious dispute between the parties with regard to the functioning of the cabinet. The parties are unable to agree on how to tackle cases of corruption affecting the government as a whole and some ministers. There may soon be a complete paralysis of the government," Raila wrote in his letter.

After upsetting the Kenyan political cart, Raila flew out to Japan on Sunday evening.

On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi announced that the PM was officially declaring there was a crisis in the Cabinet and that the ODM wanted Annan back for mediation.

When asked by reporters if ODM had officially written to the AU, Musalia did not mention Raila's letter but said the party was in the process of writing a formal letter to AU.

The PNU operatives claim that Raila elaborately stage-managed the whole scenario.

They claimed that Raila was next in the firing line as he chaired the Cabinet Ad Hoc committee that handled the importation and distribution of subsidised maize in 2008 when Kenya was suffering a serious food deficit.

"The grandstanding and fomenting of a crisis is a well organised plan that started three weeks ago. Indeed, we are aware that Kofi Annan was invited to come to Kenya to settle a dispute, way before there was any dispute," said Kibaki's adviser on constitution and coalition affairs Prof Kivutha Kibwana.

However the conspiracy theory is undermined by the fact that Raila first publicly recommended on February 5 that Ongeri and his PS Karega Mutahi step down in the presence of President Kibaki at KIA. That was three days before he wrote to the AU.

And the idea that Raila wanted a crisis is further undermined by his statement on February 12 when he chaired a National Economic Social Council meeting in Naivasha whose participants included Mudavadi, Head of Public Service Francis Muthaura, and business people from the private sector.

He told them to forget about politics and build Kenya's economy.

"He was very categorical that the government needed to work together to realize Vision 2030. The two health ministers Anyang Nyong'o and Beth Mugo made presentations and were even calling each other by their first names. There was no indication whatsoever that ODM and PNU had issues," said a senior government official who attended the Naivasha meeting.

That was the day before his PS Isahakia and Secretary Caroli Omondi resigned, prompting President Kibaki to formally suspend them along with three other PSs and top NCPB officials.

At that stage, it looked like the two principals had finally come together to fight corruption.

On Sunday February 14, the day after, Raila announced he was suspending Ongeri and Ruto. Kibaki overturned that order and it then looked like the two principals had finally split on corruption.

But the PNU still insists that it is all a plot by Raila.

"Instead of the country focusing on the maize scandal and other pressing national issues, the Prime Minister's advisers want to take the country back to an interpretation of the National Accord," he said. "Kenyans should not accept to be derailed from the ongoing constitutional review, which is the most important agenda now."

"What is the Prime Minister's office really up to? What are they really covering up?" asked Kibwana.

PNU coalition spokesman Moses Kuria claimed his party has "credible information that the Prime Minister is planning to quit the coalition government immediately he returns from his overseas trip."

In January 2008, I received a commission from an American magazine to write a 1,000 word opinion column explaining what on earth was happening in Kenya, and how it had come that this "island of peace" located in "one of the world's most turbulent areas" had descended into such chaos and madness.

That time, I had recently returned to the country after many months in the US, and was in fact not writing a regular column for any local newspaper.

And looking back, I suppose my perspective back then was really one of "the casually objective outsider" than what I might call "the passionately engaged and deeply disappointed Kenyan pundit", which was the tone of most political commentators at the time.

For what I wrote may easily have been interpreted to mean that I did not really care what happened to the country.

I wrote that in a country like Kenya something of this kind was bound to have happened sooner or later.

That Kenya usually stood out only because it was of geo-strategic interest to the great powers of our time, but it was basically just another poor African country: hopelessly riddled with inequality and tribalism; and that having an all-or-nothing electoral system along with a street culture of instant retributive violence had made it inevitable that sooner or later, political differences would take this extreme form that was now being displayed before our eyes.

I added that we could only hope that the fact that Kenyans had enjoyed about 40 years of uninterrupted tranquility would count for something and that Kenyans' long-nourished taste for peace would in the end prove to be stronger than the bitter tribal hatreds which then seemed to be assuming Rwandan proportions.

It turned out that this was not at all the kind of thing this magazine had expected. I was politely turned down, and the editors found some other Kenyan writer, whose article clinging to the myth of Kenyan exceptionalism was basically an extravagant lamentation at what was so unexpectedly happening to "our beloved country where for over 40 years we have lived as brothers and sisters", etc (Or so I seem to recall for there were so many highly emotional articles of that kind written by Kenyans for Western publications at that time that I may be confusing the article which replaced mine with something I read elsewhere.)

The happy ending to this story (at least where I was concerned) is that, apparently, these top American magazines, if they contract you to write for them, and do not like what you have written, will pay you 50 per cent of the contract sum anyway. This was my first experience of being paid for not having my work published.

And I have often thought since then that if I could regularly receive such useful amounts of money from publishers who had categorically rejected my work, it would be a perfect world.

But the reason I mention all this is that when I look at the current political storm-in-a-teacup that has upset so many observers both here and overseas, I find that the same unfashionable conclusion ("This was bound to happen sooner or later") is the one that presents itself.

I refer, of course, to the current rift in the coalition government over the Prime Minister Raila Odinga, having "suspended" Education minister Prof Sam Ongeri and Agriculture minister William Ruto, following scandals touching on their respective ministries and President Kibaki promptly "rescinding" that suspension, and stating that the PM in fact does not have any such powers to ask a Cabinet minister to vacate office, even if only for three months.

This is an event which has thrust Kenya back into international headlines (e.g, "Kenya's government teeters on collapse" in the Christian Science Monitor).

Admittedly not to the same degree as our unforgettable post-election violence, but still, enough to get foreign observers deliciously speculating if perhaps this is it; if there will once again be an opportunity for the massed cameras of the international media to return to Kenya, one of the few African nations where it is possible to cover a near-civil-war situation by day, and order room service while relaxing in a Jacuzzi in your five-star hotel by night.

So, why do I say that this kind of thing was bound to happen? Well, it is because the personal psychology of each of the two principals, as well as their immediate priorities at this time, made this inevitable. This I will explain in tomorrow's column.

Wycliffe Muga comments on topical issues.