The old order of ethnic coalitions has run its course. While Odinga, a stalwart of self-righteous politics, is fluently harnessing the diametrical profiles of ‘progressive’ and ‘reformer’ on one hand, and ‘corrupt’ and ‘anti-reformer’ on the other, a determined reformist wave is ushering in issue-based politics.
By Eric Ng’eno
Like all time-bound affairs, the spectacular denouement to Kenya’s relentless political drama, by way of an implacable epistemological ebb, will shortly expose the tremendously reckless bluff called by those quixotic punters who have been splashing in the political high tide in a state of scandalous dishabille. Because, at the present rate, the impending election will crystallize into a cataclysmic culmination to a long-running framework that has conditioned the perception, discussion, organization and practice of Kenyan politics ever since competitive democracy was restored.
The binarity that is taken for granted by one side of our great divide was instigated by mere historical happenstance. Shortly after independence, KANU underwent a traumatic internal reorganization which defined the contours of Kenyan politics thereafter. The first phase of this reorganization was the annexation of KADU, whose devolutionary ideology gave it command of the majimbo – regional governments – as an effective check to Kenyatta’s command of the national unit. Kenyatta sought to defuse devolutionary impulses within KANU and consolidate the independence party as a political monopoly.
That done, Kenyatta suddenly discovered that his tolerance for dissent and patience for collegiate decision-making was running precariously dismal. To signal his autocratic intent, he moved to systematically neutralize his Vice President and foremost colleague, and hitherto trusted ally, Oginga Odinga, and dismantle his nationwide political machinery.
The proximate cause of this siege was the ideological cleavages wrought by the Cold War, with Kenyatta suddenly and drastically pivoting to the West, thus exposing Odinga as the most awkwardly prominent sympathizer of Communism. A sequence of punitive assaults thus ensued, beginning with the scattering of Odinga’s international networks, acquisition of his local loyalists and, finally, the demolition of his power base. By 1965, Odinga was on his last legs as a formal political player at the national level, and the ruthless purge waged against him and his associates in the subsequent KANU Elections was intended to underscore it.
In particular, his replacement as the party’s vice-chairman with eight vice chairmen meant that his position as the vice president of the government and the republic was untenable. Under these conditions, he resigned to avoid further humiliation and launched the Kenya People’s Union, on whose platform he intended to challenge Kenyatta for power. His first and most important constraint was that he was unable to attract significant allies outside his Nyanza stronghold except known and already marginalized firebrand oppositionists, thanks to the annexation of KADU. Secondly, KANU made it difficult for KPU to field candidates throughout the country.
The second general election thus saw KPU manage only 9 members of parliament, a paltry delegation against the KANU behemoth. By this time, regional governments had been dissolved and the senate wound up, paving the way for parliamentary unicameralism that subsisted until 2013. In 1969, KANU titan, the Kenyatta arch-loyalist and Odinga nemesis Tom Mboya was assassinated. Nyanza led an outraged nation in mourning a rising star so brutally extinguished, and placed blame for the crime squarely on Kenyatta’s doorstep. Demonstrations swiftly turned to riots in various parts of the country and Kenyatta’s attendance of a funeral service in Nairobi turned into chaos as protesters accosted the presidential entourage.
Consolidated monopoly of political power
When Kenyatta visited Kisumu in Nyanza four months later to open a hospital, Odinga was waiting for him. A testy encounter led to ill-tempered exchanges with the two men in close proximity, surrounded by agitated members of public and tense presidential security detail. Kenyatta’s motorcade was subsequently pelted with assorted missiles, and the police escort had to shoot their way through the melee, leading to many deaths, national anger and political tension. Kenyatta used this event to consolidate his monopoly of political power by banning the KPU and restricting Odinga’s movements and political activity.
KANU remained in power until 2002 – and Kenya was a de facto one party state until 1982 when it became a de jure one-party state. Odinga remained defiant in his banishment, and over time became the symbol of resistance to political tyranny and one-party autocracy. As Kenyan politics devolved from nationalist to ethnic discourses, Odinga’s Luo Nyanza evolved into the bedrock of the politics of righteous outrage. The quest for democratic space inevitably acquired a mantle of high-minded struggle for the second liberation of the nation. Just as Kenyatta had deftly manipulated circumstances to marginalize Odinga, it was now Odinga’s turn to define his way out of dire political straits as a principled and righteous quest for the expansion of political freedom, democracy and human rights.
