Sonko, Trump and the parallels of two unlikely political bullies

For more than three years, I have been waking up to a steaming hot cup of tea and a well-threaded Donald Trump tweet.

Quite irreverent, irresponsible, and abrasively effective, these tweets have been the second thing I consume in the morning, imagining how his victims would be writhing in agony.

It is pity that of late he seems to have been prevailed upon to go slow on the delightful stuff.

Mr Donald John Trump is perhaps the most unconventional president ever elected in any democracy.

His victory in 2017 against the better-known Hillary Clinton was so confounding that many Americans are still reeling.

Whether his administration has been effective is best left to Americans themselves, and they will make their views known in November.

But while it is not for us here to make any kind of judgement on the man’s personality or electability, we can certainly continue enjoying all his foibles which are simply out of this world.

Another man whose antics closely echo those of President Trump is our very own Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko, who is always in the news for negative reasons of his own making.

Given his penchant for theatrics, Mr Sonko is also a most unlikely political leader who erupted from nowhere and stole the show by defeating the establishment, and then proceeded to project acute hubris and ostentatious philanthropy in equal measure.

FANATICAL SUPPORTERS

One might say that comparing Governor Sonko to President Trump is like comparing an apple to an orange because although both are fruits, they live in different worlds and wield different levels of power.

However, in the final analysis, both exhibit traits that baffle their detractors, for the more outrageous their exploits, the more popular they seem to grow among voters. And this is not the only similarity in their behaviour.

For one, not only do they have huge cores of fanatical supporters who will stand by them through thick and thin, they also exhibit disturbing dictatorial tendencies.

They like hiring and firing people at whim, and they cannot stand any contradiction or accept any advice from the people they hire, especially specialists.

Both are absolutely convinced of their infallibility and when they are proved wrong, they like to shift blame to everyone else but themselves.

Instead of consulting experts, they will come up with madcap ideas and solutions to problems that are beyond their ken.

A recent example will suffice. When everyone else is grappling with the problems associated with the novel coronavirus, each one, in his own way, has come up with a cure.

Governor Sonko found a cure in Hennessy, including small bottles in care packages he donated to the poor, arguing that since alcohol is said to kill the virus, the high content in the brandy should do the job.

GRASSROOTS MOBILISER

President Trump, on the other hand, and against the advice of his medical advisers, started by trumpeting the virtues or a “miracle drug”, chloroquine, and then made the matter worse by subsequently advocating the direct ingestion of disinfectants, apparently to clean up the innards and kill the virus.

We can go on in this vein, but it would be more productive to discuss how the two got to positions of authority where they can peddle utter folly and get away with it.

The best way is to start right at home. Before December 2007 few Kenyans knew who Gideon Mbuvi Mike Kioko was.

Under a little-known party, Narc-Kenya, he suddenly erupted into the Nairobi political scene by defeating two seasoned politicians, Mr Dick Wathika of PNU, who was the incumbent, and Mr Reuben Ndolo of ODM, the previous seat-holder who had occasioned the critical by-election through a petition.

He turned out to be a man of the people, a grassroots mobiliser who spoke their language and understood their needs.

He told Makadara constituency voters that he was one of their own and he would articulate all their concerns in Parliament.

He spoke to matatu crews in their lingo, and promised mama mbogas protection from the marauding askaris.

The spiels he delivered about his daredevil earlier life endeared him to all who felt marginalised.

His philanthropy too was legendary, though the source of his enormous wealth was never questioned.

GRAFT CHARGES

By the end of the campaign period, he had won the seat by a wide margin. He never looked back. Three years later, Mr Sonko was Nairobi senator.

Like many others of his ilk, he probably thought a senator was more powerful than a governor, but when he did win the seat he did so with a huge margin — 808,705.

He was to win the gubernatorial seat with an even bigger margin. These massive victories could have turned his head, for he continued behaving in a very erratic manner, until last year when he was caught up in a web of intrigues that landed him in court on corruption charges.

Today, he is battling forces that seek to diminish his clout in Nairobi politics due to his incompetence and cringeworthy antics.

Before his troubles boiled over, his ministers were said to be terrified of him, and they had reason to be.

He was known to hire and fire at whim and the turnover at City Hall has been the highest of any devolved unit.

The fact that he has run the city government without a deputy since 2018 is testimony enough of the bloated state of his ego.

In February, he was beguiled into ceding some of his constitutional functions to a non-elected entity and now that the ramifications of what he did have finally dawned on him — mainly because of the money and power of patronage lost — he has been noisily seeking to take back his powers.

COMPLETE ROOKIE

Buffeted on all sides, Mr Sonko’s braggadocio is slowly waning, but still, you can’t rule him out; he might surprise everyone by winning re-election in 2022, but that is only if Nairobi voters are still swayed by considerations other than competence.

As for Donald Trump, very few people took him seriously when he ran for the presidency in 2016.

His only claim to fame was that he was a self-made billionaire in real estate and hospitality, and also hosted a popular reality television programme, “The Apprentice”, which gave him name recognition.

When he joined politics, he was a complete rookie with less than noble traits that resonated well with a huge number of voters who could never stomach the idea that the most powerful office on earth had been occupied by a Black American with Kenyan roots for eight long years.

The fact that President Barack Obama acquitted himself admirably in those years was never enough to assuage their anxiety.

So Trump’s victory can be attributed to reaction among conservative voters who felt that their country had strayed too far to the left.

Another issue that appealed to his voters was immigration. For years, white America has been swamped by the understandable though exaggerated fear of being overrun by immigrants from Latin American and “s … hole” Third World countries. Mr Trump promised to do something about it.

The immigration issue is too convoluted to deal with here, but the upshot was that many Americans heartily welcomed the often brutal and heartless changes in policy.

ENEMY OF DISSENT

When blended with racism and xenophobia, the result has been toxic to the victims but deeply satisfying to conservative America.

Another trait that President Trump shares with our man from Mua Hills is his intolerance for dissent from the people he hires, firing them at will, not for incompetence or insubordination, but because they dared to tell the king that was naked.

In many ways, President Trump comes across as the most unlikely man to have ever occupied the White House. Yet with all these peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, he is not as daft as he lets on.

Indeed, his IQ is rated to be above average, though you cannot tell by the way he rants.

Some people believe it is all an act, but it would be foolhardy of his political opponents, now reduced to “Sleepy” Joe Biden, to “misunderestimate” him, as George W Bush would say.

Mr Ngwiri is a consultant editor; [email protected]