A Political Kenya: Latest Politics and Kenya Economy News

President Kibaki, a man who is not famous for being talkative, is upbeat about the coalition whenever he speaks. ODM leader and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, has been notably voluble about the Government’s prospects.

At various interviews in his hectic international schedule, he has sold the grand coalition as “the solution” to Africa’s tribal-riven politics.

I will not bet the house on the survival of the grand coalition (I am not deluded), but I am willing to put my shirt on it limping on to 2012.

For starters, because there are internal political battles to fight (witness Narc-K shaking the PNU tree), and there is an election in under five years in which the incumbent is not standing, no one in the coalition has time to spare to work on breaking it up.

Many factors will determine the future of the coalition, but at the level of personalities, President Kibaki and Premier Odinga hold the key to its survival.

To start with President Kibaki, it is remarkable seeing ministers, including junior ones, and minor party officials ticking him off about his attempt to consolidate PNU and, allegedly, to “impose” a successor.

Going by this, commentators and critics have written the President off as damaged goods, your typical lame-duck president in his last term of office.

If that is true, then it also means that President Kibaki isn’t powerful enough to wreck the coalition.

Secondly, if he is losing grip, then the success of the coalition is the main thing he has to hold on as his legacy. My own sense is that all he has to do to secure his legacy is to sleep throughout the next four years, leaving things as they are.

Mr Odinga, on the other hand, has even less reason to tear up the grand coalition.

During the campaigns it became clear that there was quite some unease in parts of Kenya as to whether he could be “trusted”, and whether he was still a “dangerous” radical and glass-breaker.

In the last three months, he has done a lot to soften his image and look presidential. He positions himself as the great team-player, and is robust in his defence of Mr Kibaki, a fact which should place him in good standing with some of the President’s staunch supporters.

But perhaps the greater discovery has been his appeal abroad.

His record of democratic struggle, and folksy political style – speeches full of proverbs and stories about rain-soaked lions being mistaken for cats, football tales and chants on stage, and the urban underclass’s fascination with grandeur (the Hummer) – looked unsuited to a sophisticated international stage.

But Raila soon realised that African leaders tend to form a club of villains to defend their corrupt and cruel ways, and to blame all their problems on Western conspiracies.

We went to the polls seven months ago today and voted ourselves four months of political madness and mayhem. Now we must fasten our seatbelts and go through the turbulence of a four-year-long election campaign.

That is what should concern us when Party of National Unity (PNU) stalwarts Justice minister Martha Karua and assistant minister Danson Mungatana declare interest in the presidency and premiership come 2012.

It is this that should interest us when President Kibaki, he who has made silence, composure and mysteriousness his trademarks, pitches for the dissolution of PNU affiliate parties and the emergence of a single party.

We should be alarmed that only seven months ago politicians and parties who were spelling out their visions for the next five years are now embarking on another campaign before delivering on a single plank of their election platforms.

Why? Because this way it will be a long time before the Kenyan ship of state and the politics settle. One of the reasons why the ship of state will not settle soon is the politics. And the reason the politics will not settle soon is politics.

Marriage of convenience

The politics will not settle soon because our so-called grand coalition is not even a marriage of convenience; it is a forced marriage. Everything in it may have to be forced through or fought over.

Secondly, coalitions — grand or humble — are fragile or even frigid affairs. When politicians and the politics of a governing coalition are unsettled, the turbulence unleashed shakes government, sullies relationships, soils decision-making and decisions made and slows down business.

Notice that some politicians have already convinced themselves that the hour of reckoning will come before 2012 when government will be faced with a crucial vote in the House.

One of the partners could vote to bring it down. But given that such a move could take Kenya back to January or turn a polls-weary electorate against them, they should be prepared to tolerate each other for as long as possible. That, however, is easier declared than delivered.

It is why the leader of a coalition government needs to be a juggler of party balls, a reader of the minds and thoughts of friends and foes alike, and a magician who always has a survival rabbit hidden in her kit of tricks.

This leader must keep coalition partners happy and forever tries to ensure she has enough numbers to see off a no-confidence vote. They just returned controversial media magnate Silvio Berlusconi to power in Italy after the ruling coalition collapsed.

Last week in India, the government survived a no-confidence vote by a paper thin majority.

President Kibaki faced a torrid and horrid time in the first two years of his first term at the hands of a rebellious Liberal Democratic Party, which he short-changed as he constructed his 2003 Cabinet and ignored a pre-poll seat-sharing and power pact.

