Blood feuds between presidential contenders dangerous for Kenya
Dear Son of Jaramogi and Son of Jomo, first please accept felicitations and best wishes for Christmas, and may you both attain your dreams and aspirations in the New Year.
As you gulp the festive beer and tear into the goat ribs, it might occur to you both that a strange confluence of events has placed you on a most interesting collision course.
You are heading the two groupings set to battle it out at a pivotal General Election from which the outcome could propel this country forward to democracy and great prosperity; or send it backwards into a blood-soaked terror.
Both of you are fairly intelligent and reasonably well-read. You are aware of the history that makes the match-up between the two of you so significant, and maybe so dangerous.
Maybe at some point during his sojourn in America, Uhuru had the opportunity to keep up with Dallas, the pioneering television drama of the 1970s featuring JR and the blood-feud between the Ewing and the Barnes clans somewhere in Texas.
Or, Raila, during your studies in East Germany, you might have read-up on Nicaragua. Much of the history of that small Central American nation is dominated by another blood-feud, this one for control of a country.
The battle between the Somozista and the Sandinista may have been cloaked as ideological and class warfare, but it was in reality a struggle between two families that traditionally have taken it in turn to control the politics and economy of Nicaragua.
So whether it is the battle for oil-wells and women in some Texas town, or a fratricidal contest for wealth and power in Nicaragua, one gets the same lesson: That blood feuds lead nowhere, can be totally destructive and long-lasting because anger and emotion trump reason.
Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga together led this country to Independence nearly a half-century ago. The 1966 fallout between President Kenyatta and Vice-President Odinga, barely three years after Independence, reverberates to this day in a political gulf that transcends daddy.
Pause to consider that a presidential contest featuring the two of you might be like the Sandinista and Somoza clan war in Nicaragua.
It may be couched in ideological rhetoric, but it could have roots in something much deeper and more personal.
And herein lies the danger, for years of anger and bitterness could easily boil over and consume so many who have absolutely nothing to do with either of your privileged families.
Watching on TV over the weekend the Nairobi coronation of you two political heirs, I was struck by the fact that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
The rhythmic clapping, chanting and ululations, the extravagant praise-singing and the attacks and insults directed at your opponents were straight out of the Kanu manual.
Both of you went some way towards offering what you stand for, but were long on rhetoric and short on specifics.
You both regurgitate the ‘change’ mantra, with your Cord, Raila, promising to rejuvenate the struggle for reform and the promise of the new Constitution; while your Jubilee, Uhuru, trumpets generational-change and economic development.
The sub-text was more revealing. Raila, you would have seen Jubilee as an alliance of the accused rather than anything about progress and development; your opponent and his running mate William Ruto as more than ordinary contenders for office, but a pair bound together by the shackles of the International Criminal Court.
You might have seen the event on Sunday display the anger and bitterness that has been characteristic of the two since the indictments; princelings set on retention of the status quo as the shield against the ICC.
On the other side of town the previous day, Uhuru, you might have witnessed Mr Odinga and his unlikely running mate, Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka, hold court.
You would have sensed from Uhuru Park a campaign of the dispossessed, the resentment of those for years denied what they take as a birth right.
Will you two offer Kenyan voters anything more than a continuation of daddy’s feuds?
