Jubilee’s strategy to neutralise Cord’s grievance politics

The Kenyan Opposition’s campaign for a national referendum on a spectrum of issues has thrown the country into an electioneering mode.

It is also redrawing the ideological contours of the country’s politics and revealing the rivalries playing out on the road to 2017.

The recent Opposition rally may have failed to trigger the anticipated “domino effect” in the form of countrywide mass protests resulting in a “Kenyan spring” — with the possible effect of delegitimising Jubilee power and giving the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) the necessary political muscle and space to demand a share of state power or to force an early election.

However, after Saba Saba, the Government has been compelled to experiment on new tactics and models to secure the development space from the Opposition’s renewed populist and extremist grievance politics.

Saba Saba was a major setback to Cord’s mass protest agenda, which has taken a low key – at least for now. But the Opposition has retained intact the extremist and populist hue that undergirded its Saba Saba rally. In the immediate aftermath of the Uhuru Park rally, the Opposition has mooted a two-track campaign strategy driven by two forms of politics.

First, it is pushing for a popular plebiscite, itself propelled by populist and extremist grievance politics. Second, and related to the above, its referendum campaign is targeting the swing areas in Western Kenya, Coast and North-Eastern and driven by the divisive “politics of difference”, preying on Kenya’s ugly reality of ethnic and religious divisions and competition, growing exclusion and widening inequality gap to mobilise support for the referendum.

Cord is pushing its campaign through both the public sphere (media, civil society, public forums) and Parliament. On July 5, Cord leader Raila Odinga teed off the extremist grievance politics while addressing Muslim faithful at an Iftar dinner hosted by Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho at the Arab Boys grounds where he flagged endemic land problems and the killings of radical Muslim clerics and businessmen to win over the Muslims to the referendum agenda.

Apart from religious and land-related conflicts, Cord is also praying on mundane grievances relating to insecurity to build a case that the Jubilee Government has failed to protect its citizens but also to challenge its legal monopoly over the security docket and to possibly divide political opinion within the disciplined forces.

A popular theme is the call for the exit of the Kenya Defence Forces from Somalia, itself intended to win support from Kenya’s ethnic Somalis and, by extension, the larger Muslim community. Cord’s Uhuru Park resolution demanded the immediate withdrawal of the KDF troops from Somalia, which the Government has dismissed. This has forced Cord to change tack.

On July 16, it demanded that the Government reveals the total number of Kenyan soldiers who have been killed in the fight against the Al-Shabaab militants in Somalia. This is an attempt to introduce into Kenya the American script where coffins arriving home from the theatres of war in Vietnam and Somalia forced Washington to hastily withdraw its troops.

This week, Jubilee MPs and senators from the two National Assembly committees on security have charged that Cord is behaving like an Al-Shabaab ambassador.

“It is unfortunate that the Cord team is speaking the same language as the Al-Shabaab. The leaders should stop behaving in a manner perceived to be in the same side with the terror group,” said Mr Asman Kamama, the House Committee on National Security chairman.

Ignore Cord

Within its ranks, the Opposition grievance politics and referendum agenda are having their discontents. At the Coast, leaders across the political divide told President Uhuru to ignore Cord’s referendum call. Further, disaffected Cord MPs have cautioned that the plebiscite push is likely to collapse if the campaign is not inclusive, revealing new cracks in the Opposition ranks.

On its part, Jubilee is profoundly transforming its post-election agenda and strategies to counter Cord’s push for the referendum.

Upon winning power last year, Jubilee insisted on a model that gave pride of place to economic “development” over “politics”. “Development” was enchanted as a politically “neutral” business chaperoned by a youthful and “technocratic” national government.

Drawing a moral line between maendeleo (development) as “good” and siasa (politics) as bad, Jubilee pundits saw politics as a needless “diversion” from their goal of realising Jubilee’s development promises ahead of the next poll in 2017.

In the wake of Saba Saba, Jubilee analysts are lamenting that after nearly a year in comatose, the Opposition has exploited the vacuum created by Jubilee “anti-politics machine” to make a dramatic comeback into national politics.

The intense anxiety that gripped the country in the run-up to Saba Saba comes through as a heavy price Kenya is paying for the past months of Jubilee’s benign neglect of politics.

This has paved the way for a forceful return of politics. Even then, Jubilee has refused to abandon its development agenda, viewing Cord’s grievance politics as a diversionary tactic aimed at obstructing their development agenda ahead of 2017.

Both President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto have dismissed Cord’s demand for referendum. Their coalition appears to be investing on an incipient “development-as-politics” model that highlights people-based development initiatives as a tactic to neutralise Cord’s potentially polarising style of grievance politics.

The politics of development is revealed in the iconic image of President Kenyatta joyfully riding a police motorbike during the opening of the Toyota Kenya Business Park in Nairobi on July 16, the high-profile visit to Western Kenya and at the Coast (Taita Taveta and Kwale) where he and his deputy posed development as the counterpoise to Cord’s rhetoric.

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute and former Government Adviser