The President only managed to stem paralysis in government by kicking out LDP Members of Parliament from the Cabinet and bringing in non-National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) MPs to shore up his support.

A FEW YEARS AGO, WE WERE all gathered in our parents’ countryside home for the end of year holidays, and one day a heated argument broke out about the quality of education.

As a general agreement seemed to be emerging that education had gone to the dogs, our old woman, who had said nothing, got up, and as she walked to her kitchen, said: “You people are making too much of this education issue. Just let the children go and grow up in school.”

I had never thought of school as a place which, if it didn’t offer a meaningful education, was nevertheless a good one for rural children to go to and while away the time as they wait to become minor village officials, join the army, or become chicken thieves if all else failed.

In other words, the role of school had changed, and society needed to adjust its attitudes and expectations accordingly.

I was reminded of this question in the face of the recent spate of strikes in Kenya in which several schools have been torched, with a student being burnt to death in one.

The country is angry and shocked at the tools of sin – cocaine, bhang, alcohol, and “weapons” like petrol – that have been unearthed in searches at the troubled schools.

The Government has responded appropriately, banning mobile phones, TVs and DVDs from schools. Yet one can’t feel that we are all missing the big picture. It is criminal to burn property, and even more so, to kill someone with the fire. However, the schools’ crisis and burning of buildings is not uniquely Kenyan.

In the last year or so, 25 schools have been burnt in Uganda. Dozens of students have died in the fires. A few of the schools were burnt by rogue students, but most by other miscreants.

The tragedy of the fires aside, you might say that the arsonists are devils carrying messages that are well worth listening to.

In Britain, though you don’t have violent strikes and arson, the debate about education is even more furious.

Recently, Chris Parry, the controversial chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, an organisation that represents half of the 2,500 private schools in the UK, caused quite a storm when he told The Guardian that the reason state schools were in a crisis was because they were struggling with “unteachable” children, ignorant parents, staff who don’t want to be there, and a shortage of leadership.

His remarks, though slated as “snobbish and ill-informed”, deserve attention in East Africa. Parry said even private schools, which did better, needed to be more up-to-date and to face future challenges.

In this future, he said, computers will increasingly replace teachers.

HE PREDICTED THAT GREY DOG-eared textbooks will soon be out, and pupils will learn via Wikipedia-type programmes in class. The role of the teacher will be to help them apply the facts they build from the Internet.

Parry’s most interesting idea is his most controversial; that some students are simply “unteachable”.

To revive the coffee industry, we need a Marshall plan. The health of any industry is as good as the health of it key institutions.

Today, nearly all the key institutions in this sector are a pale shadow of their former selves.

And, nothing illustrates this point better than the present sorry predicament of the Kenya Planters Cooperative Union, the 70-year-old farmers’ company that used to mill all the coffee produced in the country.

When I started reporting coffee issues in the late 1980s, KPCU had a balance sheet size larger than most of these blue chip companies you see listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange today.

Coffee cooperatives were rich and powerful institutions, paying dividends and bonuses to farmers year in, year out.

The Coffee Board of Kenya, although State-controlled, operated more or less as a farmers’ company, the majority of its directors elected at an annual conference in which all coffee farming districts would be represented.

The Coffee Research Foundation was a well-funded, robust body conducting rigorous cutting-edge research on modern agronomical practices and passing it on to farmers. Ruiru 11, the pest-resistant seed variety was developed locally by our own researchers at this foundation.

I also enjoyed the politics. No crop in this country will give you better examples of how organised farmers can influence State policy or come together to resist interference into their affairs by power-hungry Government officials.

The Kenya Coffee Growers Association (KCGA) played a critical role on this score. Such was the influence the association commanded in the coffee industry that even in the days of the single-party dictatorship when what former President Moi said was law, coffee farmers would resist arbitrary Government decisions.

They had mastered lobby group politics and were always ready to confront and disagree with unpopular decisions by ministers of Agriculture.

I still remember how KCGA under the chairmanship of the late Zachariah Gakunju mobilised farmers in May 1987 to oppose a directive by President Moi to dissolve KPCU and to replace it with a proposed National Cooperative Coffee Union.

It was the regime’s way of eliminating or bringing under its control autonomous farmers’ organisations.

Earlier, the regime had dissolved the Kenya Farmers Association, which was a profitable body that had been created by European settler farmers in the colonial days to buy inputs in bulk and sell them at fair prices to farmers.

KCGA successfully organised the coffee farming fraternity to reject Moi’s proposal.

