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Does Raila Want It As Badly As His Supporters?[/SIZE]
Posted by Carey Francis Orieko - No Comments
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The post mortem of the 2013 elections on the side of Raila Odinga was interesting. Apart from the obvious accusations of rigging that resulted in a monumental, tension-packed Supreme Court petition, and subsequent ruling in favour of the status quo, there were the more difficult in-house confessions from people knowledgeable with how ODM and/or the Cord coalition had handled the election. There were allegations of agents’ money pocketed by party functionaries, missing agents in many polling stations, especially areas considered not party strongholds, as well as massive disorganisation almost everywhere across the country. Even more intriguing was that this had been preceded by chaotic party nominations, and many people associated with the party had hoped that lessons had been learnt at the nominations and more order and discipline would be shown in handling the general election. It was not to be. I remember being on a long haul flight soon after the Supreme Court ruling, seated next to a fellow Kenyan, who turned out to be an ODM supporter, from our brief introduction. I asked him what he thought had gone wrong. His answer was blunt; “Our top people didn’t do anything to secure the vote. After the 2007 experience, we should have done better”. It was difficult getting him to say more. The bitterness from that experience was clearly still manifest.
My work involves travelling to remote communities and interacting with people from all walks of life. To understand people more, I try to delve into their backgrounds and hear their challenges and triumphs. One of the ways I do this is to discuss politics openly. I have discovered over time that political choices quite often explain many other choices. They also tend to explain expectations and make it easy to understand why people do what they do. My Abagusii people, for example, at this moment, are largely pro-Raila in a fanatical way, almost matching their Luo neighbours. Some of the reasons for this include the perennial land issues among the Abagusii, as well as a distinct feeling that runaway corruption has scuttled the economic growth of Abagusii enterprise. They feel only Raila can fix it. But my conversations with the people always end up with one grey area; Can the party conduct credible nominations and can a functional campaign team ever run a proper electioneering process for Raila, that includes monitoring of the voting and tallying process?
My people have a saying; “Omoiseke ekieni ekiya tari gokura erinde aroru”. It loosely translates to “A pretty woman doesn’t need to shout to be noticed”. In the jungle that is Kenyan politics, you would expect that someone with Raila’s immaculate credentials should easily win the presidency without chasing too hard for it. You would also expect that with such a brilliant resume in the liberation struggle, Raila would automatically attract the best personnel to power his campaigns to State House. But somehow, that never seems to happen. Why is this so? Why is Raila the brilliant politician unable to marshall a strong team revolving around clear strategy, message discipline and coordinated ground operations?
Conversations with ODM people on the ground tend to end up with the same complaints; Local offices have no order or structures, party factions are permanently bickering, top party officials are busy supporting certain factions against each other. Party meetings at local levels seldom take place. No communication with the head office is recorded. In fact, ahead of party primaries set to begin this week, I couldn’t find a single party branch who knew how the nominations would be done and who would be in charge. Even though the nomination activities begin later this week, aspirants do not know how their voters would be identified, what methods would be used to vote, how the ballot papers and boxes would look like or even where the polling stations would be! At the time of writing this article, the party hierarchy was at Bomas of Kenya issuing nomination certificates for aspirants who were unopposed as at party deadline for application. A little birdie whispered to me that there were people there who got certificates but were not entirely unopposed! This could not be independently verified. The result of this fear of chaotic nominations is that many capable ODM aspirants are running away to contest in smaller parties. Talent is being lost.
In researching for this article, I decided to first seek the views of Raila’s core bases. The common narrative here is that Raila, and the one tribe that has carried the liberation flag tirelessly this far, the Luo, may be suffering a bout of liberation fatigue. There is a school of thought that opines that once basic freedoms were recaptured from the Kanu regime, the core Luo base felt its work was done and have slowly drifted away from the burning desire for the presidency that is still prevalent among the Kikuyu, for example. This could partly explain the infamous low voter turnout among the Luo in the past two multiparty elections.
However, a political scientist who spoke to me, had an interesting perspective. In his view, Raila has steadily moved ideologically from the left to the right, and acquired an appetite for wealth common among the right. Effectively therefore, he thinks that as Raila has steadily entered the big league of the monied elite, his leftist revolutionary fangs have considerably gone blunt. In Africa, and many parts of the world, the rich hardly ever form part of the left wing revolutionary groups required to fight and topple regimes. A rich Raila isn’t the fire-spitting Marxist revolutionary of the 80s. Revolutions are all-or-nothing sort of movements, and rich people with considerable assets hardly ever want to disturb the ship. How true this is, only time will tell.
Back to people around Raila, a knowledgeable source once told me that many of Raila’s core staff are hired by reference. Someone simply walks in with you, introduces you and you are hired! Many current staff members at Raila’s offices are young people with no known political experience of any sort, and no past strategic triumphs to write about. The sort of easy pickings his opponents would love to pocket. As far as I know, nothing much has changed to show there is greater preparedness this time.
My Abagusii people have another saying; “Esese ebwate riuga teri ko minyokera sese chinde, egochitama”. It loosely translates to “When a dog has a bone in its mouth, it runs away from other dogs, not towards them”. It is my considered opinion that ahead of his possibly last stab at the presidency, Raila needs to look away from, and abandon, the failures around him, so as to run a credible, organised campaign this time round. Any other way, he will bring to the fore these questions over and over again; Does he really want it as much as his supporters want it? Can he run an organised campaign that assures his supporters and aspirants of both fairness and credible results? Can Raila, the charismatic politician and exciting public rally speaker, transition to a reliable man-manager, who can ensure that all his party branches are properly managed and operations flow from nominations to general elections? Is there any hope that 2017 will be better than 2013, and party faithful will not be subjected to chaotic nominations and claims of “someone ate agents’ money?”. Only time will tell.