OKA’s Kalonzo playing hard to get

You don’t armtwist somebody to support you over a lapsed promise and expect his followers to comply. That’s the problem with the arrangement Kalonzo Musyoka seeks to force onto Raila Odinga. Azimio voters will not rush to embrace Kalonzo if they feel they are being unduly coerced.

One candidate’s support cannot automatically be transferred to another. Those voters could opt for another candidate, or not to vote at all. Nobody likes to do things under duress. Even if Raila agreed to step down for Kalonzo, there’s no guarantee his voters would go with the Wiper leader. 

Kalonzo’s argument is that his 2017 pact with Raila was separate from the Nasa coalition agreement and was “binding” to the ODM chief, “whether he won or lost in the 2017 election”. Yet wasn’t this pact done within the context of the overall Nasa arrangement? 

ODM’s counter-argument that the Nasa deal was superseded by the dissolution of the coalition has merit. That Nasa thing is now moot. 

In fact, Kalonzo together with Musalia Mudavadi were very loud on dissolving that coalition. 

The other complication is that Kalonzo is essentially introducing Nasa issues into Azimio, whose members were not involved and don't want to be involved in the disagreements that arose from secret deals they don’t know about. They have chosen Raila as their flagbearer of their own volition. The last thing they want is to be dragged into fresh intrigues. 

Jumping the gun 

OKA has not unveiled their coalition agreement. The matter remains in abeyance. They have also yet to name their presidential candidate. Why is Kalonzo jumping the gun, giving ultimatums to others? 

Kalonzo has categorically ruled out working with UDA. However they’d love it if he ran solo rather than join Azimio. Is that what he wants? Angling for a runoff is a risky gamble on his part.

If Kalonzo journeys alone, it could be worse than 2007, when he came a distant third. Currently, two Ukambani senators are being widely blamed for his intransigence, for their own electoral preservation. 

Kalonzo can be a puzzle. His ambition to be President has always been amazingly outsized. When the success of that ambition depends on the goodwill of others, it pays to scale it down a bit. 

A word of advice to Azimio’s foot soldiers. Relax your brutal contempt for Kalonzo. Be patient even when he’s exasperating. Ridiculing him openly as has happened lately is extremely ill-advised. When you rudely dare him to take a walk, he may just do that, which will be very detrimental for Azimio. The coalition needs him.

However, he should avoid making wildly unrealistic demands. Also, he should know people like Martha Karua and Moses Kuria will just take him round in time-wasting circles. One has issues with Uhuru while the other has beef with Raila. 

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I frankly hadn’t expected Russia would invade Ukraine. I imagined the massing of troops in the Donbas region and in Belarus was muscle-flexing to force Ukraine to kow-tow to Moscow’s demands. After all, invading Ukraine was a different prospect from annexing Crimea, which Russia did in 2014. 

Russia has now invaded. Its earlier intervention in the Donbas, as with the Crimea annexation, was ostensibly to protect ethnic Russians living in Ukraine. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus is much larger. His overriding goal is to subdue the western-leaning Ukraine government so as to prevent it from joining the EU and, most worryingly for the Russians, the Nato military alliance. 

Since the end of the Cold War, Nato has been expanding eastwards into former Eastern bloc countries, to Russia’s dismay. Putin drew the line on Ukraine, Russia’s backyard. 

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is a bit of a demagogue who had kept poking at the Russian bear even when he didn’t have to, like pushing for Ukraine membership in Nato, which Moscow will never tolerate. The West knows this all too well. 

Brave Ukraine is resisting fiercely. But ultimately it is a question of when, not if, she will submit to Russian power. Nato is sending Ukraine security aid, but direct military intervention is out of the question. That would be highly dangerous. If Nato were to intervene, Russia has threatened it would be left with no choice but to go nuclear.

Overthrow Putin

I fear Putin means it. Russia and America are the biggest military powers on earth, with about 6,000 nuclear warheads each. The arsenals of other nuclear powers are negligible in comparison. The Russian-Ukraine war will have unforeseen consequences for the global power order. 

The US and Europe have imposed punishing sanctions against Russia, targeting first the financial system. Russian banks have been banned from the international payment system called SWIFT. This is the main messaging system banks use to send money quickly across borders. Russia’s central bank also cannot now easily access its $600 billion-plus in foreign currency reserves. 

These measures have hit the Russian economy hard. The country's currency, the ruble, has tumbled. So has the stock market. The Russian government seems undeterred. Oil and gas prices have shot up globally, hurting everyone. (Russia is the world's largest producer of gas and second-largest producer of oil). The sanctions have ranged from the serious to the comical. Some agency called the International Feline Association has forbidden imports of Russian-bred cats. 

The sanctions presuppose ordinary Russians will feel the pain so much that they'll rise up and overthrow Putin. That seems far-fetched. 

Also sanctioned are Russian oligarchs who made fortunes when Russia dumped communism and who have invested heavily in the West. The US has said their assets, yachts, planes and luxury apartments will be seized. This is somehow wrong and is akin to appropriation of private property, never mind how it was acquired. 

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