Kenyatta’s real project is Uhuru, forget about Raila

BBI report Kisii

President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister with copies of the BBI report during its presentation at the Kisii State Lodge in October 2020. 

Photo credit: Photo | PSCU

Last week I set out to unpack the political environment and incentives animating the principal players in the BBI and their respective strategic calculations in order to shed light on why, despite being flagrantly transgressive and thus doomed to fail, BBI was nevertheless pursued with a hell-for-leather resolve.

Two strands of political (re)presentations emerged in delineating the courses of both President Kenyatta and Mr Raila Odinga with regard to the ill-fated enterprise: Grand statecraft and subsistence politics.

In examining the complicated rhythm of Mr Odinga’s movement, I pointed out two modules of engaging in succession politics. The first was the conflict-handshake-co-optation-conflict sequence, whose precedents can be noted in 1997-2002 and 2008-2013.

The second track of Mr Odinga’s subsistence politics consists of the 2005, 2010 and 2022 referendum scenarios. Simply stated, Mr Odinga has learnt to harness a referendum triumph and convert it into electoral momentum.

The 2005 referendum, therefore, gave birth to ODM and gave Mr Odinga his most scintillating outing in 2007. The 2010 referendum failed to afford Mr Odinga the momentum he expected, because credit for the ‘Yes’ side, which won was shared among a phalanx of heavyweights. The BBI was intended to produce the sort of referendum Mr Odinga hoped to win on his terms. With hindsight, it is reasonable to doubt if Kenyatta was going to allow him any meaningful control of that opportunity.

Subsistence politics

President Kenyatta could be seen to have succeeded beyond his wildest reckoning in terms of his subsistence politics. Whilst he may not have explicitly secured an active retirement in the manner that BBI would have made possible, President Kenyatta is arguably not significantly worse off, given that he was retiring anyway.

Similarly, even if Deputy President William Ruto proved resilient and may even have thrived under the joint Kenyatta-Odinga onslaught, a Ruto ascendancy has, in any event, been on the cards since 2012.

What about Mr Odinga? The collapse of the BBI utterly undoes indispensable planks of his best scenarios. First of all, there will be no tidal crest or momentum spawned by a plebiscite to sweep him to a handy victory in August. Secondly, Mr Odinga entered the ‘Handshake’ with minimal conditions, perhaps because the tantalising promise of a referendum bump and adoption as Kenyatta’s succession project were, as Sir Elton John sang, enough to make kings and vagabonds believe the very best.

Mr Odinga must confront the perennial jinx of his politics: The Uhuru Kenyatta variable in his succession project calculus. Every time he has given his all in expectation of vantage placement on the starting blocks, satisfaction has eluded him.

In 2002, after biting the bullet to work with his worst political adversary for five years, Nyayo casually dumped Mr Odinga and plucked Mr Kenyatta, a stripling neophyte, to be his chosen successor, months before that year’s General Election.

In 2012, after once again biting the bullet to work with President Kibaki in the Grand Coalition government for five years, it was Mr Kenyatta who turned up on the last straight and ate Mr Odinga’s lunch.

In 2022, President Kenyatta is giving strong indications that Mr Odinga may not, after all, be his chosen project. To the extent that he expects to assume a visible, active and influential political role in ‘retirement’, it is apparent that President Kenyatta’s real project is one Uhuru Kenyatta.

Mr Odinga has been running into a Kenyatta barrier in every presidential succession since 2002. In 2002, he was able to execute a spectacular recovery, also known as ‘Kibaki Tosha’ and thus lived to fight another day. Can he recover this time around? Cause for optimism is meagre.

Underneath the optics of grand statecraft, the unsavoury truth is that Mr Odinga was co-opted by his ideological nemesis and became a dormant enabler of Kenyatta’s rampant surges against all constitutional, statutory, fiscal and political restraints.

The BBI in particular, has proven to be a potent object of universal revulsion, and reliable instigator of popular fury and disgust.

Political scheme

No political scheme in Kenya’s history has been more saturated with anti-Kenya fantasies, or concentrated with such illiberal, cynical and retrogressive formulae.

With the BBI, the reviled imperial presidency was very much on the cards, and resurgent negative ethnicity was going to assume pride of place as the organising principle of a particularly dreadful politics of patronage.

Leadership and governance were therefore going to consist in the perpetual arbitration of infernal ethno-regional free-for-all for resources and authority.

Kenyans turned their faces away in disgust at the BBI, yet Mr Odinga emphatically and incessantly proclaimed, “Nobody can stop reggae!”

In the name of peace and unity, Mr Odinga afforded President Kenyatta the confidence to wage his most audacious sleights of hand, whose greatest casualty may yet turn out to be Mr Odinga himself. As the election inexorably approaches, Mr Kenyatta might have had his devious way with Mr Odinga, and it is time for the denouement of yet another iteration of the duo’s recursive contest: Mr Odinga’s political walk of shame.

Despite the hearty, grinning, hugging bonhomie, the Handshake-BBI-Azimio marks, not the end of conflict, but the continuation of the Kenyatta-Odinga war by other means.

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