Succession or blame game... we want a Kenyan government, not a Kikuyu.

From: James Ololo Mamboleo
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Succession or blame game

Published on December 5, 2007, 12:00 am

By MG KIMANI

The fallout between the PNU and a number of affiliate parties in the wake of the nominations was the clearest sign yet that President Mwai Kibaki’s political formations in his bedrock Mt Kenya region have their eyes firmly fixed on both the prize of helping him retain the Presidency and his succession in 2012.

However, largely unknown to the general public outside Central Kenya, there is a third prospect. An intricate and still unfolding blame game deep inside the President’s innermost circles is taking place quietly but fiercely. While every conceivable aboveboard strategy (and quite a few unorthodox measures) is being rolled out to ensure that Kibaki remains the tenant of State House after December 27, the stage is also being subtly set to apportion blame either in the event that the President becomes the first Head of State in Kenya to be voted out of office or, if he is still in office come January and drawing up the next Government, he does not allow the blameworthy anywhere near the seat of power.

It was this infighting inside the President’s team that initially created the impression of a dysfunctional Kitchen Cabinet and hapless campaign team and strategy before Kibaki hit the campaign trail, looking and sounding hale and hearty and keeping up such a punishing schedule that both friend and foe have been impressed with the show of energy.

It was this infighting, too, that the meeting at the weekend between the PNU’s George Nyamweya, Secretary General of DP, and Safina National Chairman Paul Muite at St Mary’s Anglican Church of Kenya, Kabete, sought to downplay bang in the middle of a General Election campaign.

On Monday, Communications and Information Minister Mutahi Kagwe tried to downplay the reconciliation itself and Muite promptly told him off in no uncertain terms.

Muite represents all the affiliate Central Kenya parties inside PNU, especially a wealthy and influential internal rebel faction made up of some of the biggest pro-Kibaki-but-disgruntled names in the region.

There is a widespread perception across the nation that the Kikuyu and their extended cousinage have gained disproportionately from the existence of ethnic separatism.

All of the world’s societies, without exception, are deeply ethnicized. But ethnicity is a natural calamity that cannot be avoided. Rather, civilisation demands that we turn ethnicity into a resource for unity.

Extraordinary measures

Scholarly theorists of cultural pluralism point out the overriding importance of resource control and reproductive success, two fields in which the Mt Kenyans, who constitute Kenya’s wealthiest and most populous ethnic group, have excelled. Among their rivals, the Mt Kenyans are viewed as having benefited from the fact that two of their sons have occupied State House.

The rest of Kenya clearly thinks that the Mt Kenyans - the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru, or Gema - have enjoyed a large overrepresentation at the centre of national political power and in the bureaucracy and commercial sector and want to see a change in the balance of power. That change is ODM’s ace in the race for State House.

But the attainment of such a radical change in the ethnic balance of power and resources would require the overhaul of a national status quo that has lasted decades and would therefore call for extraordinary measures. ODM Presidential candidate Raila Odinga, who remains the frontrunner in the opinion polls, is promising just such change.

Assuming a Kibaki win and five more years of power, the Mt Kenyans will have had a son at State House for 25 years (Jomo Kenyatta’s 15 and Kibaki’s 10) on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Independence in 2013. The rest of the first half-century of Independence was accounted for by Daniel arap Moi’s marathon tenure - he clocked 24 years, 14 of them under the one-party dispensation and 10 under restored political pluralism.

In the run-up to the 10th General Election, Moi, President Kibaki and Jomo’s son Uhuru, the immediate former Leader of the Official Opposition, have joined hands and are working on the President’s re-election bid.

The coming together of Kenya’s first three Presidential families and their networks to support one of their number has been a key factor in opening up the debate about Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta playing a starring role in the Kibaki succession, whether that transition takes place on December 27 or five years from now. Uhuru has been the preferred successor of at least one other outgoing President, Moi at the end of his constitutional tenure in 2002 - with regime-change consequences.

