ODM party leader Raila Odinga (left) flanked by other Cord leaders
during a joint press conference on January 10, 2014 at the Serena Hotel
in Nairobi. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU
NATION MEDIA GROUP
How powerful is the secretary-general of
The National Alliance (TNA), President Uhuru Kenyatta’s ruling party?
My answer: I do not know.
Yet it enthuses me to hear
that a party associated with the Kikuyu — a community so maligned
nationwide — has latched onto a Luo individual as one of its central
policy-makers.
What does it matter whether the man won
the post in an open election or whether the party’s organisers simply
latched onto him as a matter of strategy?
In our
political history, national leadership has been a contest between these
two ethnic communities. So it would be admirably hard-nosed for the
Kikuyu leadership to woo Luo votes in this way.
It
doesn’t matter how many votes the TNA official brought with him from
Nyanza and such other redoubts of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)
as Western and Coast.
What matters is that such an
initiative is what may add an ort to our objective national quest to
outgrow the tribal cocoon in which our politics has trundled for so
long.
It is what might educate Kenya’s electorate into
moving away from its globally degrading ethnic considerations to
graduate rapidly into the realm of ideas and ideological considerations
as the only genuine gauge by which to latch onto leadership during
elections.
That is why I will be greatly more enthused
when the TNA abandons the tribal strategy that now characterises it and
all our other political parties as election vehicles.
I
will be a hundred times happier when the TNA regroups under a
recognisable set of social ideas relevant to the whole country and tries
to sell itself nationwide on the basis of those ideas.
So
why do I despair? Because, away from Central Province, in my own native
Nyanza — in what is the home base of what alleges to be an opposition
party — the leadership is now openly trying to close the door on all
other ethnic communities by asserting that some of the party’s offices
can be held only by Luo individuals.
Yet the ODM
leaders who spew forth such bilge water from their mouths claim to be
doing so on the basis of loyalty to Raila Odinga.
How
can that be? What kind of thoughtlessness is this? How did so many
individuals who find it so difficult to think out of the box worm their
way into leadership positions in that party?
If the
mere idea of Raila Odinga’s occupation of State House already evokes
such negative passion among certain important ethnic communities, how do
you hope to sell him to those communities by declaring that members of
those communities cannot vie for leadership positions in the ODM?
If
Mr Odinga is to remain the ODM’s presidential candidate, then by far
the most important task facing members of the party’s central policy
committee is to work out a new strategy for wrapping Agwambo in brand
new public relations clothing to be able to sell him especially in
Central, Eastern and the Rift Valley provinces.
Even I
think that Mr Odinga’s rule might make a real national difference one of
these days. That is why I despair at his own apparent refusal to deal
effectively with the extreme ethnic arrogance and belligerence which
drive all his supporters all the way from the ragamuffins of Gor Mahia
to what masquerade as university brains.
For that kind
of behaviour cannot endear Mr Odinga to other communities. Indeed, it
might even begin to alienate him from the thinking members of the Luo
community itself.
But one thing is certain. If the ODM
continues to think of itself as a Luo party or the TNA as a Kikuyu
party or the United Republicans as a Kalenjin party or Wiper as a Kamba
party or Ford Kenya as a Luhya party — and so on ad infinitum — we shall
never become a united and prosperous nation.
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