Sugar debate exposes Jubilee’s weak political capacity

Every time Jubilee appears to have pinned Raila Odinga and ODM down into a tight corner, the opposition has always wriggled out and dramatically swung back to run circles around the government.

Recently, the opposition was on the ropes after US President Barack Obama’s Kenyan visit and endorsement of the Kenyatta Government. Why is this?

Uncannily, Jubilee’s political woes are self-inflicted. The ruling coalition has disregarded the wisdom of ages that political capacity is the heart and soul of society — development and the rigmarole are mere outcomes.

As currently constituted, the Jubilee Government may continue to enjoy and even expand its numerical strength — hyped as the “tyranny of numbers” — to decisively win the 2017 elections. But the acrimonious Uganda sugar debate has exposed, once again, its vulnerability. An awfully weak political capacity in the age of social media is Jubilee’s real Achille’s heel that could lead to its downfall by 2022 if not 2017.

History is replete with examples of the rise, decline and fall of great powers according to the ebbs and flows of their political capacity. In our liberal democratic age, political capacity refers to the strategies and tactics that the political elite use in their political and policy decisions.

Political capacity is a necessary condition for the growth and rise of any leading nation.

POLITICAL CAPACITY

It is the engine of social transformation. In a powerfully argued article, “Sources of political capacity: A case study of China” (2006), the Chinese scholar, Yi Feng, convincingly argued that China owes its economic transformation and meteoric rise as a superpower to the huge political capacity of its rulers.

The age of social media has raised the stakes for political capacity. Two decades ago, when Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress published its seminal policy document, “Ready to govern: ANC policy guidelines for a democratic South Africa” (May 1992), governing was always seen as something different from campaigning to win an election.

However, as the former Premier of Ontario, Canada, Bob Rae, has aptly noted, the rise of the “perpetual campaign” model of doing political business has blurred the line between “governing” and “election” as separate times in a national calendar. The gap between governing and campaigning has pretty much disappeared.

Political business now takes the form of high-tech, big-data, message-driven campaigning — with its ubiquitous dose of negative advertising or out-right misinformation and propaganda in public debates and election. This has turned governing into an existential crisis for governments that are still stuck to the old temporal divide between governing and campaigning.

In the age of the social media, the perpetual nature of messaging and campaigning can determine the fortunes of governments. The perpetual campaign model has also enabled opposition parties and civil society groups to challenge governments or to even engineer effective regime changes.

The Uganda sugar debate signifies the success of Odinga and ODM to adopt the “perpetual campaign” model to run rings around the government. As part of a well-orchestrated perpetual campaign, the opposition has argued that in the wake of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s recent propitious state visit to Uganda, the government entered into a trade pact to allow imports of “low quality” sugar from Uganda at a time when the local sugar industry is on its knees.

In a tightly argued piece, Musalia Mudavadi of Amani National Congress weighed into the debate, warning that “livelihoods in the western sugar belt are threatened due to unscrupulous practices leading to weakened and collapsing sugar factories ...”

He further called on the government to take measures to ensure that corrupt traders do not import sugar from countries such as Brazil, re-package and channel it through Uganda and dump it in the Kenyan market to circumvent the regulations under the Rules of Origin principal.

SLIP-UP

The Ugandan sugar debate may turn out to be another non-issue, but Odinga’s powerful perpetual campaign machine has turned it into a betrayal and major policy slip-up by the government.

In the light of supremacy battles within Cord and growing pockets of rebellion within its strongholds in Nyanza, Western Kenya, lower Eastern (Ukambani) and the Coast, Odinga may have a heavy spade work to raise the numbers to win the 2017 election — perhaps his last.

But the sugar saga reveals Odinga’s and ODM’s huge political capacity to claw back on Jubilee’s political gains.

As for now, ODM is still in the dark as to what kind of deal Kenya signed with Uganda. The party has even threatened to file a lawsuit to compel the government to disclose details of the controversial sugar importation deal it struck with Uganda, arguing that the government is obliged to make public any deal or treaty it enters with another country.

However, the dictates of “perpetual campaign” do not require it to wait for truth to come out.

Instead, from ODM’s mid-term stock-taking retreat at Maanzoni Lodge in Machakos county this week, came the esoteric and hyped language of a “secret deal”, “suspect deal,” “government hostility to the sugar industry” and “making investing in the industry more and more risky” to describe the alleged pact.

ODM has successfully used its political capacity to turn the tide against Jubilee and to claw back on some of the political inroads Kenyatta made into Western Kenya. For Jubilee, the lesson is clear: Political capacity is everything in the age of “perpetual campaign.” Ignore it at your own peril.

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