Creating uncertainty and fear ahead of elections unforgivable

Little boys and girls across this country are waking up at 4.30am and sleeping past 10pm.

Their teachers are getting them to prepare for the national exams early, to account for the possible disruption of the school year by election violence.

You most probably don’t care about children. I do.

The flights out of this country towards the end of July are close to fully booked.

BUSINESSES AT RISK

People are fleeing Kenya. It is widely expected in some quarters that there will be burning of property, the throwing of stones and killings in the streets as politicians do their favourite thing — leading violence and fomenting destruction.

Businesses are shutting down. Even those who deal in human hair, the hottest commodity in Kenya, are suffering.

Many small family businesses, professional consultancies such as architects, are all but padlocking their doors. Kenyans are hurting.

STRUGGLE FOR POWER
The Kenyan politician is like one of those relatives whose activities are always bringing trouble to the family.

They take risks and put the family farm in jeopardy, everyone would have been better off if they had not been born.

They have measured clothes, mobilised billions o f shillings and are slowly moving the country to the brink of ruin.

Interestingly, many Kenyans, not just simple country folk, think that the most important thing in the world is for Nasa or Jubilee to get power.

TRIBALISM

Are Kenyans smart enough to know that it matters only to about 1,000 people one way or the other?

The biggest con perpetrated on folks high on tribalism is that it makes a big difference whether it is Uhuru Kenyatta or Raila Odinga in power.

It doesn’t really, not for the ordinary people.

It does not matter enough, at any rate, to burn the country for. I am tired, hustled and generally angry.

MUDAVADI'S TAKE
I want to make two radical points.

The first one is that I am very disappointed by the tone taken by ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi in the stuff he said about the ballot tender.

I have met Mr Mudavadi once in his office and I was very impressed by how mature, temperate and diplomatic he was.

I have also reported him, including the Anglo Leasing corruption scandals with which he has been linked, which is neither here nor there for a man of his pedigree.

BALLOT PAPERS
As a Kenyan I do hope that Mr Mudavadi was raising political temperatures and throwing the election into uncertainty because he believes its integrity is at risk and he was not just playing some funny games so as to also eat on the ballot tender.

Does it matter who benefits commercially from the tender?

Are there no controls to ensure that the IEBC does not import excess ballot papers?

Is it a matter of fact that excess ballots were printed in 2013?

RIGGING CLAIMS

Second radical point: As an individual, I am totally fed up with this narrative of rigging.

This country’s instability is closely tied to supposed electoral injustices perpetrated on Mr Odinga.

In 1992, 1997, 2007 and 2013 Mr Odinga claims to have had his personal victory, or that of the party he represented, “stolen”.

Why are these tricks successfully played on him, election cycle after election cycle?

And as a matter of extreme exasperation, why doesn’t he also rig, if that is the only way a Kenyan election is won?

CHANGE OF TACT

Because he cannot say that he did not have access to the power, money and opportunity to do so as Prime Minister in a coalition government that was leaning over backwards to please him.

And if every time he runs for office he is unsuccessful because of rigging, why can’t he find an alternative way to serve his country?

Has he considered the possibility that his famed political skills notwithstanding that he is probably not good at winning elections — maybe because he does not know how to protect them from rigging — and that perhaps his talent could be more productively utilised in other endeavours?

RAILA'S CAMPAIGNERS

In Mr Odinga’s team are some of Kenya’s heaviest brains: my friend Prof Makau Mutua, David Ndii, Maina Kiai, and John Githongo, to mention but a few of some of the brightest Kenyans alive, who are believed to be working to get Mr Odinga elected.

If they can’t find a way to get him elected, including preventing rigging, then he will probably never be elected.

I am so tired of this whining, which has gone on all my life, that if Mr Odinga complains one more time that he has been rigged, I should be among the people who will be throwing stones at him.

OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT
Their brothers and friends in Jubilee, who have been running the country, while they are not exactly the disaster that Nasa paints them to be, have serious issues.

One is corruption, which is endemic and pervasive.

The other is the management of the economy, especially insensitivity to basic needs and, finally, is press freedom.

Jubilee’s desire to control the media is the worst I have seen in 20 years of doing newspapers.

But all this pales into insignificance compared to the disruption to the lives of our children and our economy caused by all this grandstanding, chest-thumping and the creation of fear and uncertainty ahead of this election.

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