Raila’s move presents a chance to re-appraise our politics

For almost two decades now, Raila Odinga has been the most powerful counter-centre in Kenya’s politics that has checked the Executive at every turn, whether he has been in government or outside government.

This has made him indispensable to the opposition. It has also entangled his personal ambitions with the opposition’s political agenda.

His rapprochement with Uhuru Kenyatta now provides the perfect opportunity to uncouple his ambitions from opposition politics.

The problem, however, is that the opposition without Odinga is an invertebrate mass.

Apart from being its most viable presidential candidate in three elections now, the opposition is headless without his strategic mind, spineless without his chutzpah, and legless without his mobilisation skills.

DISSENT
For the country, Odinga has also been the curtain that has shielded the country from a terrifying reality that those in power have a clamp-hold on the apparatus of the state, the national economy, and instruments of truth, and no one, but Raila Odinga has been able to as much as shake the grip.

Odinga’s appeal is symptomatic of a peculiar psychology of struggle in Kenya.

Up to 1990, progressive politics in Kenya amounted to a little more than the chutzpah of a few brave men and women that stood up to the Executive.

Their fate was consistent – death, exile, persecution or penury.

This is the golden thread that runs through the stories of Pio Gama Pinto, JM Kariuki, Jean-Marie Seroney, Chelagat Mutai, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, George Anyona, Alexander Muge and Masinde Muliro, to name but a few.

DETENTION
Odinga’s credentials as a struggle figure easily fit him among these men and women.

He spent most of the 1980s in detention without trial on accusations of masterminding the 1982 coup.

In 1990s, he was at the forefront of the struggle for democratisation.

Despite a problematic dalliance with Kanu in 1997, Odinga recovered credibility and today stands apart as the most important driver of change in the last 15 years.

His credentials aside, Odinga has manipulated the psychology of Kenya’s political martyrdom to his advantage.

Historically, a political martyr in Kenya has typically been a daredevil that bravely stood up to the President.

POLITICAL MARTYR

The State’s stoke response has been harsh, and aimed at making the dissenter “an example to others”: Torture, murder or outright marginalisation that drove many to despair and early death.

While this is effective in intimidating would-be dissenters into silence, it has left many with unresolved resentment and disillusionment.

Ironically, the success of this deterrence has itself catalysed a psychological process that eventually turns the brave dissenter into a political martyr.

The dissenter that stands up to the state becomes the vicar through whom those who desire to dissent but are too afraid to do so, live out their predicament and find release.

The masses own his courage and suffering, and in death, the martyr becomes a tombstone that punctuates episodes in an epic struggle against a monstrous state.

UNITY PACT
Odinga has deliberately positioned himself as the heir and custodian of this bloodline of martyrs.

Quite often, he recalled these names when narrating his own struggle, a brotherhood in struggle.

He is the one that missed the bullet, and now lives to fight for those that cannot, dead or alive.

While the Kenyan state is still given to muscular behaviour, this ritualisation of politics is increasingly irrelevant where the political challenges citizens face are substantially different from those faced by a group fighting against the authoritarian regimes of Daniel Moi and Jomo Kenyatta. 

Odinga’s rapprochement with Kenyatta proves that, and presents an opportunity to re-appraise our politics.

The question should be less whether Odinga is lost to the opposition or whether there is an opposition without him, but more on the possibility of an opposition politics without a messiah.

To put it otherwise – can Wanjiku be an opposition leader?

DEMOCRACY
There is much to build on, no less Odinga’s own contribution to democracy.

The struggle for democracy has to date focused on opening up the political space, enabling political players to compete fairly and eventually creating a fair election system that fairly arbitrates political competition.

In other words, the struggle for democracy has made it possible and safe for everyone to participate in politics, including running for any political office.

By nature, these are political rights, and relate to the rules of who gets what and how.

There are still important problems, and that is the responsibility of Kenyan citizens, as much as citizens in even the most developed democracies, to fix.

The question today is what to do with an opposition that is too dependent on one messianic figure. To put it in Kiswahili – can Wanjiku be an opposition leader?

CITIZENSHIP
The issues of the day are also different.

In the context of a hugely disillusioned nation with huge income disparities and a youth bulge, Kenya’s politics is bound to shape up as a battle for socio-economic and welfare rights.

Rather than an entirely new movement, this is a struggle about expanding citizenship rights beyond the political, to include a demand for socio-economic rights, which should translate to free education, free healthcare, social welfare, labour rights, housing and security, in the broad sense of the term.

This is what gives substantive meaning to citizenship.

WANANCHI
In a country with such inequality as Kenya, this should form the next frontier of democratic politics.

This is a battle for Wanjiku, who shares very little with Odinga and Kenyatta.

That makes the two men, and the class they represent, incompetent to wage this battle.

What they can help Wanjiku with is to declare whether they mean it or not, #freeeducation, #freehealthcare and #houses4cucus.

Framing this politics this way changes it qualitatively. It is not a battle for heroes, but a battle for kawaida (common) people.

It is also a battle that forces political parties and politicians away from the big rallies and cameras, to the everyday struggles of subsistence.

Opposition politics today is not made or prepared for this battle.

Dr Chesang is a public affairs consultant. Views expressed here are his own. Twitter - @KipronoChesang