Threat of violence over act that will not change the status quo

The ‘swearing-in’ ceremony for ‘President’ Raila Odinga and ‘Deputy President’ Kalonzo Musyoka should be a celebratory affair that need not pose a threat to peace.

The event should not leave the legitimate officers bearers, President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, quaking in their boots.

The crowds assembling at Uhuru Park, Nairobi, will be peaceful and orderly.

Lawless mobs that often accompany opposition processions on looting and stone-throwing orgies will this time be kept at bay.

National Super Alliance marshals will work in close cooperation with the police to ensure that the event proceeds without any threat to law and order.

CROWD CONTROL

The police officers on duty at Uhuru Park and on all the routes to the venue will have been retrained on modern crowd control methods.

They will not lob teargas canisters aimlessly, baton-charge crowds for no good reason or use innocent little children for musketry practice.

Arrests, where necessary, will be targeted only at criminal elements, who might try to spoil the party, including members of the Jubilee Party’s self-styled ‘Nairobi Business Community’, which is raring to spill blood.

Any arrest will, of course, be conducted in humane manner in accordance with law and the police operational manual on the use of necessary force.

SOIL REPUTATION

Mr Odinga and Mr Musyoka will hold aloft their Bibles to take of the oath of office before whichever lawyer or ex-judge they have found ready to soil his professional reputation.

Events will conclude with fiery speeches from the political leaders, who will work their delirious supporters into feverish excitement at having finally reached Canaan.

Celebrations will go on late into the night across Nairobi, with good-natured crowds running the streets and crowding drinking places in festivities that will be replicated in Mombasa, Kisumu, Kakamega, Kitale, Machakos and every other town where Nasa commands substantial following.

IMPLEMENT

The following day everyone will wake up with a splitting headache, and a dose of reality. For Mr Odinga and Mr Musyoka, hangovers will not obscure the fact neither will be waking up in State House or the DP’s official residence.

They will be in their same old familiar beds.

They will not have a public service bureaucracy to implement their programmes, military and police formations to command, presidential motorcades or access to the National Treasury and other public assets.

Their millions of followers across Kenya will also awake to realisation that the party is over. They must still go to work, or look for work.

They must tend to their farms, shops, offices, factories and other enterprises; and also take their children to school.

In other words, it will be back to humdrum existence as their leaders look for fresh ideas to garner attention.

SWEET DREAM

Then somebody woke me up from that sweet dream. It could turn bloody.

The Nasa leadership has a tendency to attract looting and stone-throwing mobs.

It has never demonstrated the capacity or will to police its own events, leaving them vulnerable to infiltration by criminal elements out to profit from mayhem, or state security agents detailed to cause chaos.

There could also be foolishness where crazed mobs, instead of going home after the event, decide to storm State House, provoking a potential bloodbath.

Then there is the fact that under the Jubilee administration, the police service has been re-programmed to the Kanu dictatorship setting where every gathering not singing the ruling party song must be despatched with extreme brutality.

The police also like to allow criminal gangs to do the unsavoury work for them, like the aforementioned illegal ethnic militia that does not at all represent the face of diversity that is the real Nairobi business community.

This is not surprising in an environment where the President and Deputy are heirs of a dictatorship that pioneered the politics of ethnic violence, themselves survived International Criminal Court charges for allegedly directing ethnic militia, and where the Cabinet Secretary in charge of national security openly proclaims himself the leader of a criminal ethnic terror squad.

There is also the possibility that foolish hardliners in government will insist on making good the outrageous threat to arrest Mr Odinga, Mr Musyoka and their companions to face charges of treason and possibility of the hangman’s noose. That would be playing straight into Mr Odinga’s hands.

Email: [email protected] Twitter: @MachariaGaitho