Some of us have been singing since 2007 until we became sore that Kenya needs a break from yet another Kikuyu or Kalenjin president. In an open letter to President Kibaki on July 25, 2011, I implored the now-retired head of state as follows:
“When we say Your Excellency needs to ensure peaceful handover of power to your successor, as well as ensure a preceding period of peaceful campaigning and elections, we are also implicitly asking Your Excellency, and now openly urge you to use your power and influence to make sure that we not only have free and fair elections in 2012 but, equally importantly, you must ensure that tribalism is crushed as the determinative factor in electing our leaders.”
I further implored the third president of Kenya thus, “If you accomplish this, Your Excellency, namely, if you play a key role in ending tribalism as a major determinative factor in presidential elections, Your Excellency would not only have presided over the changing of Kenya from the old to the new, … you would have also planted a seed that would germinate to an even more beautiful Kenya where our affairs are governed not by tribe and negative ethnicity, but by who we are as Kenyans.”
I concluded my plea to the man from Othaya appealing to his sense of patriotism, noting, “[the] way I see it, Your Excellency, there are a number of things you can do to lead in this effort to defeat tribalism-based schemes to succeed you and therefore cleanse our nation of this debilitating disease of tribalism in Kenya and these are:
“First, and I say this with all due respect, Your Excellency, it is incumbent upon you, as the president of our nation, to inform our brothers and sisters from Central that, with 42 tribes in Kenya, and having had Your Excellency and our first President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta elected from Central to lead our country, let our brothers and sisters from the area show love and unity with other Kenyans and vote for someone other than their own this time around.
“Doing so, Your Excellency, will not be the end of Central as some might seriously believe; rather, it would be the beginning of new and fresh relations between our brothers and sisters from Central and the rest of the country, the past notwithstanding.”
I don’t know whether Kibaki ever saw my letter, but I do know a key adviser did and that fact notwithstanding, the letter was not paid any attention. Rather, we had the exact opposite.
It was therefore music to our progressive ears when President Uhuru Kenyatta announced long after the handshake, that it was time another son or daughter from outside Mt Kenya led the country.
The chorus was joined by leaders from the region, starting with Jubilee insiders like David Murathe, Governor Anne Waiguru and opinion leaders such as Prof Mutahi Ngunyi.
We are still singing, and more and more Kenyans of goodwill will join the chorus and soon a vast majority of Kenyans from across the country will be singing the same song.
The only ones who will not join in this noble song are Raila haters, Deputy President William Ruto loyalists and generally those who have no good reason at all to oppose having someone other than a Kikuyu or Kalenjin leading the nation.
Given there is objectively no chance that any one of the OKA leaders can be elected president if Raila and Ruto are on the ballot, then it can only be the case that OKA is only positioning itself for post-election crumbs.
Nothing else would make any sense why two of their leaders so vehemently refuse to back Raila thus far and it does not have to; we have an election to go through and the chips fall where they do for the better of the country, if Uhuru has his way in backing Raila.
And he should.
Those doubting will have the shock Uhuru promised long ago.
Samuel Omwenga is a legal analyst and political commentator
