It has lately been a season of the major political players in the Kibaki Succession getting to show their hand. President Mwai Kibaki, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi and Eldoret North MP William Ruto have all revealed some of the most closely guarded sides to their political personas and strategies in the first quarter of 2012.
And, with the exception of Mudavadi’s challenge against Raila inside ODM, the revelations have been mostly inadvertent, some of them even ill-timed and freighted with prospects of hell to pay somewhere in the near future. And all of them have been in the context of strategising for the change of guard at State House.
The Kalonzo Musyoka-Uhuru-Ruto melodrama inside the so-called G7 Alliance several weeks ago finally made President Kibaki show his hand in the struggle for his own succession, something about which he had contrived to maintain an apparently hands-off, far-above-the-fray composure for months, even years.
Kibaki’s apparent aloofness on the subject of his successor at State House was even beginning to develop into an honest-broker posture, so much so that when Raila’s supporters urged him to his face to declare the PM “Tosha” during the official opening of the Kisumu International Airport in February and he pointedly did not, all sides of the political divide took it in their stride, assuming he would evince no overt partisanship one way or the other.
Uhuru and Ruto brutalise VP
But when he received news of Uhuru and Ruto moving to ditch Kalonzo because the latter would not make arrangements for the firing of Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister Mutula Kilonzo, Kibaki reacted with a show of some of the swiftest resoluteness in a long career of equivocation, procrastination, fence-sitting and compromise.
Within hours, the VP, DPM and Ruto were in a meeting at the Norfolk Hotel clearly called by the President and his handlers and from where they emerged wearing the most patently for-public-consumption expressions of their political careers so far, proclaiming one of the most shallow and unconvincing reassurances of Kenyan politics, to the effect that, in Kalonzo’s own words, there was more that unites them than divides them and they were still together and a united front.
But the VP looked shell-shocked, Ruto switched on his toothiest, highest-wattage smile and Uhuru’s features and body language clearly signaled he wanted nothing more than to establish the greatest daylight between himself and Kalonzo.
Meanwhile, the President’s discreet chess master credentials lay in tatters. The Principal of the Grand Coalition regime has all along been strategising against the Co-Principal.
In the intervening weeks Kalonzo’s profile in the Kibaki succession stakes has dipped so drastically even some observers who had everything riding on him no longer consider him to be a serious contender.
Having trampled all over Kalonzo, Uhuru and Ruto revealed just how potent they are on the President’s side of the Grand Coalition, despite being suspects with confirmed charges at the ICC. In retrospect, they are perhaps fortunate that their determined push for Kilonzo’s censure in Parliament as well as firing from the Cabinet both failed. If these moves had succeeded and a member of the Cabinet’s ICC Committee had lost his ministerial flag on the say-so of two suspects with confirmed charges before the Court, a completely different national controversy with truly dire international implications would now be raging unabated about the unified clout of these Presidential wannabes. Clearly a case of being careful what one prays for!
Raila erupts, shaking Mountain and Valley
And then the affair of the alleged British Foreign and Commonwealth Office apparently leaked document surfaced in Parliament. According to Yatta MP Kiema Kilonzo, the document indicated that the PM was in cahoots with a number of meddling British ministers and high ranking bureaucrats in a plot aimed at both ensuring that Uhuru and Ruto were remanded in ICC custody for the duration of their cases and surreptitiously investigating President Kibaki over the PEV with a view to having him face trial for crimes against humanity in his retirement.
Raila was in Belgium on official business when the controversy detonated in Parliament back home, but his reaction to the “UK dossier” was swift, of volcanic fury and three-pronged. First came the statement from the PM’s Secretariat, distributed to the newsrooms and reproduced verbatim in paid-for advertising space in the national newspapers. And then followed Raila’s own oral reaction, hitting directly at Uhuru and Ruto.
The PM’s swift and forthright reaction revealed a number of things to discerning observers of the political scene, the first of which was that, alone of the top political players he has a rapid response secretariat that operates to international standards. Secondly, Raila revealed the truly low regard he has for his most ardent political foes, Uhuru and Ruto.
But this revelation swiftly translated into a ratcheting of political foreboding in precisely the areas Raila appears to be working hardest to distil some electoral support from in his quest for the post-Kibaki presidency. Throughout Central Kenya, for instance, wherever two or three individuals were gathered and politics was the topic of conversation, the gist of the talk was how dare an Odinga suggest that a Kenyatta belongs behind bars. There was not-dissimilar horror in Rift Valley on behalf of Ruto.
Jomo’s succession example
Why is the showing of Kibaki’s hand this early in the game in his own succession so significant? For two reasons – first, it appeared for quite a while that part of Kibaki’s presidential legacy would in fact be that he would not take sides in his own transition, borrowing a leaf from his mentor Jomo Kenyatta (Uhuru’s father).
Jomo went to his grave without evincing a choice of preferred successor, despite enormous pressure being brought to bear on him by his inner circle, including via First Lady Mama Ngina Muhoho Kenyatta (Uhuru’s mother). Jomo is famously and reliably said to have told Ngina, who had been sent to him to sound him out on the subject of his own successor by the Njoroge Mungai wing of the so-called Kiambu Mafia (ranged against the Charles Njonjo faction) that dead men cast no votes and he had no view on the issue outside what was prescribed in the Constitution.
Unlike Moi, who became such an active participant in his own succession that the 2002 Presidential race developed into much more of a vote against him and all his works, despite and in spite of the fact that he was not a candidate, than any other factor, Kibaki was widely expected to take a Kenyatta-like position on his own exit from State House. He certainly actively gave that impression for months, even years, on end.
Secondly, the fact that Kibaki has now been revealed to be in the thick of the strategising for his own succession and has taken the side of a political duo whose modus vivendi and modus operandi both start and end with nothing short of preventing the Coalition’s co-Principal from succeeding him points straightaway to a most discomfiting prospect for many thinking Kenyans. After the 2007 debacle, it was the hope of millions that Kenya would not see another Kibaki-Raila contest for State House, even by proxy on the part of one or both of the Principals.
Kibaki and Raila occupy unique niches in Kenyan political history: they were the main disputants of the 2007 Presidential elections results, a dispute that led straightaway into a spiral of chaos, the post-election violence of 2007-08, Kenya’s most serious outbreak of instability since the 1950s; no other candidates have ever garnered more than 5 million votes apiece in Kenyan electioneering history.
What’s more, Raila is gunning for the Presidency from the vantage point of halfway incumbency and a consistently commanding lead in the opinion polls for four years in a row, again a phenomenal circumstance in our political history. Uhuru and Ruto too occupy brand-new but much more discomfiting and ominous niches in Kenyan politics. They have acquired the extremely dubious distinction of becoming the first Kenyans ever to be accused of crimes against humanity by a UN court.
Kalonzo’s lack of a hand
And in the cross-hairs of all this extraordinary and unprecedented political activity stands Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, the Ninth Vice President of Kenya. If he had credibility issues before Uhuru and Ruto tried to shut him out of the G7, Kalonzo now has a roaring credibility crisis on his hands. This is the lowest ebb of his political fortunes. If others have been revealing their hand, whether calculatedly or inadvertently, what has been revealed is that the VP not only has no hand to play but also nothing up his sleeve.
What’s more, the VP seems to be thoroughly ill-equipped to deal with his predicament – as a political operative, in terms of the resources, particularly his strategy and communications teams, at his disposal, and even as a pillar of the Kibaki Era establishment. On all sides of the political divide nerves are clearly raw, tempers are fraying, the options are bewildering and the clock to only the second presidential transition in 50 years of self-rule is ticking.