A case for coming together to make historical gains

Many thinking Kenyans are truly tired of the perennial habit of exchanging hostile words between Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, the President, and Raila Amolo Odinga, his chief political opponent. It seems to me that most Kenyans would wholly welcome an appropriately worded long-term truce between the President and Kenya’s perennial opposition leader.

That is why I wholly support Mr Musalia Mudavadi’s reconciliation call, as reported by the Daily Nation on Monday. Yet, conversely, Mr Mudavadi, a gentlemanly soul, seemed to assert that he does not approve of  “gentlemen’s agreements”. The perennial oppositionist seemed to say that his own party would never enter any pact of that kind with another party.

BACKWARD

I know of a number of reasons that a party leader would make such a rigid statement. One is that he or she believes that only his or her party has entered the absolutely correct path towards curing the nation’s ills and does not want to risk watering down that resolve by entering an agreement with a backward minded political group. 

There is, of course, much to be said for such an attitude. But, in that case, Mr Mudavadi seemed to assert, he will reject any pact even if reached in the friendliest and most considered manner between two genuine political parties. That was why – this major opposition leader seemed to explain – he had condemned the reported truce between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, the respective scions of Kenya’s founding father and his chief opponent.

OPPOSITIONIST

Apparently, then, Mr Mudavadi, a longstanding – but usually level-headed -- oppositionist, will not initial any agreement between President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga.  Yet it would be more logical for him or somebody else to say flatly that he or she will never sign any agreement with President Kenyatta full stop. If that is what anybody is saying, then he or she is revealing that he or she has lost all consciousness of the significance of tactics in the game of politics

From all my readings on the world’s politics and political history, I know that the best advice would be this:  Though you may hedge much of the time, you should never say an absolute “never” to any one of the political opportunities that may come your way. Give it the most careful thought and reject it only after you have concluded that it will never contribute even an iota to your long-term goal of the moment.

LESSON

Most of the world’s political historians with whom I am familiar have learned a powerful lesson from the recent political history of most of Europe’s own nation-states. It is that a timed coalition, even with what seems to ordinary members to be an unacceptable political enemy, may, in the end, prove a powerfully winning tactical weapon.

From Europe’s history during the last two to three centuries, we are familiar with a number of occasions on which ideologically opposite movements have, for important momentary tactical purposes, come together to make powerfully important historical gains and social interventions. But my advice is: Please do venture forth even with a party which, in ideological terms, appears to be most vehemently opposed to your own.

ECONO-FINANCIAL

This would seem easiest in the Third World because, there, opposition is almost never a matter of hard socio-ideological differences or ideals or principles. Nay, in the Third world – especially Africa – political opposition is almost always an ethnic question. In it, powerful tribal individuals are driven only by what they stand to bag when they come to power in terms of immediate econo-financial gains.

In Western Europe’s recent Third World colonies, especially African ones, what is masqueraded as opposition politics is usually nothing but the tiny-mindedness of a tribal clique in a break-neck hurry for one of them to become the next national chieftain and thus chairman over the fleecing of a country’s scanty economic possessions.