In March of the same year, the farmers angrily protested at an attempt by the Ministry of Agriculture to sack KPCU managing director Henry Kinyua and chief executive of the Cooperative Bank of Kenya Jason Kimbui from directorship of the Coffee Board of Kenya. Moi had to rescind the decision publicly.

Kenya's recent political imbroglio largely stems from a vigorous contestation between two paradigms of the nation-state. One group of the political elite promotes a model of the ethnic nation.

Jakob Rosel defines the ethnic nation as a closed nation premised on three assumptions i.e. (1) Mankind consists of different and easily definable peoples or ethnic groups which value and perpetuate their district identity. (2) The development of an ethnic identity best matures inside the group’s own controlled state. (3) The transformation of a people into a nation precedes and facilitates the conquest of its own nation-state.

Kenya’s other political elite supports a liberalised democratic open nation under which, to quote Rosel again, mankind is conceived as an aggregate of equal and free individuals who are unencumbered by tribal colour and loyalty.

Often, a leadership which envisions a democratic nation can be besieged by political entrepreneurs of the ethnic nation. These progressive rulers may then respond by veering towards the ideology of an ethnic nation and nation-state.

The Party of National Unity was, at the end of 2007, forced to oscillate between a democratic nation and an ethnic nation due to its competitors’ ability to mobilise key regional voting blocs against it.

Conversely, those who support the ethnic nation may lace their rhetoric with a commitment to championing a more inclusive democratic open nation. Thus vision, rhetoric and praxis are in incessant combat.

During the 1983 and 1988 elections, then President Moi adroitly isolated both the Kikuyu and the Luo ethnic nations and built a non-Kikuyu and non-Luo counterpart community and ethnic vote bank. Kenya was defined as the Kikuyu and Luo group on the one hand and the Rest.

In 2002, Kenya’s political entrepreneurs created the Kalenjin and non-Kalenjin split on which the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) was erected. Essentially the Orange Democratic Movement in 2007 strove to mobilise non-Gema voters as a single ethnic nation to defeat the so-called Mt Kenya region voters.

Clearly, the political party in Kenya is essentially the political competition vehicle of an ethnic nation or coalition of several ethnic groups which have loosely coalesced into one ethnic nation.

Mr Raila Odinga’s National Development Party’s merger with Kanu was meant to aggregate a Luo and Kalenjin (alongside Akamba, Luhyia, Miji Kenda, Arab and Taita) nation. This political union was eventually consummated in 2005, and, minus the Akamba, in 2007.

In 2007 again, DP, ODM-K and Narc Kenya unsuccessfully struggled to shed the ethnic tag. The events of December 2007 and January-February 2008 were a culmination of the transformation of social inequalities, cultural resentments and economic competition between ethnic groups through dangerous ethnic nationalism into politicised ethnic conflicts and, finally, civil strife.

Between 2003-2007, Mr Odinga was able to create an ethnic nation out of several ethnic nations because the peasants, workers and lumpen groups from each of these ethnic groups saw the possibility of their tribal leader ascending into the presidency.

Several ethnic groups which craft a coalition of ethnic nations expect that they will control the attendant ethnic nation-state. In 2008, for Mr Odinga, a sense of fair distribution of the ODM slate of appointments was thus critical to the rise of his political party within the Grand Coalition and into the future.

From 2003, President Kibaki decided to modernise Kenya on the basis of liberal democracy, the market and nascent welfarism. His notion of an open society saw him mobilise the country on a development agenda.

But this was temporarily challenged by the 2007 post-election crisis. Instead of receiving kudos for reviving Kenya, the ethnically inspired nation sought to reverse the gains.

Even when their respective lieutenants within the Grand Coalition Government are busy hurling brickbats at each other, the President and the PM have not exchanged unkind words since they went into the power-sharing deal.

The two men may be polar opposites in many ways, but they do seem to enjoy a personal chemistry that puzzles many.

While the President rarely calls Cabinet meetings, a fact that may reinforce impressions of a dysfunctional government, he hosts the PM for weekly meetings at State House.

The coalition often presents the picture of a fractured government made up of two deeply hostile camps pulling in opposite directions. This makes even more vital the roles played by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga in keeping things together, and they have both been demonstrating at every opportunity that the coalition is united.

This is a scenario that confuses their respective sets of allies, many of who remain not only openly suspicious of the opposite side, but also worried that the two principals are leaving them out of the power-sharing equation.