The enduring appeal of this profile of righteousness acquired greater potency on account of the backdrop imbued by what KANU had in effect become over time: the emblem of brutal tyranny, economic mismanagement, constitutional vandalism and reckless disregard for the common good.
If Odinga was located at the core of the righteous movement, Nyanza, being the heartland of Odingaism, was understood to be the enclave of communities which at once were the disenfranchised martyrs of Kenya’s improvident politics and the cradle of the most iconic apostles of a new liberation struggle. For as long as political differences flirted with ethnic prejudice, the emerging opposed profiles – of righteousness versus impunity, democracy versus authoritarianism and integrity versus turpitude – were ineluctably destined to evince the rancid flavours of tribal animosity that had been sedulously curated by colonial authorities to subvert the emergence of a pan-ethnic national liberation coalition.
Perhaps it was with this perspective of the evolutionary arc of the competitive-coalitional framework of Kenya’s politics that president Moi could confidently predict that multi-party democracy would inaugurate a politics of ethnic conflict. What is important is the fact that the first two presidential elections of the multi-party era have been accurately described as ethnic censuses. Opposition political parties were understood to be platforms of ethnic communities whose leaders had differed with Moi and thus could practice their politics in KANU, whilst KANU was increasingly seen as a coalition of those communities who must hang together, or be skinned separately.
At the same time, the normative profiling meant that over time, the unwholesome character assigned to KANU sedimented into an impregnable mantle enveloping hard-core KANU-affiliated leaders and their ethnic communities. As more and more constituencies broke away from the KANU coalition, the full weight of this sinister profile bore down upon remnants. By 2002, the exodus out of the pan-ethnic coalition that KANU had initially been, had crystallised into a pan-ethnic coalition of anti-KANU and therefore righteous communities ranged against a chiefly pastoralist last stand, with the Kalenjin being its most salient component.
Expropriation of Odinga’s political patrimony
When NARC began to dismantle KANU, wage war against corruption and pursue accountability through commissions of investigation, it lost sight of the irony that not only was NARC a coalition of KANU alumni, but also that the pursuit of KANU in its present form was tantamount to political persecution of a couple of communities.
The fallout in NARC was therefore a godsend, particularly for the Kalenjin, because they could finally forge common cause with the most righteous kernel of a righteous constellation, and liberate itself from KANU. It was, after all, Raila Odinga who felt hard done by in the sharing of the spoils of NARC’s conquest of state power. It is perfectly plausible that that Odinga’s disenchantment in NARC extended beyond grievances related to a power-sharing pact, which would then be more or less the proximate cause of a more fundamental discomfort.
I want to propose that the unarticulated gravamen of Odinga’s discontent had to do with feeling doubly victimized by a scandalous expropriation of his political patrimony. This is to say that NARC, as a galaxy of converts to righteous politics, essentially comprised more recent KANU barons who plugged into an ancient fundament sustained by Odingaist fortitude at immense cost, in a manner that could fairly be adjudged to be opportunistic. Never mind that Odinga himself held out against joining NARC until weeks to the election, the relevant consideration being that he would have felt entitled to pride of place as the heir of the patent holder of the politics of righteousness. To be relegated to just another minister among men he found in KANU two years previously, and who were in power as his odyssey drew him into the abysmal dungeons of detention and repression, was a hard pill to swallow.
NARC embezzled the entire dividend of the political capital invested by the first Odinga four decades earlier, and did so without the merest acknowledgement of his heirs’ presence. In any event, Odinga resolved to do in NARC what he had done in KANU. He found a vast eager constituency of communities that had felt victimized by an ebullient, even hubristic NARC. Thus the Kalenjin, as Moi’s people, and therefore an arch-KANU constituency improbably found common cause with Odinga, the founding father of righteous politics that lay at the heart of the Orange Democratic Movement. It was a star-crossed affair.
