For some superstitious people, August in Kenya is a jinxed month, especially if you are a politician.
For many such people, Jomo Kenyatta’s passing on August 22, 1978, is said to have sparked the jinx.
Fast forward to August 14, 1992, and the jinx strikes again. This time with opposition presidential candidate and renowned anti-colonial activist Masinde Muliro.
Muliro died suddenly at JKIA after he disembarked from his flight from London. The tragedy in his death was that there were those who thought he might have been the compromise candidate to reunite the one-time political juggernaut Ford party.
A decade later, there was the 2003 death in a London hospital of Vice President Michael Kijana Wamalwa, who died, uncannily, on August 23, a day after the country marked a quarter-century of old man Jomo being dead.
While none of these dates and facts can be denied, rational people will tell you that’s just the way the cookie crumbles and there is nothing special about the eighth month of the year for Kenyan politicians.
Of course, the next general election is scheduled to take place on August 9 next year, and depending on how that goes, it could very well be added to the August jinx list.
In fact, depending on who you are backing to win, it could still be a jinx either way. But let’s wait and see.
You might as well say December is a jinxed month for Kenyan elections. In fact, depending on how selectively you study political history, the twelfth month has had its fair share of shocks and surprises, too.
December 12, 1963, may have brought with it many hopes for the future, but by 1969, things had changed radically.
Speaking of jinxes, imagine how cursed 77 Kenyan MPs felt after the votes from Kenya’s first post-independence general election on December 6, 1969, had been counted and they were found to have lost?
The voters had last voted for the whole country in the run-up to the independence election. At that time, they had a choice of five political parties and just about a third of the 275 candidates on offer were independents.
In the interim, the main opposition had crossed the floor to join Kanu. The African People’s party, the Baluhya Political Union and the Coast People’s Party had all disappeared.
Of the 77 MPs struck down at the ballot, there were five Cabinet ministers and 15 assistant ministers, all of whom must have wondered why the voters had forsaken them, even if some knew deep in their hears exactly why.
It would take another 23 years for the December ballot box jinx to occur. But before that, December 1991 had been dramatic, with the once all-powerful single party Kanu forced to vote for competition by amending the Constitution to allow for a return to multiparty politics.
That December also saw Mwai Kibaki, the man who had been Kanu’s first full-time employee at its founding, run away to join the DP.
The former VP, who had once said an electoral defeat for Kanu would be as difficult as trying to cut down a fig tree with a razor blade, realised his presidential ambitions were going nowhere fast in Kanu and decamped.
The elections eventually took place on December 29. This time there were 188 seats to play for and a disunited opposition fractured the vote. Kanu won a contested poll fraught with irregularities.
Kanu lost just about half of its previous complement of MPs, and perhaps one day historians will trace the party’s long slide into electoral irrelevance to this election.
We all know about the December 2007 election and frankly, the less said about that, the better, especially with some of the echoes from that abomination being heard in the lead-up to next year’s poll.
As for this December, well, it isn’t over yet and anything could happen.
