BBI will heighten momentum for politically bumpy ride to 2022 polls

Members of the public at the Bomas of Kenya, Nairobi during the launch of the BBI Report on October 26, 2020. A section of women leaders have asked Kenyans to reject the report saying it dilutes women's gains. 

Photo credit: Dennis Onsongo| Nation Media Group

As we close the door on 2020 and open for 2021, this is a racing certainty: there will be no change in our politics. We will be saddled with the same old politics in 2021 and 2022.

So much for those who decry the election cycle because productivity falls every election year. They are the selfsame people who are stampeding Kenyans into two elections in two years in the midst of a pandemic.

Twenty-twenty-one will be the year of the change-the-constitution referendum. The plebiscite is designed to generate momentum which will usher the winners into pole position for the general election of 2022.

The referendum will be a dress rehearsal for the election. The two are about the Kenyatta II succession. Therefore, prepare for two political years whose difference from 2018, 2019 and 2020 is that these did not host elections.

Usual suspects

Yet for each you would have thought there was one around the corner.

That’s the usual fare – heighten politicking anytime and all the time. That is what the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) is about: It lectures us about the presidency being the cause of poll violence, then makes it more powerful, hence more attractive.

And here are the usual suspects. For Deputy President William Ruto to become the fifth president of Kenya, he will have to overcome a fellow candidate and a non-candidate. The one is Mr Raila Odinga.

A veteran of opposition benches and trenches, a former premier, former MP, and four times a failed presidential candidate. At 75 he is dying for the top job.

The other is President Uhuru Kenyatta. He courted Dr Ruto in 2012 and in 2013 and twice in 2017 they won the presidency. Then he dumped the DP in 2018 and courted Mr Odinga, hitherto his and Dr Ruto’s arch-rival.

Together they have deliberately, determinedly and publicly undermined the DP from 2018 to the present. Throughout 2020, as in 2019, Dr Ruto has struggled to praise his boss away from Mr Odinga.

Sidelined and blindsided

Mr Odinga has done everything to keep the President close and to increase the distance between the DP and the two of them.

The President has often sidelined and blindsided the DP. Talk of BBI creating amity in the polity. These shenanigans presage the battle for the presidency proper in 2022.

The President and Mr Odinga want this to be the BBI election, goading Dr Ruto to decide on which side of the referendum he will be.

He could consider supporting the referendum and then using its result to prepare for a do-or-die fight with Mr Odinga and President Kenyatta in 2022. Or he could go for broke and make the referendum a plebiscite on the President and Mr Odinga.

He will then have to extricate himself from the government and the party of government and, of course, run the risk of exhausting his funds before the general election.

But, at least BBI will be critically scrutinised and denied the unchecked and monopolistic run it is enjoying thus far. In any case, support or oppose, Mr Odinga and the President will fight him.

When Dr Ruto recently expressed support for the referendum, Mr Odinga doubted his sincerity and dismissed him as Janus-faced.

Pentagon

Bear this in mind: While Pentagon, the spearhead of his 2007 presidential campaign, remains the most powerful political team he has ever assembled, BBI is easily the most formidable step-by-step process to the presidency Mr Odinga has ever conceived. He is guarding it – jealously and zealously – for himself.

It’s payback time, isn’t it? In 2002, Mr Odinga won the presidency. He won it for Mr Mwai Kibaki. With the utterance of two words, Kibaki tosha (Kibaki fits the bill), Mr Odinga determined the successor to long-serving Moi.

That way he stopped Mr Kenyatta from succeeding his political father who was Vice-President to his biological father. In 2007, Mr Odinga, betrayed by the man he made president, and who refused to make him premier, ran to deny Mr Kibaki a second term and to succeed him.

He won the poll, but lost the result. Arthur Miller said betrayal is the only truth that sticks. Expect more.