Keep politics out of the military, Mr President, we need stability

Let me admit to being one of those Kenyans who let off a chuckle when Uhuru Kenyatta was elected President in March last year.

I was not a supporter (mainly because I believe that in the interests of stability State House should be rotated between ethnic groups), but I found the campaign by Western powers and civil society activists against the Jubilee team to have been unwise and extremely condescending.

In a democracy, only voters at the ballot should decide who will lead them. Managing the process by attempting to bar people who have not been convicted recalls an earlier time in the West when only propertied white men could vote — because it was assumed that women and blacks were too soft in the head to make proper decisions.

But here’s the problem. Uhuru Kenyatta has simply failed to make the transition from the campaign trail to the presidency.

He remains an angry and, unfortunately, paranoid leader. He can’t be blamed for all the security problems in the country because many of the issues that the Opposition lumps on his head are inherited.

The trouble is that Mr Kenyatta’s actions risk making matters worse. The veiled suggestion he made two days after the Mpeketoni attacks that the national Opposition was to blame for the killings was the low point of his presidency.

It risked politicising a challenge Kenyans must face together and further polarised a divided nation.

SOLDIERS SACKED

There is every possibility that local leaders were involved but dragging in the national Opposition was dangerous and unwise. Then came the news a few days later that three soldiers had been sacked for attending Cord’s rally in Mombasa. Their names clearly suggested that they are from Opposition strongholds.

At first, I thought this could not possibly be true and dismissed it as the work of Cord’s effective online propaganda machine (where was this team during the campaigns when it mattered?); but sadly it was true.

The Daily Nation reported the story after the initial swirl of online speculation.

It signified a turn under this presidency to the 1980s Moi era when a plot to topple the government lurked behind every shadow.

Like Moi, Uhuru’s government has presided over several trials which have not drawn nearly enough attention of people who were recorded by the intelligence services “insulting” the President.

How this becomes a priority when you have big fish like the Shabaab to fry is a mystery. Introducing politics into the disciplined forces is an especially dangerous move.

Kenya’s military is one of the reasons the country thrived while many others on the continent burned in the years after independence.

The soldiers have stayed in the barracks and theirs remains an important and genuinely national institution that has been a key guarantor of stability in times of crisis.

When the 2007/8 post-election violence broke out and we started hearing of police shooting each other in the back, the military stayed united and performed with distinction in places such as Naivasha and parts of Uasin Gishu where they saved hundreds of lives.

Sacking soldiers on flimsy grounds risks introducing ethnic politics in this most vital of institutions. From there, it would be a short step towards crises such as those in the Ivory Coast where the civil war broke up the country because the military split along ethnic lines.

Mr Kenyatta really needs to start governing and abandon the fear that he might be toppled by either the Opposition or the West. No leader in sub-Saharan Africa has been ousted by demonstrators and he won’t be the first.

He should borrow a leaf from Mzee Mwai Kibaki. When Michael Ranneberger launched his “Yes Youth Can” project to “nurture a new generation of Kenyan leaders”, Mr Kibaki simply ignored it and the US ambassador ran around wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on a project which went absolutely nowhere.

The President did not panic and start making rash decisions or send intelligence officers to note who is insulting who in various shebeens.

Mr Kenyatta should summon the confidence to govern the country and forget all the sideshows, including dangerous ones such as sacking soldiers for no reason, which can only spell trouble for Kenya.

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