Kenyatta’s weak grip on Jubilee cannot save even a single goat 

In making his case for remaining in active political practice, Uhuru Kenyatta mainly relied on his democratic right as a citizen, and a very curious if vehement assertion, that he would not be cowed. 

Although he did not give any indications regarding the possible identity of the agencies harbouring a propensity to intimidate him, Kenyatta delivered himself of a vehement defiance of certain parties who are in the habit of stealing his goats. 

The upshot of Kenyatta’s abjurations was that he is in politics to stay and that retirement has only afforded him the time and drive to exercise his democratic freedoms. 

Kenyatta’s appeal to a perplexing superstition zealously perpetrated by Kenyan politicians was remarkable for a couple of reasons. 

Even assuming he sees the presidency or at least presidential politics as having insulated him from the worst of the prejudice inflicted by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, he must surely remember how the imperatives of due process gave no allowance to any entitlement on account of his political stature. 

Political immunity 

It is perversely refreshing that Kenyatta himself, in the course of his presidency, systematically dismantled the immunity from due process that his professional colleagues were wont to claim purely on the grounds of being politicians. There is much to be said about his wanton disregard for due process and constitutional safeguards in the course of his rampage against de facto political immunity from due process, but the fact of the matter is that by the end of his term, politicians felt particularly vulnerable on account of their profession.

Ironically, in renouncing a dignified retirement for the confraternity of deplorable in the name of maintaining his political practice, Kenyatta exhibits the astonishingly rapid onset of acute political amnesia. 

His presidency ensured that no amount of insolent posturing, nor the mobilisation of his ragtag menagerie of goons, pickpockets, borrowed delegates and political roadkill, would insure him from due process. 

His hold on the withering faction of Jubilee desperados is attenuated by his inability to conform with due process. 

Moreover, Jubilee as a political organisation has shrunk dramatically over a very brief duration. 

In five years, the party not only collapsed from a ruling party to a vanishingly modest one, but it also lost a horrific number of seats at all levels.

If in 2022 Kenyatta nominally commanded a roaring political lion, he now threatens his unnamed opponents with a half-dead mouse convulsing in his pocket. 

Even if political stature was a dependable source of immunity, his weak grip on Jubilee cannot do the job, and can’t save even one goat, as it were.

As president, Kenyatta’s aversion to democratic politics impelled him to embrace an avoidant strain of political management, whilst his despotic proclivities manifested in a brusque and intolerant attitude to Jubilee elected leaders, and inspired him to acquire the opposition through the Handshake, as a check on any potential revolt in his ranks. 

Dignified retirement 

Under these conditions, a dignified retirement should have come as an immense relief, and his utter inability to muster any meaningful support in his own party should wake him up to the nature and magnitude of his political legacy.

Kanu shrivelled gradually, from one general election to another. 

Although it still has a meagre parliamentary presence, its own chairman could not win a parliamentary seat that for long was considered his lawful patrimony. 

Even so, it took a full 20 years from the end of its turn as a ruling party, for Kanu to crash in these unforgiving straits. Kenyatta and Jubilee took months.

In fact, Kenyatta’s spectacular political implosion has overtaken the precedents set by opposition parties, which never got close to winning power, except the Orange Democratic Movement. 

It is too early to forget that Kalonzo Musyoka’s absurdly named Wiper was originally registered as the Orange Democratic Movement Party of Kenya, in a bid to appropriate the Orange brand which had felled a government and to subdue Odinga. 

In the Battle of Registration Certificates, Odinga conjured up the Orange Democratic Movement, and through sheer drive and gravitas, eclipsed Musyoka out of contention. 

Uneasy cohabitation 

These have now become special-purpose vehicles for coalition building, contesting each election as tawdry iterations of whatever latest configuration their uneasy cohabitation demands.

The national record for the most devastatingly relentless binary fission of political organisations belongs to the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD). 

This juggernaut was the first serious threat to Kanu and should have, all factors held constant, run Nyayo out of town way back in 1992. 

However, on account of intractable ambitions, FORD was riven by faction; Jaramogi Odinga’s Agip House faction, later Ford-Kenya, and Kenneth Matiba’s Muthithi House faction, which became Ford-Asili. 

Matiba’s ill health, and Kibaki’s emergence as a political titan, quickly tamed Ford Asili. Ford-Kenya prowled more confidently until the elder Odinga died, whereupon a vicious succession struggle cannibalised Ford-K, producing additional outfits: National Development Party and the Social Democratic Party.

Kenyatta was a diffident apprentice in Ford-Asili, where he acquired his political management techniques.

Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya.