I suspect Uhuru is secretly smiling at Raila’s call for national dialogue
What you need to know:
- You can’t win with a stand-alone party, so everyone makes coalitions — Kenyatta’s Jubilee, Raila Cord, and so on.
- The coalitions that are necessary for winning power in Kenya are not terribly good for governing the country once in office.
So there is a lot of dust and angry words over opposition Cord leader Raila Odinga’s call for “national dialogue” with President Kenyatta’s government.
Political warriors have lined up on both sides of the argument. The Kenyatta camp has all but rejected Raila’s call, and Raila’s side is pushing hard, smelling an opportunity.
But are Kenyatta and Raila really in disagreement? Methinks not. If you know a little bit about these things, the national dialogue and negotiations are already taking place — and perhaps no one knows this better than the two.
What Kenyatta and Raila are doing is playing for advantage, and seeing who will blink first — and lose. The surprise to me, then, is not that there is a lot of verbal duelling over the national dialogue call, but if it has not been there.
Right now we are seeing a testing of public opinion and resolve. If Kenyatta senses that the majority of public opinion is on his side, then he will tell Raila to go and sunbathe in his garden in Langata.
If Raila reads it that the public favour his call, then he will ask for his pound of flesh. For now, his call for talks is couched broadly in a need to unite the country in order to resolve the many crises facing it. But if he smells the winds swinging towards him, he will put meat on his proposals, e.g. suggesting a government of national unity. But we are not there yet.
In other words, there’s no need to run for the hills yet; the boys are still testing each other like sumo wrestlers before the battle.
The next question is what will the battle look like, and why the need to fight it? On that one, we can only make educated guesses but history can help us here.
Ever since the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) brought former President Mwai Kibaki to power at the end of 2002, there is something that has happened to every government. My sense is that Kenya has become a country where election victory has become prisoner to coalitions.
You can’t win with a stand-alone party, so everyone makes coalitions — Kenyatta’s Jubilee, Raila Cord, and so on.
FALL-OUT AND RESIGNATION
The second thing that is now apparent is that there is a disconnect; the coalitions that are necessary for winning power in Kenya are not terribly good for governing the country once in office.
Therefore, within three years of taking power, and with the next election looming, the president of the day needs to reset his politics. Kibaki — or at least his inner circle — did it by interpreting the pre-election memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with Raila’s party to mean that there was no need to share jobs equally.
In any event, that argument led to a Raila breakaway that formed the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) to oppose the Kibaki-backed constitution in the 2005 referendum.
They defeated Kibaki, but it really wasn’t a defeat. It seemed it was what the Mzee had always wanted, because then he used it to bundle them out of government, and reset his administration. Kibaki then used ODM to keep the remnants of Narc united.
After he took power in the disputed 2007 election that led to post-election violence, which ended with the formation of the grand coalition government with Raila as PM, Kibaki again needed a reset.
This time it came through a shake-up that followed a fall-out and resignation of Martha Karua as Justice Minister and the withdrawal of her Narc-Kenya from Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU).
Kibaki could afford this because with both Raila and Kalonzo Musyoka’s ODMs in the turbulent coalition, he was sure of one thing — his administration could not be collapsed.
Deputy Prime Minister William Ruto, who had a ringside seat to all this drama, learnt his lesson well and so inked a very public and more formal MoU with Kenyatta.
Kenyatta thus finds himself needing a Kibaki-type reset of his governing, but he cannot follow the same path of denying the MoU if only because the political cost is too high.
But a reset he needs. Raila’s national dialogue is perfect for him. But he cannot appear too eager because it weakens his hand. Whether he knows it or not, Raila might just have given Kenyatta the best means to do his reset.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. (mgafrica). Twitter:@cobbo3
