Let’s stop being prima donnas and abide by the accepted rules of play

Many Jubilee fans got jubilated by newspaper photos of Raila Odinga and Moses Wetang’ula grimacing in pain under clouds of teargas when their adventure to IEBC’s Nairobi headquarters went awry last Monday.

The Jubilants’ fun then shifted to snide questions of what may have happened to Kalonzo Musyoka, who seemed to have miraculously vanished into thin air when hell broke loose. (I am told his minders were faster than others in bundling him into his car and away to safety before any photos of him in an undignified state could be taken). And, sure enough, at a post-teargas press conference with his colleagues, there he was, looking smart and fresh as ever.

Not that all this really mattered. We have a bigger problem. All of us in this country love being drama queens, just as were the cheerleaders and the victims of the teargas fracas. We love to create spectacle or to simply watch it happen. That Mr Musyoka is not cut out for that role is common knowledge.

When we presume the world revolves around our parochial passions and little hatreds, we delude ourselves. Division and – yes – antagonism is the gear of the competitive type of politics we freely chose for ourselves. This is something we need to come to terms with as we reset the rules of the game. There is nothing even unique about this.

Right now, Britain is terribly divided over an upcoming June referendum on whether to remain or exit the European Union. The atmosphere is so poisoned that the colourful former London mayor Boris Johnson made an ill-disguised racist rant at Barack Obama for having the temerity to intrude into the issue.

Across in Brazil, the world is keeping its fingers crossed about this year’s Olympic Games amid a paralysing impeachment crisis facing President Dilma Rousseff. Impeachment fever has lately gripped South Africa, too. Everywhere you look, the world is like that, more or less.

All of us are familiar with the abnormal election campaign in America, where two eccentric candidates – Bernie Sanders on the Left, and Donald Trump who nobody is quite sure where he stands – have made scathing calls about delegate-fixing in the political party primaries that have put into question the integrity of American “democracy.”

NEVER-ENDING DISPUTES

The issue is always how to resolve these never-ending disputes. To believe in a world where such don’t exist is to live in fairyland. Thus the question must be: Do we fall back to institutions we have agreed to have in place? Or do we go via other ways, as with the street show put up last Monday? Or are we longing to go back to “Nusu Mkate”?

Make no mistake, all the high-blown rhetoric you are hearing all around is essentially posturing. Also, interest groups like civil society have a vested stake in portraying the political system as broken. That way they get to play a role which politicians would otherwise deny them. 

Heck, British PM David Cameron was right in letting his country’s divided electorate directly decide the fate of their EU membership rather than him huddle in meetings with political party chiefs, bishops of the Church of England and God knows who else to seek “consensus”. It is not right when a country is dragged into a manufactured stalemate when there are clear and straightforward options to take.

I will be the first to admit that the IEBC is tainted by the “Chickengate” scandal. As to other matters raised about the Commission, we need hard evidence. Chickengate was a criminal enterprise and should be handled as such. The point here is whether the relevant agencies are acting fast enough on it.

However, we have to be honest and agree that Cord’s hostility toward the IEBC long predates the publication of the Chickengate saga in Kenya.

And why should we isolate the IEBC alone in a corner? The Supreme Court was a key referee in 2013 also. Should we picket it too now that it is facing serious integrity questions of its own? What are the rules of disengagement? Are there going to be any rules anyway?

The mode of engagement matters hugely, even when we are contemplating a “Nusu Mkate” scenario. Recall 2014. Demands for dialogue laced with crude threats (“kunyolewa kichwa bila maji”) were unlikely to get anywhere with the other party. Decorum counts.

We could be misreading the anti-IEBC script, though. Perhaps it’s not really about the Commission, after all. Following the collapse of the Okoa Kenya drive, Cord urgently needs another galvanising narrative for 2017. If the IEBC commissioners call everybody’s bluff and suddenly resigned, many people would be caught off-guard. If they stay put, Cord will have the perfect excuse to boycott the next election.

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