But for Kibaki to accommodate both Moi’s support and that of the Kenyatta family (Uhuru’s mother, former First Lady Mama Ngina, still exercises a great deal of influence in the family, as does her brother George Muhoho, CEO of the Kenya Airports Authority and effective head of the PNU re-election campaign), he has had to sacrifice a number of key operatives.

This has happened especially in the period just before and since the National Referendum on the then Proposed New Constitution when the Government lost by a plurality of a million votes and Moi voted with the opposing side.

The device of a complex, long-term blame game was used to sideline key figures, some of them experienced political strategists, who were instrumental in ushering Kibaki into office. They have been replaced by technocratic figures comprising operatives of limited political experience, including a couple of political greenhorns.

Dreadful prospect?

Under the terms of the blame game, the birth of the Orange parties and the serious challenge that they pose to Kibaki’s continued hold on power is being placed squarely at the door of the group that ushered him into office and was in power for the first 36 months of his rule.

By this reckoning, this group is guilty in advance of the President’s defeat on December 27 - in the event that such an eventuality comes to pass.

Inside the President’s re-election team the key players, strategists and financiers, and the foot soldiers of the Intelligence services, PR/media consultants, advocacy/focus groups, and grassroots campaign organizers have all been primed to look out for and thwart and otherwise punish the original Group of Five. This embittered blame game has far-reaching consequences.

For their part, Kibaki’s original handlers are quietly warning the technocrats that, in the absence of cooperation and consensus, they face the dreadful prospect of being the first team at the centre of power in Kenya to have to usher a President out.

In the beginning, on his road to State House, the President had a team of five, call them the Gang of Five or the Big Five if you wish. The Five comprised Dr Chris Murungaru as Chairman of what was then known as the Resource Mobilization and Logistics Committee; Kiraitu Murungi as chair of the Legal Affairs and Constitutional Committee; David Mwiraria as chair of the Central Kenya parliamentarians’ caucus; Matere Keriri as the architect of the group’s blueprint; and Alfred Getonga as Personal Assistant to Candidate Kibaki, and before that PA to Kibaki in his capacity as Leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament.

The Big Five are also credited with being in the kitchen when the Government of Kenya was being reorganized soon after the 2002 General Election and therefore were instrumental in key appointments and strategies that were put in place to hold the nation together through its first Presidential transition since Kenyatta’s death in 1978 and its first regime change.

Murungi and Mwiraria have been restored to the Cabinet, mainly to appease the key Mt Kenya demographic of the Meru, and Keriri found a soft landing as a State corporation chief executive after he was offloaded as Comptroller of State Houses. He has joined the internal rebels grouped under Safina and Narc and is, for the first time in his career, issuing statements critical of Kibaki’s inner circle.

But Murungaru and Getonga, for the first 36 months of the Kibaki Presidency the most powerful and influential individuals after the President himself, have been left to their own devices.

Power vacuum

Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the space created by the fall of the Big Five was soon filled by old age-mate cronies of the President, technocrats without political standing, and inexperienced politicos. Among the technocrats was the State House-based Stanley K. Murage, who was appointed Advisor, Strategic Policy, in October 2004, four months after the appointment of the first GNU. The ageing cronies were Defence Minister Njenga Karume, Minister for Internal Security John Michuki and Kenya Airports Authority boss Muhoho. The greenhorn politicians were Finance Minister Amos Kimunya, and Communications Minister Kagwe and, in terms of powerplay, Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Martha Karua. These individuals now form part of the inner core of the administration and, in conjunction with President Kibaki’s personal power, privilege and patronage network that includes the Muthaiga Country Club and Muthaiga Golf Club sets, they are in the engine room of his re-election campaign.

The ageing technocrats comprise Muhoho, JB Wanjui, Chancellor, University of University of Nairobi, Solomon Karanja of Habitat and businessman Nat Kang’ethe.

It is this team, alongside strategist Murage, that will either oversee the first successful Presidential re-election campaign in Kenya in a decade or the first direct defeat of an incumbent of State House.