President Uhuru, is the price of your pyrrhic victories worth it?

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

Pyrrhus was king of Epirus and was one of the strongest opponents of early Rome. In 280 BC, he invaded Italy after allying himself with Tarentum, a Greek-speaking city that resented the Roman Republic’s domination over their homeland.

King Pyrrhus was extremely confident he could extend his empire. So, he invaded Italy with a force of 25,000 men and 20 war elephants. This was the first legionary of its kind that the Romans had ever faced. King Pyrrhus immediately scored his first victory in this battle at Heraclea. The following year, he defeated the Romans a second time during a heated clash in the battle of Asculum.

By this time, King Pyrrhus fancied himself a latter-day Alexander the Great. He hoped that his victorious invasions would give his empire a foothold in Italy. But while he had defeated the Romans in Heraclea and Asculum, his victories had caused him unacceptably heavy losses. He lost more than 7,500 of his most elite fighters, including officers and commanders, many of whom were his friends, and his prized war elephants.

While preparing for yet another battle at Beneventum, King Pyrrhus realised that he had no way of replacing his casualties. He did not have anywhere near enough potential recruits to replenish his army. Meanwhile, the Romans were only temporarily defeated. They could replace their lost soldiers with relative ease.

Even worse, the two losses had so enraged the Romans and made them more willing to continue fighting. King Pyrrhus’s failure to deal the enemy a complete deathblow, sent morale plummeting within his ranks. Upon serious reflection, he told his troops, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” Reluctantly he called off the battle and sailed back to Greece.

Since then, this has come to be known as Pyrrhic victory.

Pyrrhic victory is a victory that is not worth winning because so much is lost to achieve it. It is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. It takes a heavy toll that negates any true sense of achievement, or damages long-term progress.

Kenya has been at war with itself. A war for political hegemony. And while we have not applied the weapons of war to physically kill or maim each other, our battlefields have been our courtrooms, our parliaments, our campaign fields, and our national celebrations.

Like King Pyrrhus, President Uhuru Kenyatta has had a couple of victories that have been secured at a great cost to his legacy and to the taxpayer. Despite court orders, he has retained the transfer and management of the Kenya Meat Commission at the Ministry of Defence from the Ministry of Agriculture. In return, the Kenya Defence Forces managing the institution have boasted of their ability to pay suppliers within 72 hours turnaround. Is this achievement worth undermining and making nonsense of the express orders of the court?

Despite the Constitution requiring him to appoint all judges that were recommended by the Judicial Service Commission without any further review, the President has rejected the appointment of six judges to the Court of Appeal, Lands, Environment, Employment and Labour Relations, citing that they have integrity suitability issues which make them unfit to hold those offices, never mind that they are currently adjudicating matters. Although the appointment of the other 34 will ease the workload and backlog of the cases that have been occasioned by the long delay in their appointment, is this partial appointment, worth contravening the constitution? 

Despite the Public Health Order that prohibits huge public gatherings as a measure to prevent Covid-19 transmission, the President went ahead and launched a couple of infrastructure developments in Kisumu, which culminated in his presiding over the nation’s Madaraka Day celebrations that saw large crowds of people gathered to witness the occasion.

Was this celebration and show of his administration’s pork-barrel magnanimity to the region worth the resultant high cases of Covid-19 currently being reported, and making the region the next epicentre of this pandemic?

Despite a loss at the High Court that declared the BBI - which the President has been championing – illegal and unconstitutional, the President has gone ahead and assembled a battery of lawyers to appeal the High Court’s decision at the Court of Appeal. Is his constitutional pursuit to overturn the High Court’s decision worth it, given the already sunk cost to the taxpayer that has footed the BBI bill to date, and who will eventually pay for the costs of the appeal and probably at the Supreme Court?

Despite several requests by his party members to hold a Parliamentary Group meeting of all its members, the President, who is also the Jubilee Party leader, has neglected to do so. This has been perceived as his avoiding to directly engage with those who do not appear to support his political decisions and alignment with the ODM party.

Has his inflexibility in management of party and state affairs been worth the falling out with his Deputy, and some of his strongest supporters and grassroots mobilisers? This has culminated in their being stripped of their parliamentary leadership, and left his political party a forlorn shell of its former self.

Begs the question, have the President’s victories been worth winning because in the process he has lost so much in terms of his legacy, his friendships, his political troops, and his fidelity to the Constitution? Have his victories been tantamount to defeat given the heavy toll they have taken in long-term progress particularly of our Constitution? Has he and his supporters been celebrating pyrrhic victories? You be the judge.

Finally, my unsolicited advice is to President Kenyatta. Allow me to tell you a story about John Henry. John Henry was a railroad worker in America. He was also very stubborn and did not embrace divergent opinions and ways of doing things. One day, his company announced that they were going to introduce drilling machines in place of the workers to increase efficiency.

John Henry was enraged to hear that drilling machines might take over his job. He decided to prove that his drilling skills were superior to the machines. To indulge him, his bosses arranged a contest and to their surprise, the results were quite impressive.

The machine drill broke after drilling three metres, while John Henry drilled four metres in the same amount of time. As the rest of his fellow workers celebrated his victory, which they also deemed to be their victory, John Henry collapsed holding a hammer in his hand, and died of exhaustion. John Henry might have been victorious against the drill, but that small win was meaningless in the face of his subsequent death. Like King Pyrrhus, he won the battle, but lost the war.

Your Excellency, is your legacy worth being littered with pyrrhic victories, but ultimately losing the war for the soul of this nation?

Once you hear the details of a victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat – Jean-Paul Sarte