The Kalenjin were finally able to exit KANU and access a refreshing political domain. ODM gave the ex-NARC incumbent hold-out immense grief, and in the 2007 General election, a creditable run for its money. That may not even necessarily be the most important point. That election registered a more or less evenly balanced contest between ethnic coalition, and in the end, there were no winners, only effective losers. The grand coalition government was the formal acknowledgement of this reality. Because of the uncanny coalitional symmetry that had evolved among Kenya’s ethnic coalitions, the probability of large-scale conflict and national instability arising from electoral contests presented a new, fraught complication to an already intractable muddle.
Co-option and political laundering
The reform agenda, hurriedly abandoned in the hell-for-leather scramble for the presidency after the introduction of political pluralism, was reignited and propelled with unprecedented urgency. These reforms produced the Constitution of Kenya 2010, which made it possible to de-ethnicise politics and shift electoral competition to the platform of issues. Because of the ICC interventions in connection with the 2007 post-election crisis, a reiteration of 2007 ethnic coalitional competition manifested in 2013, and Jubilee scraped through by the sheerest of margins. The election of 2017 demonstrated in high-definition that the old model of politics had run its course, and that Kenya was ready to make its home in the brave new world of the post-2010 constitutional and political dispensation.
Yet, old habits die hard. Odinga is contesting the ever-elusive presidency once again. He is still a stalwart of self-righteous politics, fluently harnessing the diametrical profiles of ‘progressive’, ‘reformer’ on one hand, and ‘corrupt’, ‘anti-reformer’ on the other. His coalition remains profoundly invested in the model of ethnic coalitions, slightly upgraded in the BBI-Azimio version to a consociational framework underpinning government by ethnic chiefs, regional kingpins and tribal champions.
The foregoing provides an account of the origins, evolution and utility of Odinga’s self-righteous politics that is useful in understanding both its explicit and implicit potentialities over time, while facilitating its adequate problematisation in the light of tremendous contradictions, complications and fundamental changes in the operating environment.
All governments in the multiparty era have co-opted members of the opposition under diverse arrangements – from the outright defections of the early 90s to the elder Odinga’s cooperation with Nyayo in his last days, which was revived by his heir after the 1997 election and formalized into a merger NDP and KANU. These involved traversing the binary divide, whereby the practitioners of righteous politics crossed over to the putative dark side, contrary to the more positively profiled shift, from KANU to the opposition in a redemptive act of rebellion.
The NDP-KANU merger was the first indication of pragmatic possibilities of political laundering, whereby the dark side could purchase legitimacy as well as political stability in return for the righteous opposition accessing limited executive authority as well as forms of facilitation available only through the state. However, such quid pro quo presented the very real threat of not just blurring the binarity of the political opposition, it also made it possible to hollow out the meaning of each side. In time therefore, the opposition, which at any rate comprised former members of KANU, began to also have more recent KANUists in its ranks together with covert or overt collaborators of the dark side.
Indeed, by 2002, Odinga was back in KANU as secretary general, and had joined the Executive as Moi’s minister for Energy to work alongside such patriarchs as Nicholas Biwott, George Saitoti, Joseph Kamotho and Kalonzo Musyoka. When he left KANU to join LDP en route to NARC towards the 2002 election, he had enlisted KANU heavyweights who would be luminaries of the triumphant NARC, and would return to the cabinet in the victorious successor government. To that extent, part of Odinga’s angst at the expropriation of his patrimony can be attributed to his leading role in diluting the profiles by way of convoluted coalitional permutations.
Yet, the vocabulary of righteous politics endured and retained its evocative potency. ‘KANU orphan’ thus remained a rank pejorative of our cantankerous political vernacular, whilst ‘second liberation’ credentials remained highly respected. KANU orphanhood was understood to be synonymous with corruption, violence, tyranny and all manner of primitivism. Second liberation champions were automatically assigned integrity, idealism, selflessness, high-minded and public spirited disposition and indomitable patriotism.
Today, thanks to the cross-pollination between KANU and the second liberation movement, no practical distinction exists. At the same time, the vocabulary of normative profiling is still monopolized by an Odingaist cottage industry and vigorously deployed in framing the angels and villains of our politics. To the extent that the categories are hollow for all intents and purposes, the exercise can be said to be arbitrary and of limited utility.
