Sometime last year, I argued on these pages that the best political and presidential path for ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi was at the feet of ODM boss Raila Odinga.
The following week, his handlers sent a certain professor with a right of reply, which was so insult-laden that it fell just short of calling me a three-horned alien from a faraway planet.
In these streets, we learn to live with the fact that nearly every reply will first judge you by your surname, and it will be downhill from there. But no amount of name calling can rewrite history, especially where witnesses are still alive.
Following the death of Kisumu West MP and LDP big shot Joab Omino in 2004, the party, Raila and the Luo community initially extended an offer to Mudavadi — who had been soundly whipped in Sabatia by Moses Akaranga in 2002 — to return from the political cold by vying for the seat in the subsequent by-election.
Narc had by then run into political headwinds following the failure to honour the MoU, and the LDP formation was already looking ahead to 2007, and the role Mudavadi could play in it.
For context, you have to remember — and former Vice President Moody Awori confirms this in his book, Riding On A Tiger — that Mudavadi had been the Rainbow rebels’ Western bloc choice for presidential candidate, when leaving Kanu in 2002.
Until he succumbed to President Daniel Moi’s overtures and returned to Kanu to take up the role of VP for three months. In asking him to consider inheriting Omino’s seat, LDP and the Luo community were basically dusting the script and replaying it for 2004.
But Mudavadi declined the offer. Undeterred, the LDP wing, having morphed into ODM, again fished Mudavadi from the cold in 2007, raised him to the party’s high table and on September 1, 2007 at the Kasarani Auditorium during the ODM presidential nominations, Raila unilaterally raised Mudavadi’s hand as his running mate.
This was despite then Eldoret North MP William Ruto feeling at the time, and later that he had done more to get the elevation instead.
The fallout between Raila and Ruto may have started right on that podium. Just five months later, when the national accord was signed after the post-election violence, Raila again picked Mudavadi as the deputy prime minister and snubbed Ruto.
In that entire period, when LDP and by extension the Luo had banked on Mudavadi as a future presidential candidate, if one of its own couldn’t make it, community elders liked to point out that he was nearly the only top politician who had never uttered derogatory words against them.
Which is why I was thoroughly shocked to read that at the Oka meeting with the Mt Kenya Foundation tycoons last week, Mudavadi made references to the stereotype about “certain people” refusing to pay rent while “living in your houses”.
Given the history of Mudavadi and the former PM and his community, as narrated above, it is inconceivable that he would be the one to cross this political red line.
Clearly, the Oka principals are no longer making even feeble attempts at running for President on any ideology other than that the Kikuyu community must not vote for Raila, or for that matter, a Luo.
The Mount Kenya Foundation billionaires have indicated they have the instructions of President Uhuru Kenyatta to weigh potential successors for him, and present the best placed.
By sending businessmen, the President is obviously saying he wants someone who will spur the business environment and create jobs after the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the country and wiped out any gains his regime may have made.
But in letting the Oka principals onto the political high table, the President has unwittingly created prima donnas with a catalogue of demands, and who, in all honesty, do not have the capacity to face and defeat DP William Ruto in the 2022 polls.
If stopping Raila is their only agenda, it is surprising they still hang onto the President’s coat tails, given his now open preference for the ODM chief.
To be fair, the Oka principal with the greater standing is Baringo Senator Gideon Moi. He may be underrated in the alliance, but he has the money, the old Kanu grassroots contacts across the country, and truth be said, his family’s crucial networks in the security establishment, all of which count for much more than the others’ big talk.
Yet it is he, of all of them in the alliance, who doesn’t appear averse to a Raila presidency. If you ask me, the President should pull Senator Moi out of the alliance, dump the others and as ODM secretary general Edwin Sifuna likes to say in reference to the former Nasa principals, “finally walk lighter without the baggage”.
Recent political history has shown that Raila is adept at creating co-principals all over the land. To a certain level, I blame him for opening the window for co-principals with empty balloons of support such as Senator Moses Wetang'ula.
Raila’s unveiling of the Pentagon in 2007, comprising politicians without real ground bases such as Najib Balala and the late Joe Nyagah, lay the foundation for future political doctrines where you could pull out washed-out politicians like Cyrus Jirongo straight out of the museum of political oblivion, and make them co-principals, complete with their own set of crazy demands.
Today, the grandstanding by these co- principals has come back to delay Raila’s own endorsement as people with just enough supporters to fill one restaurant in a remote town come to demand that he steps down for them.
If you ask me what value Jirongo adds to a four-man alliance that already has two Luhyas, I would much rather look up the sky and attempt to count stars.
The 2022 poll is shaping out to be a two horse race.
The President and his brother Raila don’t know it yet, but if they dump Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka and Mudavadi (it would be pure comedy to list Senator Wetang'ula here), the best recourse for them would be to run over to DP Ruto and seek the running mate slot. And if they got it, the move would throw a spin on Ruto’s own promises to the Mt Kenya vote bloc. Therefore, it is possible that the fear the President has over possible divided political assault on his DP may be far-fetched.
I submit that the President and his preferred successor should descend on Ukambani and Luhyaland and create new co-principals in the shape of governors Alfred Mutua (Machakos), Charity Ngilu (Kitui), Kivutha Kibwana (Makueni), Wycliffe Oparanya (Kakamega) and senior party officials like Sifuna, whose own talents are enough to neutralize the influences of Kalonzo and Mudavadi.
It’s time for Uhuru to shut the door on Oka’s prima donna brand of politics, and send them off to seek the people’s mandate like Raila and Ruto are doing.
This is because if their only ideology is the perpetuation of old tribal stereotypes and the proverbial difficulty of selling pork in Saudi Arabia, then they are in the same basket of disunity the President has been trying to dismantle.
At any rate, given their own wings of wax, they must never be given the luxury of flying too close to the sun, and the coming dispensation is indeed hot sun!
