Building Bridges must move beyond ‘Big Two’, be national

President Uhuru Kenyatta and ‘former’ opposition leader Raila Odinga achieved a great advertisement for the Building Bridges Initiative during the joint tour of the latter’s Nyanza political strongholds last week.

Mr Odinga engineered an enthusiastic reception for an erstwhile political foe, who in other circumstances would more likely have been greeted with heckling and showers of stones.

Insofar as selling the handshake in Mr Odinga’s fiefdoms and projecting President Kenyatta as a friend and partner rather than a sworn enemy, the tour was a great success.

RUTO PRESENT

Also worth noting was Deputy President William Ruto’s presence, and his gracefully making all the right noises in support of a pact he generally holds in suspicion.

However, the razzmatazz does not disguise the fact that Building Bridges still has a large number of sceptics.

The Kisumu tour largely put on display the new Uhuru-Raila bromance rather than the serious business needed towards a sustainable democracy not forever under the threat of primitive duels for ethnic supremacy.

Beyond the PR spin, the success of the tour can reap great dividends if exploited to build broad support for a pact whose meaning and intentions remain a mystery to many.

BUILDING BRIDGES

Time is ripe to bring activities of the Building Bridges Secretariat and Task Force out of cloistered confines and out into an open and transparent quest for a just society.

So far, what the public has seen of Building Bridges is Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga burying the hatchet on a dynastic feud that began with their fathers — founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and his Vice-President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga — and snowballed into a perpetual ethnic schism between their respective Kikuyu and Luo communities.

Kisumu brought this out clearly but the problems that afflict Kenya cannot be cured by President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga agreeing to sup together, the Kenyatta and Odinga families reaching a ceasefire or the Kikuyu and Luo putting aside decades of mutual hatred and suspicion.

Building Bridges surely must transcend individuals, families and communities and address the much wider and deeper divides that all too often drive Kenya down the dark and dangerous path of bloody ethnic conflict every other electoral cycle.

OUT OF LINE

Those at the Kisumu parley who suggested that the President should make good on a half-century-old political debt and support Mr Odinga’s long presidential quest come 2022 were out of line.

In the first instance, the presidency is not personal property that President Kenyatta can bequeath Mr Odinga or anyone else. Not even to his Deputy President.

If the President has made any promises to Mr Odinga out of their handshake or to Mr Ruto out of the Jubilee Party power-sharing and transfer agreement, both claimants would be naive and foolish to expect the through pass to State House.

ONE VOTE

The President may have his preference but he holds only one vote and cannot use it to bind his extended family, clan or wider ethnic and regional constituency.

In any case, political promises are completely empty where an outgoing president shorn of the bully pulpit, State administrative and security machinery and public money, retains no clout to swing any significant vote. Ask former Presidents Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki.

It may also have been lost on the organisers that the more Building Bridges is billed as a Kenyatta-Odinga or Kikuyu-Luo pact, the more other political aspirants or groups will feel sidelined.

Mr Ruto may have put on a brave face in Kisumu but he was playing possum and, surely, will raise his head at the right time. Also keenly watching were Mr Odinga’s co-principals in the increasingly irrelevant Nasa coalition — Musalia Mudavadi, Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetang’ula.

EQUAL BILLING

They, too, will be demanding equal billing for their respective following.

There’s another matter that can’t be ignored. The destructive Kikuyu-Luo political rivalry dates back to the early years of Independence but a much more deadly and bloody variant of ethnic political conflict has taken root since the clamour for democracy begun in the early 1990s. Call it the Kalenjin question.

It would be foolhardy for one to see a deal between the Kikuyu and Luo as the answer to Kenya’s history of ethnic-political conflicts while elbowing aside Mr Ruto’s Kalenjin, who have been at the epicentre of all such violence against a large array of neighbouring communities.

That is why Building Bridges must grow beyond Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga. Only an inclusive and open national dialogue incorporating all interest groups and seeking solutions beyond temporary political alliances and power-sharing deals will save Kenya.

[email protected] ; @MachariaGaitho