Self-afflicted contradiction
The second fundamental problem with the politics of righteousness is the effluxion of time. The origins of the framework of profiling, and the meaning of its most salient vocabulary is lost in the mists of history. 1966 is the political Middle Ages in 2022. The majority of voters in the impending election have no real memory of the Nyayo era, as a consequence of which the Second Liberation is utterly meaningless. Odinga’s cardinal mobilizing narrative, however fluent in its vernacular and replete with evocative vocabulary, is superannuated to the point of obsolescence. At the very best, it is threadbare, hollow and stubbornly associated with rivalrous primordial entitlements, claims and grievances of limited resonance in the post 2010 constitutional dispensation.
The third problematic complication of the politics of self-righteousness may be described as the loss of credibility on account of a reputation for cynicism and hypocrisy. Odinga expended his political capital distinguishing himself from KANU, then joined it. He then worked hard to profile Jubilee the incarnation of KANU’s worst manifestations and the antithesis of his liberation politics, and both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto as his political nemeses. He propagated this profiling so successfully that by 2017, there were thousands of Kenyans willing to fight and even die for his cause.
In March 2018, with neither warning nor explanation, he joined Kenyatta’s government and initiated the BBI process that culminated in the Azimio Coalition Party on whose ticket he is contesting the election. He is now trapped in a cosmic contradiction of his own making. He must promise a dramatic break from an establishment that sponsors him. He must canvass his second liberation credentials whilst intractably entangled with KANU Pro Max. He is offering to fight corruption while safely ensconced in the extravagantly indulgent lap of Corruption, Inc. Azimio’s theory of change entails the frantic defence of the status quo. Kenyatta, the outgoing president, chairs the Azimio Coalition council and owns explicit preferential rights. Azimio is not aerodynamic and it is encumbered by crippling political baggage. It is a hot mess.
The Constitution inaugurates the post-tribal political society in Kenya to the extent that it promulgates a framework to coordinate diversity, preserve culture, protect free expression, yet at the same time promote the emergence and consolidation of pan-ethnic, consciously nationalist, unitary and issue-based politics oriented towards deeper cohesion and shared prosperity on a sustainable basis. The salience of tribal identity in national politics is emphatically on the decline.
Since the politics of righteousness aligned binary profiles with ethnic identity, it has become possible to deploy ‘corruption’, or ‘war on corruption’ for example as dog-whistles, implying the isolation of certain communities or their leaders. Similarly, second liberation can be argued to be a souvenir by which certain communities memorialise ancient grievances and mobilise around a persecution complex and the entitlement implicit therein. The residual retrospective utility of second liberation and prospective potentiality of integrity, qua war on corruption, are therefore onerously encumbered by this sinister undertow.
At the moment of the overdue expiry of a narrative framework that has evolved through sinuous concatenations and permutations of happenstances, a tidal backlash has emerged. The promise of the second liberation was for all practical purposes retired at the promulgation of the Cconstitution in 2010. Retrospective politics were hollowed by flagrant incest between the putative righteous and delinquent sides. Demographic changes ensued with momentous generational shifts. The economic imperative began to ascend to the top of discursive priority, demanding that all messaging align with or incorporate it.
A new political insurgency, centred on economic liberation has emerged, and is taking the nation by storm. The response has been overwhelming, and the bottom-up political platform has proved to be resilient, easily weathering sabotage through diver stratagems. The politics of democratization of opportunity, of restoring hope and dignity to millions of struggling citizens, of inaugurating a government that serves, and is kinder and gentler to all its people, is at hand. By focusing of issues that cut across all communities regardless of ethnic identity, this inclusive, participatory and affirmative politics unites all Kenyans. It at once appeals to citizens’ self-interest whilst affirming their patriotism and idealism.
Kenyans want to work hard for themselves under a government that works for them, and does not get in their way at every turn. They want an end to state capture, monopolies, conflict of interest and the impunity that has been on spectacular display since the advent of the BBI era. The Hustler Nation is fed up and is rising up, standing to be counted and taking position at the frontline of nation building. They are after a government that does not only act in their name, but actually advances their welfare. It is fronted by a leadership that listens and consults, not fiery messiahs with inscrutable slogans and obscure visions. There is only one platform championing this economic insurgency, and it the Kenya Kwanza Coalition that has sponsored William Ruto.
A self-righteous politics that long surrendered its coherence is going to struggle for relevance against a spectacularly on-point platform. On August 9th, 2022, Kenya will be saying goodbye to a lot of things, and not a day too soon. (
— The author is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya
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