Mt Kenya region residents do not know how to exist outside the corridors of power. For they have been inside for far too long, they do not know how the outside feels and looks like.
The trauma of waiting for 24 years for the Daniel Moi regime to fade away still torments them. There is wailing in the mountains. There is anxiety in the highlands. There is panic in the Kikuyu Nation. And the desperation grows as the Kenyatta succession dateline nears.
The anxiety is heavy because the centre-post has crashed. There is no ethnic nexus for the State House race in 2022. The Mugumo tree may have fallen — literally — and the architect of the so-called 'Tyranny of Numbers’ has declared it dead – as dead as dodo.
Who cut the Mugumo tree - that traditional symbol of sturdy Agikuyu political power? Did some foxy politician, in the language of Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power, cut the tree to scatter the monkeys?
Central's seasoned hands such as former Gatanga MP Peter Kenneth are out in the cold, thanks to Jubilee nomination conspiracies of the 2017 General Election.
The former Gichugu MP and Cabinet minister Martha Karua could not make it to the kitchen. Her gallant struggle to win the Kirinyaga gubernatorial race, even through litigation up to the Supreme Court, backfired.
Former Starehe MP Maina Kamanda, like other seasoned politicians, lost to a greenhorn — Charles Njagua — in Starehe. Spurned by ambitious co-owners of the Jubilee Party, Kamanda retained visibility only through nomination as MP.
The massacre of the old guard in the central region in 2017 had less to do with the preference for freshers. It was a scheme in the Uhuru Succession matrix. Hirelings were preferred over the old guards. As they would say, 'my frend, it was a strategy.'
Nairobi county is in a leadership crisis because of this conspiracy. The likely governor, Kenneth, was discarded for the erratic and beleaguered Mike Sonko. These should be ominous signs of ruination when people vote with their stomachs.
Legislative representation of central Kenya, even at the gubernatorial level, is a cocktail of first-timers and a lacklustre lot that does not register in the high octane succession politics. It was a Jubilee intra-party strategy for 2022.
At best, the first-term MPs can be 'rented' to give voice to the succession ramble. Renting is the word, as maverick pundit Mutahi Ngunyi argues in his Fifth Estate, an online discourse on pertinent issues around public governance.
Ngunyi, the brains behind Tyranny of Numbers, has declared that superiority, generously dangled during the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections, is dead. He has a plausible justification for the dearth of Tyranny of Numbers.
There is no one from Central Kenya with a clout to rally the Gema communities to the cause of retaining power in the House of Mumbi. At best they would have to make concessions. This is why President Uhuru Kenyatta's tongue-in-cheek quip at the Sagana caucus last week that he would not mind being a Prime Minister is coded. That office does not exist, but it can be created through bridge-building compromises.
The other alternative is to be scattered in a way that the Gema voice would dim in the post-Uhuru dispensation. A people who have been used to power for decades may not want to be on the fringes. Compromise can be a strategy for accommodation.
Inheritors of the vote-rich central turf of former presidents are positioning themselves to grab the territory. How to do this, is not important for some, doing it is everything. Some want it through dialogue, rebranding, building bridges, and concessions. Some want it through deception, lies, fear-mongering, and propaganda. But the situation is much more complicated.
Functionaries of the deep state in the 1970s such as then Attorney General Charles Njonjo were soft on the Kenyatta I Succession. They hoped Daniel Moi, then Vice President, would be a passing cloud.
The cloud lingered for 24 excruciating years. While it lasted, the Kikuyu felt excluded and would be among lead players in the Moi Succession clashes of the 1990s. They wanted power back to the House of Mumbi. They indeed returned it through the Mwai Kibaki presidency in 2002. Kibaki held on to power for 10 years, including a controversial second term after the violent 2007 presidential election.
The possibility of another exclusion from the corridors of power, after another 10 years of Uhuru, worries the region. A region that has always viewed tenancy of State House as an entitlement. Kenyatta I occupied the seat from independence in 1963 to his death in 1978.
The reign of the simba of central laid a foundation for ethnic entitlement that came with deliberate use of political power to accumulate wealth. There had to be a way of protecting this economic power, some of which may have been proceeds of impunity.
The history of AfricaniSation of white-owned businesses, especially productive lands in the highlands, including in the Rift Valley, is a record of a skew that favoured those close to State power.
Uhuru has a historic chance to mend Kenya.
