Ruto, Raila must keep spoilers at arm’s length for talks to yield fruit

It is said politicking is easy, but governing is hard. After weeks of breathing fire and brimstone, President William Ruto did a climbdown. He agreed to engage with Raila Odinga and his Azimio side. The President has done the right thing. A good move deserves praise. He has done what a President must do. I know for him it was not an easy step to take. All the more reason to commend him.

Raila graciously agreed to accept the olive branch. Despite pressure from his supporters not to, he called off the demonstrations Azimio had planned for last week. Nobody wants to call it a Handshake. Rather it's a work in progress.

Naturally at this stage, Ruto’s and Raila’s engagement scripts are not reading the same. Ruto only explicitly ceded ground on the quarrel over the recruitment of new IEBC commissioners. He proposed a bipartisan panel akin to the Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group format, which President Daniel arap Moi agreed to with Mwai Kibaki and other Opposition leaders in 1997. Raila is okay with that but wants “external experts” brought in as insurance.

Ruto did not directly mention Raila’s other issues: the high cost of living, the reinstatement of four IEBC com-missioners who were recently forced out, the opening of electoral servers, and putting a stop to the ‘poaching’ of Opposition MPs by the Majority side. I suppose these will come up during the wider conversation the two sides are likely to hold in due course. There’s a catch, though. Ruto wants a strictly parliamentary-driven process. Raila envisions a national dialogue anchored between the government and Opposition. He warned he’d be back on the streets “within a week” if the government starts playing tricks.

Hardliners

Contrary to what his hardliners may have initially driven Ruto to believe, opening up to the Opposition will only strengthen his position. It calms the nation after weeks of explosive tensions. The street infernos are gone — for now. This will buy him time to reshape his policy direction. It has always been said Ruto is a good politician but a lousy leader. Now is the time to show he has the leadership mettle.

The two protagonists are aware of the political risks they’ve taken. There’s real apprehension among the UDA rank and file who fear their party is taking the Handshake route. Curiously, there’s the same worry among the rank and file in Azimio, and especially in its ODM core. They don’t want Raila compromised.

How Ruto and Raila play this thing will be interesting to watch. Already there’s grumbling among the ‘hoi polloi’ that their bread-and-butter concerns are being overlooked as the politicians give primacy to matters that uniquely affect them such as the composition of the IEBC.

Negotiations are successful only when the participants avoid taking extremist positions. The spirit should be of give-and-take. As a sign of goodwill, the rhetoric from both sides should be toned down. The insults should stop. Ruto's Sunday speech set the right tone. “Mtu wa kitendawili" changed to “my brother”.

In the trenches together

In fact Ruto and Raila know each other well. They’ve been in the trenches together before. If only they can keep the spoilers at arm’s length, I believe they can work this matter out together. Let’s see what happens.

For his part, Raila knows the power of symbolism thoroughly. When reading his replying statement, he referred to the President as “Mister Ruto”. Likewise, after the contested 2007 election, Raila refused to refer to Kibaki as “President”. Only after that fateful day in 2008 when he signed the power-sharing accord with Kibaki outside the Office of the President building did Raila refer to “President Kibaki”. Evidently, it hasn’t reached there yet with Ruto. Meaning there’s still some way to go before they reach an amicable settlement. However, they’ve started a journey. All we can do is wish them well.

This is not the time to disparage Ruto. Yet it should be a sobering moment for him as he reflects on how he used to attack President Uhuru Kenyatta for reaching out to Raila on March 9, 2018. Uhuru had endured months of almost daily street barrages from Raila’s supporters. Ruto has caved in after only three demonstrations, spread out in two weeks flat.

The biggest losers are the DP Rigathi Gachagua faction. Their empty hardline position alienated many. He and his crowd had sworn they could only sit down with Raila to discuss his retirement. One impertinent MP from Kiambu demanded his arrest, swearing nothing would change. How tables turn! Ha, clearly Raila is going nowhere. He has more staying power than they thought.

Still it gets worse for these naive, misguided Mountain UDAists. Raila will now march to the negotiating table to present his case.

The Mountain UDAists won’t have a seat, or at any rate won’t come as an independent voice but as part of UDA. They were outmanoeuvred. They were long warned by the clear-sighted among their kinsmen that joining UDA without an independent vehicle to bargain with as Musalia Mudavadi had with his ANC party or Moses Wetang’ula had with Ford-Kenya would be a gross miscalculation. Now here they are. Punctured. Sidelined because of their rabid anti-Raila hatred. Disoriented. Confused. Seeing deals being cut above their heads.

Alas, that’s the baggage Mt Kenya imposed on itself by electing the most obtuse bunch of pseudo-leaders in the community’s recorded history.

There should be no illusions about this engagement Ruto and Raila have started. A senior Catholic prelate who was in the thick of the preliminary outreach to Ruto and Raila told me: “We’ve taken a major step, but we’re not out of the woods yet! Let’s keep praying for our national leaders to learn to overcome selfishness and pride.”

[email protected]; @GitauWarigi