Suspicions mar G7 unity bid

• All is not well with the Finance minister’s team accusing the VP of reluctance to participate in primaries to pick flag-bearer

Technocrats within the G7 alliance are drafting terms for a pre-election agreement that would see them present a common front against Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement at the next General Election.

The deal would be modelled along similar lines to a power-sharing deal in the ruling National Front Coalition in Malaysia, a loose alliance of 13 parties that contest elections together but retain their own identities even when they form government.

But that effort to craft a united team ahead of 2012 comes against the backdrop of rising tensions between the camps of Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka and Deputy Prime minister Uhuru Kenyatta that raise doubts about the capacity of the coalition to hold together.

Mr Kenyatta’s camp accuses Mr Musyoka of being reluctant to take part in an open primary to determine the candidate of the G7 alliance because he fears defeat.

Mr Musyoka, on the other hand, has publicly stated that the next election will be between him and Mr Odinga while he has been accused of saying that as the most senior official in the G7 he should be their natural candidate.

In interviews, allies of Mr Kenyatta were unusually pointed in casting doubt on the commitment of Mr Musyoka to stick to the alliance in the event that he loses in the primaries.

“The vice-president needs to drop his false sense of entitlement,” one of Mr Kenyatta’s campaigners, Mr Moses Kuria, said. “One of the principles around which the G7 is based is democracy. Candidates have bound themselves to free and fair competition after which they will back whoever emerges the victor. Nobody should expect to be handed the ticket on a silver platter.”

Differences between the two camps came to the fore earlier in the week following the publication of an opinion piece in The Star by one of Mr Musyoka’s advisers, Mr Muthui Kariuki. Mr Kariuki urged influential members of the Kikuyu ethnic community to back a presidential candidate from outside Mt Kenya in 2012. Mr Kenyatta is an ethnic Kikuyu.

“…The Kikuyu elite’s Kibaki succession schemes smack of ethnic arrogance to other communities. It is simply not good for the national cohesion we are so desperate to cultivate particularly after what we went through after the 2007 elections. Their schemes augur ill for Kenya.

“The best thing that those behind this scheme can do for Kenya is to try and disabuse the communities of such popular negative notions like the Kikuyu are genetically incapable of voting for a non-Kikuyu because it is in their DNA by endorsing, and actively campaigning, for a candidate who is not a Kikuyu in the next elections.

“Certain politicians have been going around the country calling others KKK. I can assure you that those fellows are praying day and night that they do battle with a Kikuyu presidential candidate in a run-off. I’m informed by highly informed sources within their quarters that they will quickly come out of their manholes and in an incredible turn of events argue that the 3K’s did not mean Kikuyu, Kamba and Kalenjin!”

That argument is said to have stirred unhappiness in the Kenyatta camp.

“Mr Musyoka is advancing the view that if we do not support him Kikuyus are dyed-in-the-wool tribalists,” said Mr Kuria. “But this is a democracy. He says that he is the most senior member of the team but if that is true voters will back him. He should learn the biblical lesson that one must humble himself before he can be elevated to positions of leadership.”

An ally of Mr Musyoka played down the tensions between the candidates’ camps describing them as “teething problems” expected in an alliance that has yet to crystalise and develop a structural foundation. He said the VP was “both a democrat and a team player” who was willing to participate in a primary.

Relations between the VP and the Finance minister are expected to be further tested by several trips the Kenyatta camp plans to make in Mr Musyoka’s Ukambani backyard in the next few weeks.

Mr Kenyatta’s allies claim that the VP has been unhappy about those plans but they say they will go ahead with the visits because Mr Musyoka has been a frequent visitor in Mr Kenyatta’s Central Kenya base.

The G7 is an alliance that emerged after an initial coalition between Mr Kenyatta, Mr Musyoka and Eldoret North MP William Ruto assumed the tag Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Kamba (KKK) association after the ethnic extraction of the trio.

The G7, which first came to the limelight after Mr Kenyata and Mr Ruto’s first trip to The Hague in April, was seen as an attempt to expand the geographical reach of the organisation to battle charges that the movement was dividing the country along ethnic lines.