Okoa Kenya a populist challenge to our liberal democracy

This week, Kenya marked the fourth anniversary of the promulgation of the new constitution on August 27, 2010 that saw the country’s fractious power elite agree on a new liberal democratic order.

But the shrilly return of populism — an age-old tactic by ambitious politicians to mobilise the masses in opposition to the elected government by depicting it as corrupt or self-serving, with the explicit aim of winning power — is arguably the foremost threat to Kenya’s nascent liberal democracy.

It is also a real threat to the implementation of the new constitution and to the realisation of Kenya’s economic dream of timeously achieving the ideals of Vision 2030 and joining the club of the world’s emerging economic powerhouses.

Suffice it to say, however, that the populist threat to liberal democracy is not unique to Kenya.

In a new article published in the current issue of the Foreign Affairs Journal (September/October 2014: 27-36), the Harvard political scholar, Yascha Mounk, has proclaimed the return of the dangerous pitchfork politics for ages associated with populism as a worldwide threat to liberal democracy.

In many respects, the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy’s populism has a long pedigree in earlier waves of populist attempts to take power exemplified by the Tiberius Gracchus and the populares movement in the Roman Senate, the Jacobins in Paris in the 18th century or the Jacksonian Democrats who took Washington by storm in the 19th century.

FAILED TO RAISE NUMBERS

Recently, the populist challenge to Kenya’s liberal democracy started some three months ago with the return of opposition leader, Raila Odinga, from a private trip to America and a high-pitched rhetoric that marked the build-up to Cord’s Saba Saba (July 7) rally.

But the embers of populism momentarily dimmed when Saba Saba came unstuck in the wake of Cord’s failure to raise sufficient numbers to create the requisite “CNN effect” that would have enabled it to lay claim to mass support; to follow through on its much-talked-about plan of a grand march to State House to take over power; or to ignite a “Kenyan Spring” by mobilising spontaneous mass protests across Kenyan cities and towns.

The most visible symbol of the rebirth of populism in Kenya is the Okoa Kenya (Swahili for “Save Kenya”) political outfit — touted as an “independent” and broad-church movement of opposition politicians and like-minded civil society leaders but which, in reality, was established by Cord during its Saba Saba rally to spearhead its push for a referendum.

In a significant sense, Cord’s Okoa Kenya initiative carries eerie echoes in the rise of the Tea Party that exploded onto the United States political scene in 2009 as an initial response by America’s ultra-conservative Republicans to Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Just as the Tea Party is driving the purist agenda of the ultra-conservatives in the Grand Old Party (GOP), Okoa Kenya is driving the agenda of ODM/Cord purists to challenge and slow down the Jubilee Government and to reverse the coalition’s electoral losses of March 2013, first through the proposed referendum and ultimately through the 2017 elections.

Contrary to the view that Okoa Kenya is planned to replace Cord as Raila Odinga’s 2017 vehicle in the face of the electoral fiasco in ODM and simmering power tussle at Cord’s helm, the outfit’s agenda is simpler than this.

As for now, it is no more than a “fund-raising” ploy designed to facilitate Cord’s external benefactors to fund the opposition’s referendum campaign activities without attracting accusations from Jubilee that they are taking political sides. The Cord leaders have been at pains to draw a sharp line between their coalition and Okoa Kenya.

Despite this, the Okoa Kenya initiative has all the ideological trappings of the Tea Party, whose purists now target not just the Democrats but also Republicans suspected by the purists of being too moderate.

Similarly, Cord is targeting both the Jubilee politicians and Cord MPs and governors that Okoa Kenya purists consider as milk-and-water moderates. Moreover, Okoa Kenya populism is drawing from the same repertoire of slogans and tropes as radicalised right wing populists across the Atlantic rim.

Cord’s Okoa Kenya populism also has similar tactical traits as the trans-Atlantic populists like the Occupy the Wall Street movement which have preyed on government and corporate corruption, stagnation of living standards and growing economic inequality — the “99 per cent” struggling under the thumb of the super-rich one per cent — to mobilise the masses around a populist agenda.

But Cord’s agenda also has a distinct Kenyan hue. A new “revisionist” trend in the political discourse is now targeting the new constitution, as populism shifts the terms of debate from “implementation” to “amendment”.

GHOST OF NAIVASHA

Bracing the trail in Cord’s new assault on the new Constitution is a sensational article last Sunday by the former Chairman of the Committee of Experts charged with the drafting of the new constitution, Nzamba Kitonga.

Kitonga bases his case for the amendment of the Constitution on the claim that the final supreme law did reflect a “people-driven constitution” but was rather a product of compromises by the political elite in the famous Naivasha meet (of the Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Review). The ghost of Naivasha, Kitonga argues, has come back to haunt Kenya.

On its part, Jubilee has launched its counter-discourse against the “mutilation of the law”, accusing the Cord political elite of seeking to amend the constitution to promote their political agenda.

As Cord embarks on getting the people to sign up for the referendum, Okoa Kenya’s populism is seismically shifting the political discourse from constitutional implementation to amendment. The shift away from economic, social and security issues to constitution is, arguably, the most potent challenge to the post-2010 liberal democratic order.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute. He also served as the Director of the Joint Coalition Government’s National Secretariat for the Referendum.