By FieldMarshal CouchP
Thursday, July 13, 2017.
On Wednesday, July 12, President Uhuru Kenyatta visited Kisumu to campaign. It was expected to be a routine stop in the president’s countrywide effort to get himself elected. It turned out to be anything but.
In the lakeside town, the heartland of opposition leader Raila Odinga, the president’s convoy was jeered and pelted with destroyed Jubilee Party campaign materials. When he tried to address the crowds, the president was himself shouted down and called unpalatable names. As soon as he left one locale, the dais and other equipment were promptly destroyed.
This despite the fact that president was guarded by heavily-armed security officers who somehow the crowd expected to behave with decorum as they themselves acted like primordial Neanderthals. It was as if the uncouth crowd was baiting the guards to react with terminal violence, in which case memories of a similar incident in 1969 would be rekindled.
The incredibly primitive and disrespectful scenes that hounded the president out of Luo Nyanza contrasted sharply with the experience of Mr Odinga’s tours of Kiambu and the Rift Valley – Jubilee strongholds - weeks earlier. There, the opposition brigade was listened to respectfully, and accorded all courtesies by the locals.
Following the Kisumu fiasco, things are likely to change. Jubilee supporters will see the unfortunate shenanigans by the Luo of Kisumu as a humiliation of the president and his deputy, and react in kind. Chaos will ensue everywhere, and it is now not unlikely that incidents of violence will break out, especially in informal settlements and ethnic border areas.
Which brings us to the raison d’etre of this treatise; why Raila Amolo Odinga should never be elected the president of the Republic of Kenya.
To be clear, the 72-year old hair-dyeing Raila is a bona fide citizen of the republic, and is technically in all parameters qualified to vie for the highest office in the land, questions about his academic qualifications notwithstanding. But does Raila, whose first son and heir apparent died of a cocaine overdose, have the temperament or grace to be president? If he were president, how would his uncivilised and uncontrollable supporters behave and react towards other Kenyans?
The Kisumu chaos give a chilling glimpse into what a Raila presidency would bequeath Kenyans – chaos, intolerance, ethnic profiling, violence and death. This might sound melodramatic, given that, in the words of one Nasa supporter, that ‘the youth in Kisumu were simply exercising their democratic right to tell off the president”.
This argument by Nasa and its supporters would be true if the Kisumu disturbances were an isolated incident. Sadly, they were not. The gospel and philosophy of intolerance and division have been integral to Nasa’s and Raila’s naked pursuit of political power, as they were in 2007 when he preached the 41-against-1 message. We all know how that one ended.
To fully understand the Kisumu chaos – and to wake up to the existential dangers and risks of a Raila presidency to the republic – we only need to give three or four examples of how truly deep this despicable and dangerous approach to national politics runs in power-hungry Odinga’s psyche.
Put simply, Raila Amolo Odinga - who first came into the national limelight when he instigated a failed coup by lowly and poorly-educated Luo non-commissioned officers in 1982 - is willing to burn Kenya to attain power for his own selfish ends. In that failed coup alone, an estimated 1,000 Kenyans died. Raila felt nothing.
Like Mobutu Sese Seko and Jean Bidel Bokassa before him, Raila is the quintessential African megalomaniac – a power-hungry despot with zero empathy for his own people. Whether 1,000 or one million die, it means nothing as long as he sits on the throne.
Consider this.
During a campaign stop-over in Kajiado four weeks ago, Raila told the Maasai not to sell their land to ‘foreigners and outsiders’, and promised to help them regain those they have sold once he was in power.
Those ‘foreigners and outsiders’ are the Gikuyu, the Kamba, the Kisii, the Meru and even the Luo and others who have bought shambas and small plots in peri-urban areas like Kisaerian, Ongata Rongai, Kitengela, Athi River and Isinya to put up family homes as they work in Nairobi. In other words, ordinary simple hard-working Kenyans of all ethnic backgrounds. People that Raila purports to champion.
