About a week ago, I came across an article that dealt with a surprising topic: Hillary Clinton running for US president in 2024.
To understand how bizarre this sounds to anyone who follows US politics, you have to remember that this is a woman who in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, was expected to steamroll the rival who back then was still Senator Barack Obama. However, Obama beat her in the primaries and went on to beat Senator John McCain, the Republican contender, to become the 44th president of the US.
Many had thought that she was on her way to becoming the first woman to serve as president of the US; and were bitterly disappointed when she lost to Obama.
But she then waited out Obama’s eight years in the White House, and in 2016, ran again for president. This time she got the Democrat’s nomination – only to lose to Donald Trump, despite having actually got more votes than him, owing to America’s unique electoral college system.
So, you would think her career in politics was at last dead and buried.
Only it apparently, is not. And nor should it be.
Two examples from West Africa remind us that political ambition is not something that the devout politician will easily discard. They tend to keep running even when by all accounts, they should long have retired.
In Senegal, the former president, Abdoulaye Wade only won on his fourth attempt (in 2000) having lost in three previous attempts. And the current Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari also only made it to the presidency on his fourth attempt (Incidentally, he had earlier served as a military dictator in the mid-1980s.)
Perhaps most impressive of them all is the current president of Zambia, Hakainde Hichilema, who lost five consecutive times and only won on his sixth attempt in 2021. A man capable of bearing such a series of defeats and continuing with his quest for his country’s top seat is surely no ordinary man.
And of course, in Kenya we have the former Prime Minister Raila Odinga right now in the midst of his fifth attempt at the presidency, and already being proclaimed by his ardent supporters as “the fifth president of Kenya” despite the candidate himself admitting freely that he has a tough race ahead of him.
But in my view, the political figure who is staging the most remarkable resurgence yet is one Cyrus Jirongo, former MP and Cabinet Minister, but best known as the chairman, in 1992, of the Youth for Kanu lobby group, and back then believed to be perhaps Kenya’s youngest millionaire.
Owing to the financial problems faced by his business empire, he has in recent years had such a low profile, that his name has barely been in the news at all. And yet now here he is, back at the big table, acknowledged as a 'principal' of the One Kenya Alliance, which includes Senator Gideon Moi and former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka.
It is in many ways a truly miraculous comeback.
All this serves to remind us that just as some of us are addicted to alcohol; others to smoking; and yet others to gambling; politics too – specifically the prospect of gaining political power – can also be an addiction.
For other than as a kind of addiction, how else would you explain why someone like Hillary Clinton may yet run for president again?
It’s true enough that we all have personal goals we had set ourselves that subsequently eluded us. But we ordinary folk tend to take such defeats and humiliations as just part of life.
Hillary Clinton certainly wanted very badly to make history as the first female president of the US. And a door seems to be opening for her to resurrect that dream.
First, there are plenty of valid concerns over whether or not President Joe Biden’s age and health would allow him to run a vigorous campaign in 2024.
Second, there seems to be an unspoken consensus in the US that the Vice President, Kamala Harris, may well have had immense symbolic value in the last presidential election, but she is not a viable presidential candidate in her own right.
So why not Hillary Clinton as the democratic candidate for president in 2024?
