It was Senator Ledama Olekina who in March 2018 quipped that the owner of one cow could not be allowed to lead the cattle dip committee.
This was after NASA senators removed their Minority Leader, Moses Wetang’ula in what was termed as a “messy and noisy divorce” that would have casualties.
The retort was befitting in many ways, not least because Senator OleKina comes from a pastoralist community, where livestock analogies come naturally, but especially so because Senator Wetang'ula was sitting at the apex of NASA leadership in the Senate while his Ford Kenya party had only one Senator in the coalition. — himself!
It wasn’t a tidy process, and one would have hoped that the then NASA boss, Raila Odinga, would learn a lesson from it. He clearly didn’t.
Fast forward to 2023 and the Azimio coalition is caught up in a similar situation. Isiolo Senator Fatuma Dullo, the erstwhile Azimio deputy Minority whip in the Senate, joined the recent political caravans to State House, making her position within the coalition untenable.
I have to state from the onset that I do not understand why anyone holding a position of trust in a party or coalition doesn’t just resign once he/she stops believing in the position of the said party or coalition.
From where I sit, I am struggling to see how Senator Dullo expected to whip members of her coalition, after she shed off the ideals of her side and declared support for the regime, which incidentally, her side is supposed to keep in check.
Obviously, dignified resignations still don’t dwell in this land.
It is impossible to discuss the messy processes in reclaiming the leadership positions in both the Wetang'ula and Dullo cases, without mentioning the elephant in the room— how these positions were given to them in the first place.
In these Raila coalitions, there is usually a burden of “nationhood” that other coalitions simply don’t bother with. In the leadership of both Houses, UDA simply took up all the slots without caring about their coalition partners.
In the bigger scheme of things, this homogeneity helps nurture a more disciplined and functional majority or minority. But enter Raila and Hail Mary, the face of the coalition must reflect in House leadership!
At face value, it is a good thing for our nascent democracy. On the reality index, however, it’s a whole different matter. Most small parties entering Parliament after election simply do not have the vote numbers or political backbone to stand on their own.
Invariably, their members end up available for purchase on the political market. In awarding them important coalition seats, and doing this repeatedly after every election, the dominant party — in this case ODM — consistently sacrifices its own stability in both Houses, by enabling the “public auction” of leadership slots it should in fact shamelessly keep.
There is a touch of irony to the current controversy. In replacing Dullo, the coalition has opted, finally, to make ODM secretary general Edwin Sifuna, the Deputy Minority Whip.
I say “finally” because, in my estimation, being the most senior elected party official of the biggest party in the Azimio coalition, Sifuna should have been a straight shoo-in for either Minority leader or Minority whip from the very beginning.
He was just the unofficial boss of his party's Senators, but if the total number of votes garnered in the last election counted for anything, he holds the record in the current life of Parliament as the elected leader with the highest number of votes.
His appointment would have saved the coalition another round of cows counting and cattle dip leadership watch, to quote Senator Olekina.
The Senate Standing Orders clearly set out the procedure for appointment of the House leadership on both sides. Upon the communication of changes to the Speaker in writing, together with the minutes of the meeting at which the decision was made, the Speaker has no say in this.
But by appearing to stall on the communication from the Minority side, the Speaker has behaved as if he is an appendage of another branch of government who needs to wait for clearance from somewhere else. This is fertile ground for impunity, because auctioning the independence of the Senate does not augur well for the growth of democracy.
The Senate holds the unique position of representing the interests of the counties and their governments, as well as debating and approving crucial bills like those revolving around revenue allocation.
Their key oversight role bestowed by the 2010 Constitution cannot be gainsaid.
The greater concern that must be raised when the Speaker, or even the Executive, illegally attempts to determine how the Minority picks its leadership, is that this may in fact be an attack on the counties or a blatant early plan to violate revenue allocation formulae by installing malleable people in key positions.
There is no denying that between the county governments and the national government stands the Senate as the guardian angel of stability and good working relations between the two. It is why senators, members of teh National Assembly and Kenyans of goodwill must reject any attempt to run parties and coalitions in the houses from anywhere other than their credible headquarters.
It might indeed be that the problem is that the government side is simply uncomfortable with the individual picked to fill the Deputy Minority Whip position, Senator Sifuna. If that is so, then one would wonder how a regime that fashions itself as the top lover of God would fear man this much.
At any rate, I doubt the Azimio coalition came to the House to entertain the Kenya Kwanza side. Even as we wait to see how Speaker Kingi will ultimately resolve this impasse, I am reminded of a controversy from September 2022 in the National Assembly pitting Kenya Kwanza and Azimio coalitions over which one was the true majority in the House.
After a long push and pull, Speaker Wetang'ula finally averred that the second largest party in the house was ODM, not Azimio, because only one person, Raila Odinga, had run in the election carrying the Azimio.
Stripped down to parties, ODM then became the Minority party in Parliament, but as usual, shared out slots rightfully its own, to coalition partners. On that same pedestal, ODM was obviously also the minority in the Senate, and leadership positions held by coalition partners like Dullo of Jubilee, essentially became goodwill gestures from the dominant party in the coalition.
For this reason, I don’t see why the Speaker should indulge the outgoing Deputy Minority Whip when the owners of the position come for it. In any case, even though ODM has consistently made it difficult for itself by dishing out House positions that it then reclaims with difficulty later, it still retains the numbers in the Azimio coalition to run the show, especially as its erstwhile coalition partners keep floundering and fumbling towards the gravy train.
If there is a lesson to learn from UDA, however unpalatable it may sound on the ears of partners, it must be to “keep the powerful positions within the political family”. You will never go wrong.
