We need a party that can galvanise our national mind

What you need to know:

  • Apolitical party is a group of individuals nationwide who believe in and actively pursue more or less the same socio-political ideals.
  • Our parties are but vehicles fitted with loudspeakers through which individuals from big ethnic groups seek to whip up emotional support from their ethnicities.
  • All our political parties can be seen as personal vehicles through which individuals from the big tribal communities seek to amass national power.

Properly speaking, a political party is a group of individuals nationwide who believe in and actively pursue more or less the same socio-political ideals.

Apparently, that is what gives Raila Odinga the right — as the newspapers put it the other day — to threaten to “kick out” of his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) all members who back President Uhuru Kenyatta’s government.

For if there are, in the ODM, individuals who strategically support the President, then the question is direct and immediate: What are they doing in the ODM? The answer stands out like the Kenyatta Convention Centre in Nairobi. For in our setting, such a definition of the political party is always wide off the mark since none of our political parties is an association of true socio-moral ideals nationwide.

If a party had such ideals and published them in, say, a book form, I would be among the first to know it because reading is what I do and, as a result, I regularly visit all of Nairobi’s bookshops.

Yet, no, our political parties are not associations of like-minded social idealists. Contrariwise — as Tweedledum used to tell Tweedledee — our parties are but vehicles fitted with loudspeakers through which individuals from big ethnic groups seek to whip up emotional support from their ethnicities.

All our political parties can be seen as personal vehicles through which individuals from the big tribal communities seek to amass national power.

Thus Mr Kenyatta’s strongest support base is on the slopes of Mount Kenya, Mr William Ruto’s along the great valley, Mr Odinga’s around Lake Victoria’s protrusive Nyanza Gulf, Mr Musyoka’s around Kiima Kimwe, Mr Mudavadi’s at the foot of Mount Elgon, etc.

A tribe, then – not ideals, not sets of social ideas of the kind that you might call an ideology – is the definition of each one of our political parties.

Each party is an association of men and women held together by ethnic strands woven by the leaders. That is why, if Mr Odinga launched a regime of “kicking people out” of the ODM, a likelihood is that the major victims will not be Luo.

GREAT BOOST

Of course, it would also depend on the method by which he “kicked out” anybody. For, indeed, “kicking out” is not a very polished way of doing political things. “Kicking out” is a term which a true democrat should never brandish carelessly because it implies one of those kangaroo courts by which many an Adolf Hitler and a Joseph Stalin used to eliminate every one of their party critics.

For the wheels of the system would continue to spin because the Kenya style is that the victims of any “kicking out” will immediately and with vigelegele be welcomed into the bosoms of other parties to swell their numbers.

That would be a great boost for democracy because – as our Euro-American liberal gurus have convinced us – the number of human beings in a party is the be-all and the end-all here of democracy.

If the number is big, then – it doesn’t matter if Joseph Stalin is their leader. For our own academic angels of Western democracy have convinced us that the greater the number of contestants in any political kidumbwedumbwe, the more democratic you are, not the social content of your thought.

It was through such parliamentary numbers that Germany, a highly educated nation, allowed a mental baboon called Adolf Hitler to become its Fuehrer.

So why do we continue to make Euro-American liberalism our ideal in politics? Because, upon the whole, it was thus that European colonialism caused even its greatest mental product among us to admire deeply the moral duplicity of Western European and North American liberalism.

What Kenya needs is a party that can galvanise our national mind for a new house-cleaning process to make it serve the nation’s really objective interests.