- Put another way, there is not much Ruto cannot do with Mudavadi without the merger but a merger will render Mudavadi hapless.
- Allowing to be played like a guitar and having the presidency handed to him are things tales are made of.
Image: HILTON OTENYO
A good case can be made that President William Ruto has been in re-election mode since the day before he was sworn into office as the country’s fifth president. So much so that an even better case can be made that the President has done and continues to do this at the expense of solving the country’s myriad of problems.
President Ruto's strategy, as the leader of UDA, has been a complex one. His first priority has been to prevent Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua from turning the tables on him, as he did with his former boss, retired President Uhuru Kenyatta. Simultaneously, he has been diligently working to build a new coalition, a move he hopes could secure him a second term in office.
I am reticent to say “elected” for the second term because that’s just a phantom when it comes to Kenyan and African elections.
As always, if you wish to debate that fact, it is best to do it with yourself and spare everyone else the time annoyance of debating the obvious.
On this prong of Ruto’s dual strategy, namely, building a new coalition, topping the list has been having UDA swallow as many of its affiliate parties as possible.
Interestingly, this has been tougher getting done than Ruto and company anticipated.
The reason is simple; unlike previous presidents who sought to and succeeded in having their parties swallow other parties, the head of state is without the benefit of history and favourable dynamics that made the previous mergers memorable.
Ruto's efforts to build a new coalition face a formidable headwind. Even if he manages to make some progress, the outcome is unlikely to match the success of previous mergers. This underscores the uphill battle he is facing in his political endeavours.
To be sure, and the irony here is the two previous major political party mergers successfully accomplished two diametrically opposed objectives.
In 2002, when then-National Democratic Party leader Raila Odinga merged NDP with KANU, no one, including then President and KANU leader Daniel Arap Moi knew that Raila would engineer the biggest ouster of Moi and his project from within the ruling party. In other words, the KANU-NDP merger produced the opposite outcome of what mergers are supposed to do.
In 1964, Ronald Ngala, the co-founder and leader of the Kenya African Democratic Union, announced the dissolution of that party, which joined the government "under the leadership of Mzee Kenyatta", leading to a de facto one-party state under KANU.
The irony there was KADU was principally formed in 1960 to prevent the big tribes in Kenya from dominating politics and suffocating smaller or marginalised tribes and communities. In that sense, the merger did accomplish limited success for what the merger was intended to accomplish, as Mzee Kenyatta did attempt to accommodate these smaller tribes and marginalised communities, though barely.
Hindsight is always 20-20, but had KADU stuck its ground and instead focused on growing the party, it would have accomplished more for itself and those it represented than the crumbs it was thrown at the bottom of the dining table.
The question is, should Ruto succeed in arm-twisting ANC leader and Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi into folding ANC and having it swallowed by UDA, will the merger be akin to Raila’s and KANU in 2002 or Ngala and KANU’s 1964.
The money should be on the latter. That is for the betting type; if you are not one and wish to have a purely analytical answer, then here it is:
Ruto seeks to have ANC merged with UDA for all the right reasons for Ruto and all the wrong reasons for ANC and the future of Kenya Kwanza. Merging ANC with UDA will create three power centres that will ultimately undo Kenya Kwanza.
Put another way, there is not much Ruto cannot do with Mudavadi without the merger but a merger will render Mudavadi hapless and probably dash his hopes of ever becoming a president.
Were Mudavadi wiser, he would remain put in ANC, play dumb around Gachagua while trying to be his own man.
Allowing to be played like a guitar and having the presidency handed to him are things tales are made of.