Who’ll govern all these Kenyas?

Kenya has East Africa’s most hyper-personalised politics. While politics elsewhere tends to revolve around personalities, in Kenya it gets very granular. Who sits where at a funeral, who receives the President, who is seen eating lunch with whom at a top-end Nairobi hotel, even the mischief of members of county assembly get a bit of airtime. 

Then the commentators dig into all to reveal their significance, telling us whether Deputy President William Ruto has gained a tactical advantage for the 2022 election; whether President Uhuru Kenyatta signalled his preference for a successor; and whether former Prime Minister and kingmaker Raila Odinga has been snookered...

It can be very hard to see the forest for the trees. But the forest is there.

Recently, President Kenyatta threw the cat among the pigeons when he said one reason the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) constitutional reforms should be supported is that they open the door for other ethnic communities, not just the Kikuyu of Central Kenya and Kalenjin peoples of the Rift Valley, to lead the country.

The more enlightened criticism has that Kenya was increasingly cosmopolitan and “mixed”, and that its future is as a merit-driven “non-tribal” nation.

Supporters said the idea that tribe shouldn’t be a consideration is a disingenuous argument for the status quo. It is an easy one for those who have ruled to make as it protects their dominance, just like people with money are more likely to say money isn’t everything than poor ones who have none.

The argument for the rotational presidency, however, is one of those tricky animals. All is well until somebody makes it, and then there is no putting it back in the bottle. And minorities care about it.

The question, though, is what does it all mean? Where is the forest? The answer might lie in the number of new parties being formed or old ones being dug out of the closest, where they have gathered dust, and being refurbished.

At the coast, it seems that enough leaders there from across the Kenyan political divide have agreed to form or join a regional Kadu-Asili, which the Daily Nation reported will be launched in March.

Kilifi Governor Amason Kingi said the time had come for Coast to chart its political destiny and even produce a presidential candidate in the 2022 General Election. He said the region has about three million votes and should stop depending on “outsiders” during elections.

New and regional parties

Politicians have a nose for these things and understand when the ground is shifting. The proliferation of new and regional parties seems to be loosely aligned with the proposals for an expanded executive in the BBI with a president, deputy president, prime minister and two deputy premiers.

Regional chieftains, with blocks of millions of votes in the pocket, will likely trade them for one of the plum offices.

The recentralising forces, which in September 2016 saw the ruling Jubilee Party remade as a monolithic organisation with the merger of 11 smaller parties, seem to have run their course. 

However, Kenya is going back to 2002, when the opposition National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) formed to defeat the ruling Kanu. As Dr Mukhisa Kituyi was wont to say, Narc was the broadest democratic coalition to take power in Africa, with nearly 20 parties. Well, almost, because South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) had more by the time Nelson Mandela was released on February 11, 1990.

The new parties and the resurrection of dead ones seem to be a response to some fundamental changes in the country itself. And it’s a good development.

Within the narrower East Africa, Nairobi is the capital that is seeing its dominance in-country shrink the most.

Over the past 15 years, Kenya has revolved less and less around the capital. If you search Kenyan music and musicians on YouTube, you’d be surprised at how many of them are from outside Nairobi. Their sounds are so different they could be from another country.

The explosion of universities is also such that, as we have seen during the pandemic, some of the most innovative ideas have come from campuses outside Nairobi.

For the past 10 years, I have tracked the evolution of Kiambu and I am astounded by just how much it has grown and how elements of it rival or eclipse Nairobi. Two friends, very global chaps, now work in Nairobi only half the time and moved out not long ago. One lives on a small nice farm in Machakos and the other in Athi River.

There are many more Kenyas today. Each of them, rightly, wants to be governed differently. But because they are more aware, demand to see themselves in global Kenya too. The rotational presidency is too crude a response to it. But the 2010 Constitution has now become a blunt instrument too. 
Pity the man or woman whose job it will be to fix this.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3