But what was his coded message to the Maasai?: “Evict these usurpers, as long as you give me the votes”.
If that is not a recipe for ethnic blood-letting from a political psychopath, nothing else is.
Earlier, in an even more breath-taking affront to simple economics and social cohesion, Raila had said that he will somehow reduce rent significantly in 90 days if he took power. How he will do this given that he does not own all rental houses in Kenya was lost to everybody but himself. Also conveniently forgotten by what one political analyst has aptly called the Lord of Poverty were several basic economic facts, to wit, that Kenya is a free-market economy and that many of the so-called landlords have loans to discharge.
So what – in the doomsday scenario that the Lord of Poverty wins the presidency in August - will be the effect of his senseless statement?
You only need to look at the Kisumu chaos and 2007 for an easy answer; Raila’s rabid and primitive supporters across the country will refuse to pay rent until ‘Baba’ says so. If these supporters can insult a president guarded by hundreds of Recce commandos, how will Mama Mueni in Huruma be able to get her rent from them? Or Baba Kwamboka in Dandora? Or Kamau in Pipeline?
The answer is in the teargas and insults that blanketed Kisumu when the president visited.
In effect, what will happen is that Kamau, Mama Mweni and Baba Kwamboka will have to join hundred of others and fund militias to enforce their rights, probably through extrajudicial means such as killings and night-time evictions. This will probably escalate very quickly into ethnic clashes. For the record, those militias are already being formed, and people of Luo origin are increasingly finding it difficult to lease houses and other premises in Nairobi.
Once again, Raila will have, nay, already has, managed to pit ordinary Kenyans against one another, with deadly consequences.
The last example of how Raila’s presidency is untenable again revolves around land. In April, again in one of his many convoluted and unreasoned statements, Raila said that once in power he will abolish white-owned conservancies and return communal lands to their ancestral owners.
Thus the expansionist Pokot will be allowed to invade Laikipia and murder – as they are doing with the help of local politicians affiliated to Raila – land-owners, both White and Black with impunity. And since much of the ancestral land is disputed anyway, this will probably escalate into a multi-ethnic conflagration involving the Pokot, Marakwet, Samburu, Tugen, Keiyo, Turkana, Kikuyu, Whites, Somalis, Borana etc etc etc – in other words, the whole of northern Kenya will go up in flames!
It is instructive that Raila only retracted his incendiary statement when the British government and media raised their concerns. As far as he is concerned, the protests of Kenyans who saw the danger in his unfortunate statement were not good enough. Their lives matter even less.
And this, fellow Kenyans, unfortunately, is a snapshot of what a Raila presidency will be; widespread war in the north, ethnic and class violence in the cities over rent, and a Maasai insurgency. His re-energised supporters, like prehistoric Zinjanropuses with no sense of what civilisation is will refuse to pay rent, matatu fares, or bills in restaurants. Mta-do?
Businesses will collapse, the tourism industry will fizzle out, and communities will take up arms against one another.
In all this the Luo will suffer the most, as they are starting to. Away for the bravado, there’s no way the Luo can withstand a sustained economic, social and (God-forbid) armed onslaught from the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin. And we need to remember that most sensible Luo are not with Raila, though the maintain their silence for fear of being brutalised.
Kenya need not go that way. It is the late Saitoti who once said, in broken prose, that “there come a time”. That time has come for every Kenyan - Kikuyu, Luo, Kamba, Pokomo, Somali, whatever - to take action to stop the ogre called Raila from ascending to the House on the Hill. It is incumbent on all of us to work to stop the Kenyan Bokassa from becoming the president of the republic, by all means necessary.
We only have one country, and to gamble it with a 72-year old who has the bitterness of having lost his heir to cocaine and watching his second heir become weakened by disease is fool-hardy.
The fact is, Raila has no qualms in burning Kenya; he has nothing to lose.
We, on the other hand, have everything to lose.
Signed,
FieldMarshal CouchP
Citizen, father, patriot.