In the Kibaki camp, for instance, many of the traditional political power brokers are openly resentful that they have lost out as the President comes to rely more and more on Mr Odinga whose clout is growing by the day.

Powerful politicians such as Cabinet ministers Martha Karua, Kiraitu Murungi and John Michuki might have thought that the entry of Mr Odinga into government merely gave them time to re-group and consolidate a hold on power while the newcomer played a peripheral role.

However, they have had to watch as Mr Odinga became the one to define the real role of the new Office of Prime Minister and firmly consolidate his own position within the power structure.

Then there are Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka of ODM-K and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta of Kanu — the initial leaders incorporated into the PNU coalition to keep ODM at bay. The formation of the Grand Coalition reduced their clout in the Government dramatically.

Even the early tussle between Mr Odinga and Mr Musyoka over the pecking order is no longer an issue as the former has entrenched his position.

Within Mr Odinga’s ODM, there have been similar issues, and compatriots who at one time might have viewed themselves as co-leaders have had to adapt to the new realities. Key members of the ODM Pentagon controlling sizeable blocs, notably Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi and Agriculture minister William Ruto, are now seen as ordinary Cabinet ministers rather than regional kingpins.

Mr Ruto’s populous Kalenjin bloc, however, remains a problem for Mr Odinga who has to increasingly contend with accusations that he sold out once he ascended to high office.

In many ways, the entry of Mr Odinga into government might have been the best thing that ever happened for President Kibaki in his final term.

If anything he has become a key asset. On his overseas travels, on meetings locally with visiting foreign dignitaries and also from his close links with the diplomatic community, the PM has emerged as a most enthusiastic spokesman and salesman for the coalition.

As seen on his visit to he UK, Mr Odinga is always effusive in his praise of the President and the way in which the two of them are working closely to shape a new Kenya.

The President will not be a contender in 2012, and thus unlike some of his allies, does not see the Prime Minister as a threat.

I don’t know whether this has something do with the selection last year of our famous wildebeest migration as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but we seem to have an affinity for all things GNU.

The creature President Kibaki cobbled together in the middle of his first term in an effort to keep at bay rebellious elements within the then governing coalition was a GNU.

Now as the President’s political camp jumps hither and thither like a headless chicken, some fellows have crafted their own GNU, the Grand National Union, in what is becoming an increasingly comic series of disjointed manoeuvres in the bid to have a footing come 2012.

I am not quite sure what the new GNU is supposed to be about, but it reflects the utter confusion in President Kibaki’s backyard as succession politics comes to the fore and every little grouping starts looking out for its own survival.

The President wants PNU, put together as a coalition of parties for the express purpose of securing his re-election in 2007, transformed into a united political party.

He failed with a move to unite the original Narc in a similar fashion five years ago, and there is little chance now that the PNU affiliate parties will agree to dissolve. If anything, they are all busy looking towards securing their positions post-Kibaki.

Hence Ms Martha Karua striking out on her own with Narc Kenya; Mr Musikari Kombo in Ford Kenya still signalling a determination to remain independent; Mr Mwangi Kiunjuri and others scampering towards the new GNU, and even President Kibaki’s own ‘‘original’’ party, the DP, indicating through its present leader, Joseph Munyao, that its wants to remain intact.

The source of everything seems to be the very early jostling for the Kibaki succession. There are indications that the President and some of his close advisors are trying to manage the process, but some are beginning to see the Head of State as largely irrelevant to shaping the future dispensation.

President Kibaki might not personally care too much as he serves out his final term, but it is apparent there are many around him who live in mortal dread of life without one of their own at the helm.

And here their limited thinking focuses not on how PNU, Narc Kenya, GNU or any of the other mutations can secure power, but how their region, Central Kenya, can remain in power.
They ignore the first unwritten rule of Kenyan politics: There must be some rotation at State House.

PRESIDENT KENYATTA COULD NOT be succeeded by a Kikuyu and neither could President Moi be succeeded by a Kalenjin.

President Kibaki was extremely fortunate to win himself a second term, probably with some sleight of hand, after having succeeded in turning most ethnic constituencies solidly against the Kikuyu. Anyone who imagines now that Kenyans would elect another Kikuyu to succeed him come 2012 must be on Cloud-Cuckooland.

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I always assumed that Prof Samson Ongeri was of advanced education. After all that professorship must have come from somewhere, and the man actually taught at university – medicine, no less.

And his medicine was the real thing, unlike that practised by the myriad ‘professors’ and ‘doctors’ in the classified pages who promise to cure you of cancer, Aids and every other disease known to humankind.