Kenya Kwanza ticket the only plan to consider

What should we do when there is only one plan to consider?

This stunning prospect was unthinkable a month ago, yet it has come to pass in what has to be one of this troubled land’s most splendid dreams come true.

Its glory is enhanced by the fact that the dream is demonstrably resilient, having endured the harrowing nightmare of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), which bred and unleashed a diabolical menagerie of political monsters, impelled by a resurgence of deleterious ethnic obsessions.

Even so, Azimio, which is the remedial iteration of the BBI debacle, resolutely fashioned an appeal to these crudest of political impulses into a retrospective platform steeped in righteous self-profiling.

Kenya has gradually but firmly changed before our eyes.

Its governance, never stellar at the best of times, had descended from stagnation into dysfunction under the dead weight of a static administrative and political system that found little need to keep up with changing demographics and evolving operational environment. 

The quest to perfect the Kenyan nation, as a political community that subsumed and transcended the political expression of various ethnic identities, struggled desperately for four decades. 

Then in 2010, Kenya seized an improbable yet overdue opportunity to heave itself out of this hopeless quagmire. 

Elaborate blueprint

The ensuing constitutional dispensation provided an elaborate blueprint for national consolidation through robust technologies for managing ethnoregional politics in the service of a stronger national unit.

In other words, after August 2010, the idea of Kenya devolved from the domain of idealistic fantasy and hopeless wish to become a feasible project. 

The mere application of this dispensation’s most elementary components sufficed to set in motion irrevocably the phases of a realistic project. 

For over a decade now, the possibility of Kenyan nationhood has gathered irreversible momentum to become an inevitable fact, magnetically drawing all actors out of primitive consciousnesses to enlist and coordinate them in forging the cosmopolitan alternative. 

As long as the Constitution subsists, the national project is assured to continue manifesting majestic possibilities for us and for future generations.

This is the reason why it was an existential imperative of an ossified status quo to use its earliest opportunity and best endeavours to stall the actualisation of the new constitution and, failing that, mobilise with unprecedented ferocity to dismantle it with a view to restoring the dismal equilibrium which nevertheless served them handily. 

The dysfunctional postcolonial equilibrium was the ideal operational environment of a certain type of politics and a specific form of administration. 

The Constitution’s explicit purpose was to retire this status quo and exterminate all its manifestations. 

Anti-constitutional

One of the reasons BBI struggled was that a sustainable national consciousness had emerged, firmly centred on issue-based politics and irrevocably welded to the subsistence of the new constitutional dispensation. 

Therefore, dismantling this dispensation to restore a former state required the arrest of a self-sustaining mobilisation and the overt antagonism of a majority whose consciousness had either migrated or been born in the emergent nation.

Azimio is the campaign platform of that anti-constitutional and thus anti-national, pro-ethnic order. 

It promotes a personality-based politics devoid of resonant issues or other credible agendas for change. 

It is a campaign to revert to an ancient order, and thus return Kenya to a time of governance based on consensus among ethnic barons and tribal chiefs. 

It is strategically retrogressive, being immensely invested in the past. 

The artificial and inauthentic profiles of its leading personalities have been fabricated into a platform focusing on apocryphal exploits fast receding into the mists of historical time.

Azimio’s platform is essentially retrospective: its plan for the future is to return Kenya to the past.

The causes of Azimio’s tone-deaf, struggling and clumsy campaign are also the drivers of the Kenya Kwanza momentum.

Kenya Kwanza paid attention to feedback from Kenyans and plugged into their restless desire to claim the promise of the Kenyan nation as set out in the Constitution. 

These Kenyans yearn for freedom, dream of opportunities and are ready to work for abundance. 

They know that the best technology to unlock prosperity, so that plenty is found within our borders, is in a Constitution that proclaims sustainable development to be the ultimate national value and principle of governance. 

The politics of this dispensation is necessarily issue-based and oriented towards opportunity and prosperity.

Tuesday’s presidential debate was boycotted by the retrospective platform. 

William Ruto had to simultaneously contend with unrelentingly restrospective moderation while prosecuting a prospective, issue-based, solution-oriented agenda. 

Despite favourable moderation, Azimio could not muster the confidence to present its candidate. 

The reasons are obvious: side-by-side with the Kenya Kwanza platform, Azimio’s tissue of extravagant rhetoric and polemical effusions would have appeared egregiously lackadaisical and scandalously inappropriate.

The difficult moderation only served to highlight that Kenya Kwanza’s plan is robust, coherent and feasible.

After all, a plan is by definition prospective. A retrospective plan is just deceptive reverie and fraudulent reminiscence.

Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno