KKK Alliance: Our greatest shame!

The year 2009 will go down in history as Kenya’s epoch of many shameful man-made disastrous calamities. Top on that list is the transgression of tribalism. Because of tribalism we have elected misfits into leadership positions, which have led to the establishment of a House of Nincompoops in place of a Parliament; because of tribalism we have killed our pregnant mothers and raped their young daughters; because of tribalism we have slaughtered hundreds of our own brothers and sisters. And now our chauvinistic leaders have come out in the open to establish an obnoxious tribal organization which they, either by design or by sheer ignorance, call the KKK alliance.

Once upon a time, as a young Managing Editor of the Daily Nation, I had the misfortune of interviewing one David Duke in New Orleans. He was then the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, commonly referred to as the KKK. I say the "misfortune" because of the most uncivil, if not barbaric, language used by the boss of the KKK during the interview. Words that came from his mouth were so horrific that I dare not repeat them here. Suffice it to say that he unsuccessfully tried to equate me to monkeys and baboons, which he describes as black people’s closest cousins. In his mind no Black man or woman was a fully developed human being and they, therefore, did not deserve being treated as such.

Today, when I repeat that story to my students, a cold chill still runs down my spine. It was therefore my greatest shock to hear people in my own country, who consider themselves respected leaders, with titles such as the Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Honourable Minister, forming a political alliance with a name exactly the same as David Duke’s KKK. Kalonzo Musyoka, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto would like to tell us that their KKK stands for Kikuyu, Kamba and Kalenjin. But the aims and aspirations of their KKK are not different from David Duke’s xenophobic organization. Both are just as chauvinistic. They are also both shamelessly intolerant. The American organization is racist and the Kenya one is tribalist. So what is the difference? The American KKK seeks the supremacy of the White race headed by Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Kenyan one wants to snatch political power in Kenya and establish a dictatorship headed by tribal chiefs. Honestly, I see no difference between the two.

Kenyans should just examine the political history of the leaders of the KKK alliance to get concrete evidence why it should be thrown into the dustbin of history. As the leader of the Orange Democratic Movement – Kenya (ODM-K), Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka has not sought permission from his party executive before pulling every member into an unholy alliance with the Deputy leader of ODM, William Ruto and the Chairman of Kanu, Uhuru Kenyatta. It was only a few short years ago when Kalonzo was denouncing, in the strongest possible words, the leadership of Ruto’s ODM and Kenyatta’s Kanu. What metamorphosis has the Vice President undergone to see his 2007 strongest political enemies as his strongest partners for the 2012 elections? Alternatively what changes have taken place in Ruto or Uhuru’s leadership to attract the Kamba leader?

Kalonzo has been a loyal member of Kanu, Liberal Democratic Party, the National Rainbow Coalition, and ODM-K. All within a short period of time since he joined politics in 1983 when he unsuccessfully tried to represent the people of Kitui North in Parliament as a supporter of the dreaded one party political system in Kenya. Strictly speaking, Kalonzo Musyoka does not have a political philosophy he believes in. He changes his political colours like a chameleon. Today he is preparing Kenyans to vote for him as the next President in the 2012 elections as the leader of the KKK Alliance in the country. But will the others in his group let him take the lead? Even more important than that, will the Kamba people be prepared to be led by their noses by a man who wants to isolate them from the rest of Kenyans?

To answer the last question first, the Kamba people , who overwhelmingly backed Kalonzo in 2007 as the leader of the ODM-K should ask their leader what philosophical changes have taken place in Kanu or ODM for Kalonzo to want to cooperate with Uhuru as the Kanu Chairman or Ruto as the Deputy Leader of the ODM? They should also want to know the significance of Kikuyu, Kamba and Kalenjin political alliance against the rest of the country? Why, for example , should the Kambas in Mariakani, consider themselves closer to the Kikuyus in the Central Province and Kalenjins in the Rift Valley than the Mijikenda people of Mariakani , Miritini , Changamwe, and Mombasa which are all close next door neighbours, and have been for decades?

As to the first question , which is extremely mind boggling, it is always amazing to see people who believe in no ideology at all ganging up together to form a political alliance based on tribal loyalty, when in fact they belong to three different tribes. None of the three leaders i.e. Kalonzo, Kenyatta and Ruto has shown a remote willingness to step down for the other, for the Presidency of Kenya after Kibaki. The only thing they have in common is the perception that they have the ability of putting their entire communities in their pockets. By the look of things the trio is in for a very big surprise this time.

The majority of the new generation of voters, whose number run into millions and are scattered all over the country, have two things in common: Poverty and unemployment. They all rightly believe they are in that predicament because of the greedy leadership of the likes of Ruto, Kalonzo and Kenyatta. They believe the only salvation they have is the use of the ballot, rather than the bullet, to bring about the desired change. After all, that method has succeeded in the most powerful country where a Black man was only considered a slave, and today he is the most powerful leader introducing changes that could only be confined to a dream world.

The story of Uhuru Kenyatta is basically the same as that of Kalonzo Musyoka. Though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his only hope of succeeding Mwai Kibaki at State House is to be accepted as the official Presidential candidate of the KKK alliance. Uhuru erroneously believes he is the undisputed leader of the Kikuyu people, who have supported his family for a long time, even before he was born. What Uhuru forgets, or is incapable of comprehending, is that the majority of the Kikuyus of today, who are the majority of young voters in Central Province, believe the rich in their community have only become so by robbing their forefathers. The majority of the rich Kikuyus are the children of home guards who killed a lot of Mau Mau in the struggle for liberation before independence. The majority of the poor among the Kikuyus today are children of the Mau Mau freedom fighters who, until today, have never seen the fruits of independence. In the next election they too see the power of the ballot bringing justice into the political scenario of the country.

Of the three KKK leaders, it is only William Ruto who has the backing of his people in the Rift Valley. But if they remember the history of how Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, who made them back his hand picked Presidential candidature of Uhuru Kenyatta in 2002, led them to be isolated by the entire country, they may not support Ruto for long . After all the Kalenjins are the quickest people in changing their minds in the entire country. If you don’t believe me, ask Raila Odinga.

Harmonized Draft Constitution disturbs tribalists

Nothing is disturbing the tribalists, who have ruled Kenya for the last four decades, more than the Harmonized Draft Constitution, which threatens to move the centre of power from a few despots to the people. The three imperial Presidents who have misruled the people of Kenya since independence have made sure the wealth of the nation benefited only a few privileged classes from their own areas. The process created the evils of nepotism, tribalism and corruption which can only be corrected by a complete overhaul of the political systems established by the dictators in Kenya, which is what the new draft is trying to do. No wonder the tribalists are ganging up to form ethnic political cabals to protect their ill gotten wealth and, if they succeed, they hope to establish a formidable tribal faction to win the 2012 election.

Under Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya saw the creation of a real gap between the haves and the have-nots with the haves apportioning themselves huge tracks of the most fertile land from the former White Highlands in the Rift Valley. The servant-master relationship between the people and the colonialists continued in a different form. The new masters were Jomo Kenyatta’s closest relatives and a few selected people who occupied top positions in his regime.

President Daniel arap Moi did exactly the same as his predecessor and went further to break the law through the most colossal robbery of public funds known as the Goldenberg scandal. Apart from the scandal, Moi committed further crimes of annexing fertile land from the country’s largest water reservoirs on the Mau forest and giving it to his closest family members as well as his most obedient servants from his own community. Today the land grabbers are fighting tooth and nail to retain their looted land against the wishes of the rest of Kenyans.

Mwai Kibaki on his part came in with his own type of scandal known as Anglo Leasing. The scandal was so disgraceful that a few heads in his regime had to roll. His efforts to introduce his own form of nepotism have been vehemently opposed by the entire country. Now his regime hangs on a thin thread kept alive by the coalition he has established with Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Should the coalition collapse the chances of his serving the rest of his term comfortably are extremely remote.

What the three regimes have in common is to wish for a future government that would protect their huge ill-gotten wealth through a despotic government established by one of their own. The Kikuyu-Kalenjin-Kamba alliance is supposed to achieve that goal. A government of Uhuru Kenyatta, Kalonzo Musyoka and William Ruto would make sure the gap between the haves and the have-nots would grow even wider. The so called KKK alliance will therefore do everything possible to oppose the parts of the Harmonized Draft Constitution calling for a paradigm shift that removes the power from a few privileged families to the people.

The relevant part of the Draft constitution which gives the tribal despots sleepless nights concerns land. The proposed law says in Chapter Seven , Article 77 that land is Kenya’s primary resource and the basis of livelihood for the people, and shall be held, used and managed in a manner which is equitable , efficient, productive and sustainable. It further says the national Government shall define and keep under review a national land policy ensuring the principles of equitable access to land and associated resources. That part of the proposed Constitution can bring together Uhuru, Ruto and Balala despite their past differences. Now they all paddle in the same canoe as they symbolize the elite who own unfairly huge tracks of land while the majority of the people of Kenya have nothing at all. Some of the huge pieces of land owned by Balala’s people down at the Coast have been left idle by absentee landlords who live in the Middle East while the true owners of the land , the Mijikenda people, are still treated as squatters,forty years after independence.

Tribalists will also be most disturbed by the section of the proposed Constitution which deals with basic requirements for political parties. Article 114 requires every political party to promote the objects and principles of the rule of law by promoting and upholding national unity. In the past tribalists have survived politically by forming parochial ethnic political parties which they have used as ladders to high national positions. If the Harmonized Draft Constitution goes through, political parties will have national character as prescribed by the Political Parties Act of 2007 which , among other things,prohibits the registration of political parties founded on ethnic, age , tribal, racial , gender, regional, linguistic,corporatist, professional or religious basis or which seeks to engage in propaganda .

Tribalists will particularly oppose this part of the proposed draft because it demands political parties to have a democratically elected governing body; and abide by the democratic principles of good governance, promote and practise democracy through regular, fair and free elections within the party, and promote discipline within it. That particular demand of the draft Constitution simply means the ownership of tribal political parties as personal properties will be a thing of the past. It may also mean democracy will be introduced in political parties’ nomination process making the obnoxious hand picking of favorite candidates by despotic leaders, also a thing of the past. Personally I would have liked the Harmonized draft to go even further and demand primary elections for all political parties to be supervised by the IIEC.

It is my hope that that proposal will be taken seriously by the CoE while drafting the final version. After all, the Harmonized Draft demands political parties to conduct their affairs in a manner that promotes democracy and peaceful politics. It also demands them to respect the right of others to participate in the political process, including, persons with disabilities and other minorities. Well organized, transparent and democratic primary elections in Kenya will ensure that the Harmonized Draft’s demand for political parties to respect and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, and gender equality and equity, will be achieved very easily.

Tribalists in the past have survived politically by engaging in tribal warfare. They have remained at the top leadership of their parties by terrorizing their local opponents as well as their national rivals. The Harmonized Draft Constitution prohibits political parties from engaging in or encouraging violence by, or intimidation of, its members, supporters, opponents or any other person. It also criminalizes the establishment or maintenance of paramilitary forces, militia or similar organizations. If the Harmonized Draft Constitution is passed then engaging in bribery or other forms of corruption in political parties will be the thing of the past.

The other part of the Harmonized Draft Constitution which will be vehemently opposed by the tribalists concerns the Executive. For forty years since independence tribalists have benefited from an imperial president with so much powers that only rewarded his own people. To continue to enjoy the fruits of independence exclusively as members of the privileged elite the tribalists will fight to maintain power through an imperial president whom they hope will come from one of the three tribal grouping of the so called KKK.

The part of the Harmonized Draft Constitution which they would like to get rid of is Article 179 which says the Prime Minister shall be the head of the Government and shall preside at the meetings of the Cabinet. This is something extremely hard for the tribalists to swallow because they know none of them, as leaders of tribal organizations masquerading as political parties, can succeed in accumulating enough members of Parliament to qualify to be appointed Prime Minister. So they spread lies that it would be most unfair to give so much powers to a prime minister “who is not elected by the people.”

They conveniently forget what Article 180 of the Harmonized Constitution says. That part of the Draft demands that within seven days following the summoning of the National Assembly after a general election, or whenever necessary to fill a vacancy in the office of Prime Minister, other than on the occasion of a vote of no confidence, the State President shall appoint as Prime Minister in a manner that clearly indicates the people have a major say in that appointment.

First the State President has to consider the member of the National Assembly who is the leader of the largest political party or coalition of parties, represented in the
National Assembly. Tribalists forget that no one becomes the leader of the largest political party in the National Assembly without the consent of the voters, who, for all practical purposes, are the people of Kenya.

The Draft Constitution says if the leader of the largest party or coalition of parties has been unable to command the confidence of the National Assembly, the member of the National Assembly who is the leader of the second largest political party or coalition of parties represented in the National Assembly will be the next candidate for Premiership to be considered by the State President. No one becomes the leader of the second largest party in the National Assembly without the consent of the people.

There can be no confusion as to who the leaders of these parties are because the Harmonized Draft Constitution clearly says each party participating in a general election of the National Assembly shall designate a person as the leader of that party for purposes of being selected for the appointment of the Prime Minister.

Anticipating possible disagreements in this sensitive issue of the appointment of the Prime Minister, the Draft gives the State President a third option where neither of the persons contemplated in the first option or the second option has been able to command or retain the confidence of the National Assembly. This third option says that the State President shall propose to the National Assembly the name of a member who, in the State President’s opinion, may be able to command the confidence of the National Assembly.

According to the Draft on receiving that proposal from the State President under clause (3), the Speaker shall summon the National Assembly and introduce the proposal from the State President. The Draft says within seven days of the Speaker receiving a proposal from the State President, the Speaker shall call a vote in the National Assembly to
confirm the appointment of the person proposed by the State President. And if that process also fails then the National Assembly shall by a vote supported by a majority of members present and voting nominate a member of the National Assembly for appointment as the Prime Minister. Parliament will therefore vote to elect a Prime Minister when all the other options have failed. But tribalists like to trumpet this aspect loudest magnifying the none participation of the people. The tribalists don’t like the people to know that the first option proposed by the Harmonized Draft Constitution reflects the wishes of the people.

The role of the people in appointing the Prime Minister is so important that if, within sixty days of the State President first appointing a person to be Prime Minister, no person has been confirmed or nominated for appointment, the National Assembly shall stand dissolved and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission shall conduct a fresh general election for the National Assembly. That is what the tribalists don’t want to hear.

Draft Constitution boosts Raila’s chances

The Draft Constitution is the closest Kenya has come to establishing a truly democratic society. It obviously favours those who have been struggling to establish such a society where political leadership is transparent and accountable to the people. One such person is Raila Odinga. His long struggle to demolish an imperial presidency has been fulfilled by Nzamba Kitonga’s success in coming up with a document that eradicates all the past despotic evils of dictatorial presidents. The evils came in the form of concentrating too much power in the hands of the demigod Presidents.

In a country where political survival has, for a long time, depended on tribal hegemony of ethnic supremacists, Nzamba Kitonga and the Minister for Constitutional Affairs, Mutula Kilonzo, as the two people who steered the formulation of the Draft, would have been accused of boosting their own tribe if Raila Odinga was a Kamba. The fact that both Mutula and Nzamba happen to be Kambas is a sheer coincidence. Similarly the accusations of the Draft Constitution appearing to support Raila are misconceived perceptions based on ignorance and lack of understanding of recent political development in Kenya.

An unbiased examination of those developments will clearly reveal that political parties in Kenya are by and large ethnic institutions under the leadership of ambitious tribal chiefs camouflaged as national leaders. That is with the exception of the Raila’s Orange Democratic Party which, though personally controlled by the Prime Minister, is a national party with leaders from all corners of the country. Sure enough, the most powerful political position in Kenya, if the draft Constitution is accepted by the people, will be that of the Prime Minister. But no one can dream of becoming a Prime Minister in Kenya if he or she does not lead a powerful political party capable of winning the majority of seats in the Legislature.

The only way to make sure that Raila does not become the first powerful executive Prime Minister after the 2012 elections is to remove him from the leadership of the ODM in a democratic manner. The other way is to establish a powerful non tribal political party to rival the ODM in every part of the country before 2012. Such an undertaking would be an uphill task for leaders who are already stigmatized as both tribal and hegemonic monsters.

Given the fact that there have been two Presidents from the Central Province there is little wonder that MPs from that area are still lamentably calling for an imperial President. Arguing that because the Draft Constitution demands that the President gets the mandate of the people before occupying State House, and therefore the elected President deserves to have more powers than what they call “unelected” Prime Minister, the MPs’ hope is to confuse Kenyans and make them reject Nzamba’s proposals. In that confusion may be a man from Central Province, hopefully Uhuru Kenyatta, could end up the third Kikuyu President for Kenya. Such a wishful thinking is building castles in the air. It would take an unusually clever conjurer’s trick to convince Kenyans that the next executive President should come from Kiambu.

The claim that the Draft Constitution favours a Prime Minister who is not elected by the people is as misleading as it is malicious. To qualify to be a Prime Minister one has to be the leader of the largest political party or coalition parties represented in the national assembly. Political parties don’t become the largest parties in the national assembly without the consent of the people. As a matter of fact to achieve that goal, a political party has to be national and acceptable to diverse people of Kenya, which is far more difficult than receiving more than half of all the vote cast in the presidential election even though it also requires at least twenty five percent of the vote cast in the majority of the regions.

It is also wrong and most misleading to claim that the Draft Constitution crates an office of a figurehead President. The elected President of Kenya after 2012 would be a very powerful person with very well elaborated State functions as well as Legislative functions which can hardly be described as duties of an impotent Head of State. For anyone to exercise those powers he or she should rightly get the consent of the people. By getting his or her many candidates win elections in the majority of the constituencies in various parts of the country the Prime Minister would have demonstrated clearly to have the support of the people.

There are many possible positive outcomes of the Draft Constitution. One of them would be the establishment of national political parties that are not parochially tribal. These would be parties that would compete on ideological differences rather than ethnic diversity. Briefcase political parties will be a thing of the past. The demand by the Draft Constitution to have regular elections in political parties would also introduce badly needed internal democracy in political parties. Being the most favoured person by the new Draft, Raila is likely to spend more time revamping and strengthening the ODM. Holding the already powerful position of Prime Minister he is likely to perform that duty so magnificently that very soon ODM will have offices where there will be long queues of people seeking party membership.

Knowing very well the power of the Kikuyu vote in any election in Kenya, a special recruitment ODM team is likely to be formulated in Central Province to fish for Kikuyu membership, particularly among the Kikuyu youth and even among the members of the Mungiki clandestine organization. Raila’s friendly approach in dealing with the Mungiki menace is a very well calculated political maneuver which Agwambo is a master of.

Despite its popularity ODM has its own internal problems caused by the rebellious William Ruto and Najib Balala. Their departure from the party means Raila will pay special attention to the party development in both the Rift Valley and the Coast provinces. In both places the Prime Minister has identified people who can easily step into Ruto and Balala’s shoes. Raila’s job in doing this will be made very easy by national mobilization against tribal politics. Stigmatizing Ruto as a tribal leader, however, may be a lot easier than disgracing the non tribal Arab Balala who can only be fought by reminding the coastal Mijikenda people of the dishonorable historical role of the Arabs in that part of the world. That Raila can do most effectively through his charismatic public attraction.

To get the massive support of the Luhya people Raila is likely to groom Musalia Mudavadi as the country’s next President. It will not be surprising at all if Raila starts grooming some young man or woman for the position of Deputy President. Very much like Moi, Raila will soon start using top Government positions, including that of the Deputy Prime Minister as political baits to win popular support from all parts of the country. This method is likely to work wonders for Raila who is sure to be the Prime Minister of Kenya from 2012 for a very long time to come because, unlike the position of the President, there is no limited term of office for the premier.

Carson should have hit harder

Johnnie Carson’s ban on a senior Kenyan official is both timely and effective. The official has been stopped from visiting America. The US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs’ threat to 15 prominent Kenyans in September to ban them from visiting the US unless they stopped their systematic opposition to political reforms in Kenya, has now started to work. Since then the 15 have gone underground and don’t want to talk about the issue in public. They feel like lepers isolated from the rest of the community.

The Carson tactic could work wonders. When African politicians are stopped from traveling to Europe or America they feel completely disoriented and absolutely insulted. What good is money if it can’t buy all the goodies to be found in Western capitals? That is why many of them send their children to America and Western Europe for both secondary and university education though Kenya has more universities today than at any other time in history. A lot of our leaders have no trust in the country they lead. That is why many of them have their real bank accounts in either America and or in Western Europe.

Carson should therefore not only have banned a nameless influential individual Kenyan official, but he should also have named all the other 15 he had written to a month ago. And what is more he should have frozen all their bank accounts which contains money they have looted from the people of Kenya. Furthermore he should have announced that the children and other relatives of the named people now living in America were going to be deported back to Kenya. That is the language our leaders understand.

More than anyone else, Carson, who has served his country as the Ambassador in Nairobi, understands all the tricks in subterfuge that Kenyan leaders engage in while dealing with the international community. He knows, for example, when Kofi Annan visited the country recently, attempts were made to mislead him and make him believe the country was really serious in implementing Agenda Four reforms. Carson knows Annan found a lot of rotten skeletons in Kenyan leaders’ cupboards.

The visit by Kafi Annan to review reform progress, Carson knows, exposed Kenyan leaders as the most hypocritical people who can go as far as spending public funds to cheat and hoodwink wananchi into believing that the coalition Government was serious about Agenda Four. On October 4th when the former UN Secretary General landed on Kenya, the Government chose to shamelessly tell the people a complete lie through an advertisement in all the national newspapers by the Government spokesman, Dr. Alfred Mutua, who must obviously be underestimating the intelligence of the people of Kenya.

As if he was addressing primary school kids, Mutua imprudently told Kenyans that the Government had achieved what he called a “reform performance” Grade “A” or 90 per cent. The very thought of coming up with such a wicked propaganda, and in such thoughtless format, proved that the Government spokesman, and the people he speaks for, live in a completely different world from that in which the wananchi of this country dwell.

It took Kofi Annan a very short time to realize that the so called leaders of Kenya were planning for yet another bloodbath in the Rift Valley where Kikuyu Mungiki hooligans and Kalenjin militias are collecting dangerous military guns in preparation for another confrontation between them in 2012. Depending on a South Consulting report the former UN Secretary General warned that serious crimes in Kenya were going up and that warlords, who have always won elections in Kenya through threats and bloodshed, hadn’t gone to sleep, but were indeed still preparing to kill more Kenyans in three year’s time.

The South Consulting October report says although post-election violence ended with the signing of the National Accord in February 2008, new forms of crime have arisen in different parts of the country. In areas affected by post election violence, threats against certain communities perceived as ‘outsiders’ persist. Kenyans must be wondering why it took Kofi Annan to come all the way from Europe to expose a heinous plot by our leaders to remain in power through mass murders.

Carson is also aware that on October 6th Raila and Kibaki tried to sanitize Mutua’s dirty propaganda by paying for full page advertisements in all the national papers, and telling the people a story closer to the truth regarding the progress Kenya was making in achieving Agenda Four reforms. But up and above Agenda Four, Carson is likely to raise the issue of insecurity in the country, with the two principals. It is amazing that neither President Kibaki nor Prime Minister Odinga has come up with convincing truth about the security situation in the country. None of them has come up with a clear condemnation on the preparation for war between Kikuyus and Kalenjins in the Rift Valley.

While in Kenya, Carson will most certainly raise the issue with the two principals and demand that the two become more open to the people about the dangerous issue. He must have read the South Consulting October report which says there is a continuation of old illegal armed groups and the emergence of new ones. According to the report some of the new ones have mutated from the old groups. Further, the report says, the groups are emboldened by the failure to successfully prosecute members suspected to have taken part in criminal activities in the past. As reported in the past reports, says the report, lack of policy guidelines on how to deal with organized crime and the fact that some groups enjoy the backing of powerful political leaders have combined to limit actions that would eliminate these groups. This notwithstanding, adds the report, criminal groups have no support among Kenyans -- many people prefer the police to these groups.

The news about constant meetings among Kalenjin Leaders must be extremely worrying. They claim to be meeting about “social and cultural issues”. If that is the case then why are the agendas of these meetings not made public? Why are journalists not invited to the meetings? Another group of leaders engaged in clandestine meetings is that from the Central Province. They claim to be planning “one man one vote” in the next general election. The relationship between the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus has been disturbingly cool ever since the last general election when the two ethnic groups were virtually engaged in a civil war. What is the Government doing to harmonize the relationship between these vital ethnic groups in the country? When Kofi Annan warns of planned conflict in 2012 whom exactly did he have in mind? And why do journalists not write exposes on these national stories? What has happened to investigative journalism in this country?

Raila’s silence on Ringera baffling

The Prime Minister has been mysteriously quiet on the Ringera controversy. His silence is puzzling the whole country. The enigmatic manner in which Raila Odinga is treating the Ringera affair means Agwambo has something up his sleeve, on which he is probably still working and, when he is ready to let the cat out of the bag, it will be quick and punchy. His first reaction will come with such a big explosion that it will shock both Aaron Ringera and Mwai Kibaki, who has had the impudence to unilaterally give the retired judge a new contract, at the risk of angering the whole nation. The manner in which the Ringera debate has been conducted so far indicates the majority of Kenyans have had enough of the old lawyer; not because he is not qualified for the controversial job, but because of the perception of his sluggish pace to expose the big fish among the corrupt and his apparent lack of enthusiasm to prosecute them.

Having once been falsely accused by a section of the community of being involved in maize scandal, that is said to have included his son Fidel, Raila must be extremely careful before he openly attacks the man who, ostensibly, would have investigated the Prime Minister and his son following the false allegations. Indeed there are some people who believe Agwambo should have called for an inquiry to investigate both his family and himself to prove that he undeniably was not involved in any corrupt activities. Now that a lot of time has passed since the allegations, Raila does not want to appear to be rejoicing at the misery of the man who was supposed to probe him. Hence the deliberate silence. But there are many other reasons that could have made the Prime Minister buy his time before commenting on the hottest issue of the day.

First the Prime Minister must be enjoying the embarrassment the President is going through for acting unilaterally without consulting the right people. Strangely, the President’s imprudent act came about only when Francis Muthaura returned to his office after a long absence caused by ill health. Inevitably, people will wonder why Kibaki deliberately ignores Agwambo only when Muthaura is around. This time, however, he has done so at his own peril. For taking the thoughtless action of single handedly renewing Ringera’s contract, the President is paying heavily, even though many respected lawyers believe he did nothing illegal. Raila must be enjoying seeing Kibaki against the wall for preferring to consult Muthaura rather than his equal in the coalition Government.

Secondly the Prime Minister must be enjoying seeing the President being chased around the political field of intrigue by Parliamentarians who seem to have very little respect for the Head of State. The cat and mouse game between the President and the Legislature proves that Kibaki has neither full control of the Executive, to which Raila belongs and controls a very substantial share, nor the Parliament, which is fully controlled by Agwambo. The fight between Kibaki and Parliament also proves that ignoring the Prime Minister in making major decisions in the country can be extremely costly for the President. The continued silence by Raila keeps Kibaki in the torture chamber for a longer period, where the Prime Minister hopes the President can learn a lesson of his lifetime.
The current confrontation between the Executive and the Legislature can probably be sorted out in court, but before then, Parliament can do something to remove the ambiguity in the Anti Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, which has landed the country in a political quagmire. The warring parties do not disagree on the manner in which the Director and his assistants should be appointed. The bone of contention is on how the Directors’ contracts can be renewed. The President, and the people who back him, seem to think the law empowers the Head o State to renew the Directors’ contracts without consulting anyone.

His opponents seem to think the President has no such powers without consulting the Advisory Board and getting the approval of Parliament. As the debate continues the whole issue has been politicized and old political wounds have been reopened. Parliament should take the fastest step possible to amend the Act and remove the ambiguities. Either the President has the powers to unilaterally renew Ringera’s contract or he doesn’t and the law should be clear about that issue.

Now the debate has taken a new turn with ODM insisting the President broke the law and PNU explaining that no law has been broken by the reappointment of Ringera. The old ODM-PNU rivalries on governance issues are at play in pulling the country apart in political confusion at taxpayer’s expenses. MPs continue to draw fat allowances when all they are debating on is whether or not Ringera was properly reappointed to serve his second term.

Meanwhile the MPs and Ministers, whose files Ringera had opened while investigating graft, wish the debate will never end before Ringera is sent home and corruption cases against them can finally be swept under the carpet. Some MPs are even suggesting that the entire ACCK should be disbanded and Ringera and his complete team should be sent packing. If that happens, it will be the most irresponsible act by Kenya’s Legislature in recent history. No matter how lackadaisical people may think Ringera has been, he has started some very vital investigations which cannot be wished away because some MPs think his reappointment has been done irregularly.

Before MPs send Ringera away and maybe even disband the KACC, the people who pay Ringera and sustain the institution he heads must be told the nature and content of the 498 files which he has handed to the Attorney General for prosecution. A lot of MPs are probably in those files and they would not like Ringera to talk about them. There are eight Ministers who Ringera has recommended for prosecution for corruption. Five of these Ministers served in the former Kenyan Governments and three of them are still Minister in the Kibaki-Raila Government. Wananchi would obviously like to know who these Ministers are and what nature of corruption Ringera is accusing them of. Arguing about the manner in which Ringera’s contract has been renewed will not change the situation. Eight Ministers are still being accused by Ringera. The big question is: Do Kenyans want to back Ringera on this particular issue or do they want to back eight corrupt politicians now hitting so hard against Ringera?

In a Press Statement issued by Nicholas M. Simani, the KACC principle Public Relations and Protocol Officer, the anti corruption body shows that Ringera has made major pro-active interventions that have saved this nation billions of shillings which would have ended up in top corrupt public officials’ pockets .These include a 2.2 billion shilling mis-procurement in the Kenya Sugar Board, one billion shillings mis-procurement of cranes at the Kenya Ports Authority and many other proven cases which mysteriously have been given a total blackout by the local media. What is of greater significance to Kenyan journalists, the vanishing billions that end up with corrupt officials, who Ringera has exposed, or the manner in which his contract is being renewed? What has happened to the news values of Kenyan journalists? What about their own ethical principles of accuracy, impartiality and fair play? The world is watching the misbehaviour of the Fourth Estate in Kenya with a lot of interest.

Corruption is fighting Ringera back

The countless enemies of Aaron Ringera are up in arms. Daggers have been drawn against the KACC boss for more reasons than meets the eye. His invisible, yet extremely powerful, enemies include tribalism, party politics, professional jealousy and, last but not least, corruption itself. For the whole week now the entire country, led by the Fourth Estate, has buried its head in the sand and totally declined to listen to reason on the need to renew Ringera’s contract. Making more noise than anyone else, Parliament itself has condemned the retired Judge’s reappointment as illegal. That, despite the fact that the august House is full of lawyers, who simply refused to be logical and instead became so openly partisan, tribal and unreasonable.

The claim that the reappointment of Ringera was illegal was based on either the ignorance of the law or a deliberate misinterpretation of it. The relevant part of the Anti Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, under which the KACC comes, was expertly discussed in a well written article in the Daily Nation by the Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Mutula Kilonzo, who reveals that no law was broken by Mwai Kibaki when he reappointed Ringera to serve the second five year term. What is shocking is the number of lawyers, including the KACC Board Chairman, Okongo Omogeni, who have ganged up to oppose the reappointment of Ringera. Did these lawyers tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Facts don’t support their case.

The fact that Mwai Kibaki broke no law does not mean he behaved in the most upright, decent or honest manner. His act of ignoring the KACC Board simply means he is an extremely stubborn, pigheaded and may be very obdurate old man who is drunk with power and does not hesitate to exhibit it. Doing so, however, does not mean he is breaking any law. So the Board members have every reason to be upset, but they should not do so by exposing their ignorance of the very law that puts them there. Parliament is making a lot of noise and getting very disconcerted for nothing.

The law does not say that the Legislature has to be consulted before the Director is reappointed to serve a second term. According to the law Parliament is only involved in approving candidates to be hired by the Commission. Ringera had already gone through that procedure before he was hired. Something is seriously very wrong when the whole Parliament becomes embarrassingly so worked up at the taxpayers expense. The LSK is taking the matter to Court but Mutula has already interpreted the law for them.

For the short time that the KACC Director has served Kenya he has made very many powerful enemies including Minister in the current Government. Among the people he has recommended to the Attorney General for persecution are three Ministers in the Kibaki-Raila Government and 58 Chief Executives of Public Corporations. Ringera should now publicly announce the names of the people he wants the Attorney General to prosecute. That way we shall know who his enemies really are. The biggest problem with Ringera is that he has no prosecutorial powers and without those powers he will always appear to be incompetent whereas in fact the man is indeed being frustrated by the big sharks he is trying to expose and prosecute. There are very many Kenyans who believe Ringera should be given more powers to prosecute rather than being shown the door.

Among the people who would like Ringera to lose his job is Rashmi Chamalal Kamani who is involved in the Anglo Lasing scandal including some wanting security related contracts. This man is so crafty that not even Ringera can trace him. All that Ringera can do is to offer an award of 100,000/- to anyone with useful information about Kamani. Whereas Kamani has been forced by Ringera to go underground it is not conceivable that the later is sitting on his laurel waiting for the Anglo Leasing scandal to vanish in thin air. Obviously Kamani is fighting back and he is fighting back using the most powerful men and women in and outside the Government and Parliament.

The next powerful man who can easily do Ringera in is Yagnesh Mohanlal Devani whom Ringera exposed as the man behind the Triton scandal involving more than seven billion shillings. The amount of money is so staggering that any of the beneficiaries exposed by Ringera would do anything to make sure the retired Judge is sent home as soon as possible. There is little doubt that Ringera has achieved more than the Fourth Estate in Kenya would like to acknowledge. Indeed rather than joining forces with those who would like to get rid of Ringera, journalists should support him as the one man always ready to help them do exposes that would put crooks in trouble.

Big money in the hands of crooks is not the only enemy fighting Ringera. Tribalism is also fighting him. Many tribal chiefs look at Ringera’s job as a feather in Gema people’s cap. Jobs in Kenya are so “tribalised” that it is almost a shame to hear even the most highly educated people talking of how many ministers their tribes have, or how many judges and how many heads of parastatals their tribes have. The larger the tribe the more top public official bosses it is supposed to have. Ringera’s job happens to be the most lucrative public office of the land.

Every tribe with anyone on the bench thinks it is time for their son or daughter to occupy that office. Ringera’s achievements notwithstanding, he will always be opposed by tribalists trying to get their own people at the KACC helm. The other reason Ringera is opposed by tribalists is the perception that he is there to protect his own people from facing the long arm of the law no matter how corrupt they are. Tribalists therefore want their own man or woman in that important office to be protected from the law as they continue engaging in corrupt activities.

Besides big money and tribalism, Ringera’s enemies include party rivalries. Ringera is perceived to be a PNU supporter regardless of his real political conviction. This makes him the dart board of the ODM missiles. No matter what he does, he will be always a victim of the most lethal attacks from ODM MPs. This trend will continue until the office is occupied by an ODM candidate. How beneficial that candidate will be to the party is not easy to imagine. But ODM is made up of Kenyan politicians who suffer from the same societal weakness as the rest of the country. Many of them are as corrupt as PNU leaders. Professional jealousy is yet another enemy facing Ringera. The only way he can fight that is to be even more competent. But first he has to keep his job.

Without Muthaura Raila is ruling Kenya

Francis Muthaura is an incapacitated man. As the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President, the Secretary to the Cabinet and the Head of the Public Service, he is an extremely powerful man. But his health has let him down and he had to be flown to South Africa for an urgent heart surgery followed by an inevitable bed rest that has kept him away from his office for well over a month. Meanwhile Prime Minister Raila Odinga, apparently with the full backing of President Mwai Kibaki, has moved in full force to reduce Muthaura to his proper protocol size of a civil servant who is obviously quite subordinate to the Executive Prime Minister.

The move was celebrated by an astounding pomp and pageantry of public launching of the Strategic Plan for the Office of the Prime Minister 2009-2012. Spearheaded by no less a person that President Mwai Kibaki himself, the fanfare that marked the occasion was an elaborate endorsement by the Head of State of the of Raila’s undisputed Constitutional powers to guide Kenya through the most sensitive endeavors since the establishment of a coalition Government. The only person who would have challenged the constitutionality of the whole exercise is Francis Muthaura, who, very soon, is about to be relegated to the position similar to that of the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Isahakia.

Though The Standard newspaper saw the whole exercise as a clever move by Kibaki to set political traps for Agwambo, Raila clearly explained during the launch of the plan, that he had directed his officials to draw up a Strategic Plan that gave Kenya the strongest possible opportunity to make sure serious reforms took place. He explained that it all started with his Constitutional mandate of coordination and supervision of the operations of Government. In view of what many people thought about Government, that was a huge task which he took “very seriously”. He further elaborated that the quality and efficiency of Government affected Kenya’s prosperity. It also influenced how the people cared for each other, and the services were received. According to the Prime Minister the citizens needed to know that Government was there for them when they needed it most. This was why it was so important that the public sector worked smoothly and effectively.

Could The Standard Newspaper by any chance be correct in suggesting that Kibaki wanted to make “political minced meat” out of Raila through the plan? Is it possible that all of a sudden the President is outmaneuvering Kenya’s most reputable political acrobat in living history? After all Raila has always outsmarted the Gema group led in the Raila-Kibaki Government by Muthaura. Agwambo himself does not agree and he does not mice his words. He openly told the country: “His Excellency the President and I share the conviction that Kenya can be a more prosperous, unified and secure nation. We stand together in wanting a government and public service that works well for Kenyans and that steers us towards the aspirations set out in Vision 2030. As the President and I stand together, the Nation must stand together -- in unity and harmony.”

Those words must have hurt a lot of people who have always benefited from the political differences between Kibaki and Raila. Since the President’s visit to Nyanza where he virtually endorsed Raila’s Presidency, the working relationship between the two leaders has drastically changed. Today Agwambo tells the country in the presence of the President that he will endeavour to make sure “that there will be enough food to eat, decent housing for our people, a sustainable environment, enough water to drink, energy, modern roads, railways and ports to grow our economy; and, above all eliminate corruption and insecurity which threaten to poison our society and to tarnish our reputation around the world.” Wow!

These are not words of a politician campaigning to get elected. There are words of a leader planning to develop his country at whatever cost. When Kibaki takes a backseat and let Raila run the show, it clearly indicate that the Nyanza Declaration to hand powers to Jaramogi’s son is practically being implemented now. Enemies of Raila-Kibaki plans will shout loudly to try and change the trend but the undercurrent is just too powerful for them. The Kibaki-Raila political plan is a tsunami which will sweep a lot of people into permanent political oblivion very soon.

The eight priorities listed by Kibaki and Raila as the Prime Minister’s Strategic Plan could be seen by the enemies of the two politicians as a trap to politically finish Agwambo. But any optimistic Kenyan would see them as necessary challenges for any development conscious leader. Priority Number One concerns challenge of Infrastructure which is intended to improve roads, rail links , ports and Information and Communication Technology, which according to Raila will result in better movements of food and other important goods, improving business opportunities and leading to economic growth. If Raila fulfills this goal he will be the most popular politician in East Africa because the beneficiaries will be the entire population of the region. The achievement of this goal cannot come about without the creation of many jobs which will again make Agwambo the most popular leader. Kibaki could not give Raila the responsibility to oversee the achievement of these goals with the aim of destroying him politically.

Priority Number Two concerns environment protection and climate change , which according to Raila is critical to safeguard natural resources , as is being done in Mau Forest, and other water towers, and because ecology brings the country prosperity through tourism. This is a challenge which has unfortunately been politicized by the Kalenjin Members of Parliament because very important people from that community, including the former President Daniel arap Moi, have illegally allocated themselves huge junks of land by destroying the forest. Now they don’t want to be told to get out of the forest even though the consequences can be seen by the entire country.

When , rather than if, Raila succeeds in moving the illegal settlers out of Mau he will make a few political enemies from among the Kalenjin tycoons, who illegally grabbed the forest and destroyed it. The rest of the country will consider Agwambo a true nationalist and the political mileage he will get from that is an assured two term seat at the State House. He is very aware of this fact and that is why he proudly says he is willing to pay “the political price” that will accompany the evacuation of the squatters at the Mau forest. When tourism prospers as a result of climatic change, Raila will always be remembered down at the Coast and among the Maasai communities.

Priority Number Three concerns upgrading slums and informal settlements which according to Raila will ensure that all Kenyans have decent housing. The Prime Minister happens to be the MP who represents people in the poorest habitats. They voted for him from their ramshackle homes. The people of Kibera can today see wonderful houses being built for them. As usual some corrupt characters are trying to use the legal system to try and stop the legitimate slum dwellers from moving into the new houses. Needless to say, that will be done over Agwambo’s dead body. Knowing that his political future depends on eliminating slums from Kenya, the Prime Minister will spare no efforts to grab the chance of upgrading slums in Kenya. His political enemies will see that challenge as a trap to finish him politically, but there is very little doubt that he will soon prove them wrong.

Priority Number Four concerns food security which Raila says will make sure that no Kenyan goes hungry for lack of planning of or distribution. According to the Prime Minister, Kenya has the knowledge and skills to prevent recurring maize crisis and the talent will be mobilized. Food, or lack of it, is always a political bomb and when it explodes heads always roll. No one knows that better that Raila, who recently was almost shouted down at Kibera when every word he uttered was drowned by shouts of “unga!” Naturally Raila knows hungry people can be angry mobs; but when he is given the responsibility of feeding the hungry he can easily turn the anger into very useful votes. Rather than trap him, Kibaki has given Raila all the votes he needs to become the next President after 2012, by giving him the responsibility to feed the hungry.

Priority Number Five concerns improving Governance and fighting corruption which, according to Raila, is the real power. Every time Raila has asked for more powers, he was dying to punish the corrupt in Kenya. Believing that the country’s resources belong to all Kenyans, Raila has been given by Kibaki the key to jailhouses in Kenya where he will pile up all the corrupt people who have so far been untouchable sacred cows. Raila knows that is the way he to win the love and the popularity of the underdogs of Kenya who are his voters. By giving him the responsibility to improve governance and end corruption in Kenya, Kibaki has actually handed Raila the key to State House.

Priority Number Six concerns the implementation of Kofi Annan’s Agenda Four which is Raila’s pet subject. It concerns Constitutional, institutional reforms, land reforms, poverty inequality and regional imbalance, unemployment, particularly among the youth, consolidation of national cohesion and unity, transparency, accountability and impunity. In other words, all the things Kenyans have been crying for. If Raila has the powers to get them for the people of Kenya what reason will they have to reject him in 2012?

Priority Number Seven concerns youth employment, popularly known as Kazi kwa Vijana Programme. According to Raila the youth of this country are the future. The success of Kazi kwa Vijana programme must be sustained and replicated. Anybody who can get jobs to the young people of Kenya is sure to get their votes in the next elections. Kibaki has just given Raila that chance.

Priority Number Eight concerns transformation of public service which according to Raila underpins the achievement of these priorities. He says the Public Service must be exemplary in supporting Government and in serving citizens. As he prepares to oversee the implementation of the eight goals he actually takes over all the responsibilities of Francis Muthaura; and to make matters worse, he does so with the full backing of Mwai Kibaki.

Raila admits that this is an ambitious plan. According to him it would take hard work and commitment to working together across the Government and with all of the stakeholders, to achieve success. “In all priority areas the Government will move forward as one, measuring and reporting progress in making Kenya and its citizens stronger and more prosperous,” he says. His enemies must be wondering how he will do it. The Cabinet has already cleared 250 billion shillings to build Kenya. This time Raila and Kibaki mean business. And they have the international backing!

Gitobu’s Bill sure to go through

Gitobu Imanyara’s Bill to amend the Constitution is sure to go trough Parliament and become law. It is the end of the road for post election violence planners and financiers who turned Kenya into a cesspool of tribalism . This is so because ODM has announced it will back the cantankerous Imenti Central politician’s determined move to put the culprits behind bars. And ODM controls Parliament. Yet this time ODM is backed by a number of other parties in calling for the establishment of a powerful and independent, internationally recognized tribunal to try the mass murderers of post election violence. There is no way the butchers of Rift Valley can escape the law this time. When Martha Karua brought her two Bills – The Constitution of Kenya Amendment Act of 2009 and The Special Tribunal of Kenya Statute of 2009 – before the House, Imanyara led a battalion of backbenchers to reject them. His reasons at that time were very solid.

The Bills had serious loopholes. The loopholes were the fact that the Bill did not clearly say that the President had no powers to pardon a person found guilty by the tribunal. It did not say that the Attorney General had no powers to enter a nolle prosequi when certain important people are prosecuted. The Bill did not say that the Chief Justice could not transfer Judges who appear to be incorruptible in the serious cases. For these reasons Gitobu mobilized the parliamentarians to reject Martha’s Bills and instead called for the trials of the suspects to go to The Hague where neither the president, the Attorney General nor the Chief Justice could interfere with them. Gitobu wanted Luis Moreno-Ocampo to prosecute the suspected Kenyans who include high ranking Ministers in the Kibaki-Raila Government.

Though backed by the majority of the people of Kenya, Imanyara’s rejection of Martha’s Bill was seriously criticized by the international community led by Kofi Anna, who issued a statement saying he was disappointed that the Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill 2009, which would have paved the way for the establishment of a Special Tribunal in Kenya, was defeated in Parliament. According to Annan this development was a major setback to the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV).

He believed it was also a blow to efforts aimed at ending the culture of impunity in Kenya, which was a central objective of the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation process. The respected international diplomat said ending impunity was critical to addressing the root causes of the crisis that engulfed Kenya last year. Despite this strongly worded statement, Imanyara and his group in Parliament, backed by the ordinary wananchi, were still calling for Moreno-Ocampo to step in. The suspects were too powerful to be tried in Kenya without the interference of the President and the Attorney General plus the Chief Justice.

This was the stand of the country until the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton visited the country and clearly explained to both the leaders and the wananchi the importance of conducting the trials locally. It was after this explanation that Gitobu Imanyara saw the light and drafted his Bill which among other things ensures that national immunities including the exercise of the prerogative of mercy shall not bar the Tribunal from exercising jurisdiction and further that the power of pardon shall not be exercised in respect of persons convicted for crimes under the Act. In particular the Imanyara’s Bill ensures investigative and prosecutorial autonomy for the Tribunal by excluding the Attorney-General’s powers under Section 26(3)-(8) of the Constitution. Under this section of the Constitution the Attorney General has powers to institute and undertake criminal proceedings against any person before any court, other than a court marshal, in respect of any offence alleged to have been committed or to take over and continue any such criminal proceedings that have been instituted or undertaken by another person or authority and to discontinue at any stage before judgement is delivered any such criminal proceedings instituted or undertaken by himself or another person or authority.

In her Bill Martha explained to MPs that she had brought the Bill before Parliament as the result of the deliberations of the National Accord and Reconciliation Committee formed after the political crisis triggered by the disputed elections held on 27th December, 2007. She said the Committee held its deliberations under the auspices of the Panel of Eminent African Personalities comprising the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, His Excellency Kofi Annan, His Excellency Benjamin Mkapa, former President of the United Republic of Tanzania and Her Excellency Madam Graca Machel. She elaborated to the MPs that her Bill sought to implement the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence submitted to the President on 16th October, 2008 (“the Waki Report”). The Bill proposed to introduce a new section 3A to anchor the Statute establishing the Special Tribunal for Kenya in the Constitution in order to insulate the Tribunal against objections on grounds of unconstitutionality.

Imanyara’s Bill takes care of that by making similar proposals. It is actually the work of Imanyara himself, Marta Karua and Mutula Kilonzo which shows clearly the group of people who are likely to support it.Raila could not afford to tarnish his name as a person backing impunity. His statesmanship was under scrutiny.So he has now mobilized everyone to back Imanyara's Bill. These will be the ODM, the Narc Kenya and the PNU. Those likely to oppose the Bill will be Kalenjin MPs led by William Ruto who will see it as a move to push the Agriculture Minister over the cliff. The result of the passage of the Bill through Parliament will be a serious security threat by the Kalenjins who will threaten to rise up in arms in defence of their tribal leader. Last time they were in the same mood was just before the 2007 elections and they were quite prepared, some would say even trained, to attack the Kikuyu community whether or not ODM lost the election. This time their threat will be against the rest of the country since the Bill is likely to get the support of everyone apart from the Kalenjins and Uhuru Kenyatta and his very few friends in Parliament.

The second group in Parliament that is likely to oppose the Bill, it is quite easy to guess, is that of Uhuru Kenyatta and his friends. The reason is that Kenyatta is said to be one of the suspects on Moreno-Ocampo’s list.These are the same people exposed by the KNCHR who the people would like to see fired by Kibaki and Raila . Short of that the people would like them to resign while waiting for Moreno-Ocampo. The passage of the Bill will anger the Mungiki terror group who are said to be on his payroll, and were used to create havoc at Naivasha during the post election violence. The question is who will the Mungiki threaten this time when the Bill seeks to punish those who attacked the Kikuyu community after the 2007 elections.Though Raila has his own way of dealing with the Mungiki gangsters, this time they have been caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea and the manner in which they will react to the Imanyara Bill, remains to be seen. So far the Kibaki- Raila Government has not prosecuted any Mungiki members who took part in mass murders of Naivasha where they were to have “retaliated” to the Kalenjin – Luo attacks. Will they escape the sharp eye of the independent investigators set up by the Imanyara Bill? Time alone will tell.

United PNU weaker than divided ODM

PNU is trying to unite before the 2012 general elections. In the party, however, are bitter rivals, all interested in the seat at State House after the next general elections. The just ended Mombasa meeting showed a possible coalition between Kiraitu Murungi and Kalonzo Musyoka, who are likely to be PNU’s running mates. The unity between the two politicians will probably bring together all the Kambas and the Meru’s as a powerful voting bloc. The team is also likely to be joined by a section of rich Kiambu Kikuyus under the leadership of Beth Mugo and Njenga Karume.

The most conspicuous absentee at the Mombasa meeting was the Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta who is said to be contemplating some form of unity with the Agriculture Minister William Ruto. Uhuru can be very unpredictable when forming coalitions with other leaders. In the last elections he tried to team up with Raila without much success. Behind Uhuru are most of the young Kikuyu voters from Kiambu who are said to be Mungiki followers. If , by some miracles, Uhuru manages to bring Ruto and his Nandi and Kipsigis supporters into this camp, the problem will be how to divide posts if , in the unlikely event , they form the government after the 2012 elections.

If they can agree to make Kalonzo their Presidential candidate with Kiraitu as his running mate and Ruto as the Prime Minister, this will be a very strong team for Raila to beat. The team will have Uhuru Kenyatta to satisfy and it may be quite likely that the first President’s son may accept to hold the same position of deputy Prime Minister as he does today. To try and get some votes from the Coast, the team may consider Chirau Ali Mwakwere as the second Deputy Prime Minister. This shaky arrangement is likely to be opposed by George Saiototi, whose presidential ambitions have never been quite removed from his head. If all these leaders can agree to back Kalonzo in 2012 then Raila will have quite a strong team to fight to succeed Kibaki as the country’s next President.

Despite the threat by William Ruto to pullout all the Kalenjins from ODM, the party is still strong throughout the country and remains in the forefront as the sole institution to form the next government without any coalition. For that to happen, however, Raila will not only have to keep a very close relationship with Musalia Mudavadi, who will most likely be his running mate, but he will also have to cajole Martha Karua and her Narc Kenya to accept the position of the next Prime Minister with Danson Mungatana as the next Deputy Prime Minister and a Minister in charge of Youth Employment.

As the most popular politician in the country Raila is likely to disband tribal grouping in political parties; but that step can only be taken when he is already the President of the country with a lot of Executive powers after 2012. For the time being, he will have to join the bandwagon of tribal political leadership of indispensable leaders in his new ODM after the departure of William Ruto, who is most likely going out of the party with rich Kalenjins from his own Nandi tribe and highly enlightened Kipsigis tycoons. The rest of the Kalenjin communities, particularly the Elgeyos, the Endorois, the Marakwet, the Pokots, the Saboat, the Terik and the Tugens, who have all not benefited much from Ruto’s present tribal leadership, are likely to remain in the ODM. When he pulls out of the ODM, Ruto cannot possibly move with all the three million voters that the Kalenjin ethnic group controls.

According to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, most of these people are pastoralists and very much like Raila’s own Luo people are said to have migrated to their present location from Sudan more than 2,000 years ago. If Kalonzo Musyoka’s dream of uniting PNU comes true the country is likely to end up with a fight between two , rather than three , political parties . It so happens that his own ODMK did not particularly differ constitutionally with Raila’s ODM. The two parties’ manifestos were also more or less the same as the PNU manifesto.

If tribal political parties have to end in Kenya then Political Parties Act has to be amended to prohibit political parties from copying constitutions of other political parties. The law should make sure that the country’s two major political parties actually stand for distinctly different ideologies from which the people can choose. It is common knowledge that the PNU stands for a unitary State of Presidential system of Government while ODM stands for Majimbo federal government structured in a Parliamentary system. No matter what type of the Constitution Nzamba Kitonga drafts the final decision about whether Kenya will be a federal State or will have a unitary Government will be determined by the people through a referendum.

After that the country will still have to choose between PNU, which will probably be fighting for a strong president and a weak Prime Minister and ODM, which has always fought for a strong Prime Minister and a figurehead President. Whereas the two parties will have to abide by the new Constitution, they have to come up with very different philosophies which don’t confuse the electorate.

According to Section 12 (1) of the Political Parties Act, parties are formed in Kenya to further purposes which are not contrary to the Constitution or any written law. Subsection Two says any citizen of Kenya who has attained the age of 18 years, subject to the provisions of this Act, has the right to form a political party. I believe this section needs to be amended to prohibit people from forming political parties that are ideologically similar. The duplication of political parties that are more or less the same ideologically has encouraged the formation of many tribal political parties that are similar except for their leadership.

Such political parties should be discouraged in Kenya. Steps to arrive at a situation where the voters of Kenya will stop thinking it terms of their tribe should be taken now that the leaders are thinking of electoral reforms. As far as possible the 2012 elections should be organized in such a manner as to have leaders who seek voter from the people based on the differences in political philosophies rather than differences in tribal or clannish origins. That however is building castles in the air, which is the wishful thinking of many Kenyan idealists.
The truth of the matter is, very sadly, that the 2012 election will be as tribal as most Kenyan elections. This will mean that the Kambas, Merus, Nandis, Kipsigis and rich Kiambu Kikuyus will vote for the PNU and the rest of the country will vote for Raila Odinga’s ODM which will form the next Government in this country.

Kenyan electoral reforms empower electorate

Power is about to be handed to the people of Kenya. They have been exploited by power hungry dictators since the country became independent in 1963. Jomo Kenyatta’s number one preoccupation was to change the Constitution to make himself lawfully a dictator who controlled the Executive, the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Media. When Daniel arap Moi took over, he systematically changed the law to make himself an even worse despot than Jomo.

He made Kenya a one party state with himself as the undisputed leader of that party. The dictatorial regimes of Kenyatta and Moi were made possible through the legitimization of sham elections which put the two leaders in office with the consequences of untold economic, political and social miseries to the people of Kenya. The situation is about to change as the country begins to think about reforms. One of the most important of these reforms will be the electoral reforms. It therefore is extremely important for the leaders to examine what have been the major weaknesses of Kenya’s electoral system. For Kenya to have free and fair elections in future, power must be handed to the people to enable them to truthfully participate in the complete formulation of an electoral system and also actively participate in the entire electoral process.

Three important steps have to be taken to make sure the country succeeds to make those achievements. The first one is a thorough examination of the Constitution to make sure it establishes a truly pluralistic culture that allows the existence of true multiparty democracy in the country. The second step is to examine the electoral commission to make sure that both its form and structure are in keeping with the new democratic Kenya that believes in handing the power to the people. The third step is to make sure during the future elections there will proper accessibility of all the candidates to voters and all the voters to the candidates. Voters must also have the accessibility to all the relevant information about the entire electoral process including campaigns, manifestos and all the relevant activities of the Electoral Commission.

There can be no hope of electoral reforms in Kenya unless a number of changes are made to the current Constitution. The first change has already been made by the establishment of the IIEC made up of credible people who were appointed in the most transparent manner through Section 41 of the Constitution.Nzamba Kitonga must make sure the draft constitution he is preparing for Mutula Kilonzo to submit to Parliament will make the provisions in Section 41A of the Constitution a permanent form. Before that part of the Constitution was changed, it gave the powers to appoint members of the Electoral Commission to the President and the President alone.

Memories cannot be so short as to forget the manner in which Mwai Kibaki abused this part of the Constitution, just before the last elections when he appointed people with the sole responsibility of rigging the elections in his favour. Today the country is eagerly waiting to see how the IIEC implements Section 41A which gives the new team the responsibility to reform, the electoral process and manage elections in such a manner as to institutionalize free and fair elections in Kenya. The new team will probably find it a bit difficult to do so without controlling the primary elections which are still conducted by political parties controlled by individual politicians with dictatorial tendencies of running those parties as personal properties. The new team may have to look at the Political Parties Act of 2007 with a view of recommending changes that will give the IIEC the responsibility of conducting regular party elections as well as party nominations before any general elections of by-elections.

Elections cannot be free and fair when nominations are conducted in such a tribalistic or even clannish manner. After all Section 14 of the Political Parties Act prohibits the Registrar of political parties from registering any political party which is founded on an ethnic , tribal, gender , regional , linguistic , corporatist, professional or religious basis or which seek to engage in propaganda based on any of these matters. The new team, which the country has yet to know how it operates, will find it extremely difficult to perform its duties effectively with political parties they cannot control. One of its duties is to conduct and supervise elections efficiently. According to Section 41A (f) the new team is expected to develop a modern system for the collection, collation, transmission and tallying electoral data. This can probably be done most effectively by making sure voting in future will be done electronically. As a matter of fact electronic voting should be introduced in the country in all political parties during the nomination stage of elections.

The third challenge of the new team is that of accessibility. One of the greatest weaknesses of past elections was the fact that voters elected leaders purely on tribal loyalties.The call for majiboism made Kenyans think of themselves as members of their own tribes rather than their nation. The challenge is to make political parties come up with original party manifestos that create meaningful debate during the election campaigns. As things are today, Kenyans vote for people simply because they come from the same villages. The level of party and electoral democracy will rise quite considerably when both leaders and voters begin to think about issues, rather than personalities, during elections.Until today, for example, people think of PNU as Kibaki's personal party instead of a party of the people.It is the fight to personalize the ownership of ODM that created an unbridgeable gap between Raila and Kalonzo Musyoka.

The time for campaigns through hype and hoopla should now be replaced by a thorough examination of party policies and individual leader’s ability to meaningfully interpret those policies before an inquisitive audience. Platform sharing during both the primary and national elections should be the IIECs number one agenda in reforming eletions as an essential prerequisite to get nominated as a party candidate and finally be elected as a Parliamentarian. Kenyans must have followed the last American election intimately because of Barrack Obama. By now they know how the new American President had to go through a very rigorous Democratic Party nomination through very well organized Primary Elections. It is time Kenya introduced countrywide Primary Elections to be organized by the IIEC. The second most important lesson for Kenyans from the last American elections is the manner in which the new President works very closely with his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, after going through a period of bitter rivalry for party nomination. This is the kind of mature politics Kenyans should be planning for through electoral reforms.

May be the forth step that the new team needs to consider seriously is to establish a very effective interactive website that will cater for both the public and the entire Fourth Estate.The manner in which the media covered the 2007 elections showed a number of professional weaknesses which the IIEC can help to eliminate through media workshops before, during and after elections . In the next election the IIEC should organize regular press conferences to inform journalists and Kenyans everything there is to know about the entire electoral process.And when journalists are given such opportunities they should master the ethics of covering election in a free and fair manner. The IIEC should also organize the platform sharing between both Presidential and Parliamentary candidates and make Kenyans follow the debate through television and serious interactive town-hall debates rather than through public rallies which encourage hype and hoopla and the game of strategy rather than the substance of elections. The ball is now in IIEC’s court.

Kenya’s IDPs exposed to war

Kenya’s tribal leaders are preparing for war. If they succeed, the people who will suffer most will be the remaining internally displaced people, whom the politicians have now forgotten and the Government is doing nothing to resettle. Instead, political leaders in Kenya are engaged in a bitter war of words in preparation for the 2012 elections. At the centre of the verbal conflict are tribal leaders who won the 2007 elections by mobilizing their ethnic groups into militia forces that engaged in ethnic conflict that saw the death of over 1,000 people and the displacement of over 300,000 others. That bloody trick by the tribal war lords has now been fully exposed by the international intervention that has brought the ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, into the picture. The internationalization of the post election ethnic violence in Kenya has opened the eyes of Kenyan voters who now seem to realize the folly of being manipulated by ambitious leaders, who only want to use the people as clusters of tribal cocoons, for their own selfish political benefits.

The next election, therefore, will see the ganging up of tribal leaders against nationalists who have the interest of the country at heart. Among the tribal leaders are William Ruto, who will try to mobilize the Kalenjin people against the Kikuyus in the Rift Valley, and Uhuru Kenyatta, who will try to terrorize whoever opposes him in the Central Province by the use of Mungiki terror gangs. The outcome of that will be a surprising rejection of Ruto by the Kalenjin and a total rejection of Uhuru by the new forces of Gema leadership under Marta Karua.

As the country’s political mobilization against the repetition of the post 2007 election violence gains momentum, terrible mistakes of forgetting the fate of the remaining IDPs have been made by all the Kenyan political leaders. While the debates of reforms in the police are prioritized, no steps seem to be taken in line with Kofi Anan’s Agenda One to enhance security and protection of the population. His recommendation of measures to increase police presence and rapid response measures to protect the vulnerable groups in the IDP’s camps, don’t appear to be visible to independent observers.

According to Anan’s report on status of implementation matrix on progress, between February 2008 and today, 35 new police stations have been constructed in the affected areas of the Rift Valley. But this has not led to the protection of the Kikuyus IDPs from getting constant threats from Kalenjin, who are still frustrating the returning of the farmers to their destroyed homes. The farmers in the IDP camps are particularly scared of returning to their pre 2007 election homes because their Kalenjin neighbours who destroyed their properties after the elections are still there enjoying the country’s impunity and inability to prosecute post election violence offenders. Despite the noise made by politicians about the need to return the country to peace and prosperity, the IDPs are suffering in silence and without any defenders.

The current preoccupation of the debate on whether or not Moreno-Ocampo should start prosecuting the planners and financiers of post election violence soon has made the whole country forget Kofi Anna’s Agenda Two which called for immediate measures to address the humanitarian crisis and promote national healing and reconciliation. The report on the status of implementation shows that the Government ignored international guidelines on establishing a framework for national responsibility to resettle the displaced people. Though the Government raised 1.96 billion Kenyan Shillings of the required 31.4 billion Shillings budget, the resettlement programme is still hindered by inter-ethnic hostility and sporadic violence in some return areas of the Rift Valley.

There are also allegations of the use of force and corruption in administration of IDPs’ funds. The report says the resettlement programme focused on IDPs who were land owners and in camps to the exclusion of integrated IDPs and those from several other ethnic communities apart from the majority Kikuyus. Although 295 of 296 camps are officially closed there is a proliferation of what is known as “transit” sites in return areas by IDPs who are unable or unwilling to return to their farms because of insecurity.

According to the progress report of the fate of IDPs, hawkers, squatters, business people, landless IDPs without start-up capital or prospect to lease land or premises, remain in closed camps. The report also says that self-help groups of IDPs have established their own camps in safer areas. But these camps lack any basic service which leads into the proliferation of slums or what the report calls ‘new cities’ exclusive to IDPs. The report says the closure of official camps is not an end to displacement and that there is a need for a strategy on transit camps, since displacement is becoming more protracted.

When the country is as politically alert as Kenya happens to be, politicians will never get away from the tidal wave of evolutionary change that is currently witnessed everywhere. The catalyst of this change has been the visit of the American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, who has elaborately identified a number of Anan’s Agenda Four reform items, which must be accomplished before the next general election. But even more serious than the Agenda Four items are items in Kofi Annan’s Agenda Two on humanitarian crisis caused by the post election disputes. The continued suffering of people in the remaining IDP camps is the most shameful thing to happen in this country. Now hat the country is facing very difficult times caused by drought, which will most likely be followed by food shortage, Agenda Two must be taken very seriously. When that horrible situation of countrywide hunger comes, the people in the camps will suffer even more.

The progress report says there are too many transit camps which are so remote and too far apart making the delivery of aid difficult or impossible. The report also says other emergencies resulting from drought and food insecurity, and high food prices have diminished the significance of IDPs as a vulnerable group in need of special assistance. It says attention to IDPs is on the decline yet transition from emergency to early recovery has not been easy due to abrupt closure of camps and inability of IDPs to fully return to their homes.

The report recalls that after the signing of National Accord the President and Prime Minister made symbolic tour of the Rift Valley and called for peace. At that time the principals and various groups of politicians and Government officials preached peace at various functions. Unfortunately the importance of the joint peace rallies was reduced by protocol wars between the Prime Minister and the Vice President. Since Raila has now established his importance as the country’s most functioning and relevant leader, the protocol wars have ended. Given the fact that his relationships with Mwai Kibaki have considerably improved, the peace rallies should resume with a view of demolishing transit camps so as to fully resettle the IDPs. If Ruto does not join Kibaki and Raila in these peace missions, then he will be committing political suicide and should be given a long rope to hang himself.

Tribal Militias still threaten Kenya

The hired hooligans who terrorized Kenya after the 2007 elections are still there. They could emerge from their hibernation anytime when their paymasters tell them to do so. The dogs of war can bark and bite whenever they are unleashed by the merchants of death who are about to be exposed by Moreno-Ocampo. The trouble is that the moment the ICC prosecutor touches them, the hooligans are likely to strike again. This time even more deadly than before. The unsubstantiated story goes that AK-47 guns have been purchased from Somalis and the hoodlums are only waiting for orders from their wicked commanders and financiers. The most disturbing thing is that some of the commanders sit in our Cabinet and they have been responsible for frustrating all efforts to punish organizers of the post election bloodbath.

When the country was in real mess we called in Kofi Annan to remove us from the political quagmire we sank ourselves into. Though not so conspicuously, we seem to be still sunk there. One of the first steps he took was to establish unambiguous steps which smoothly pulled us from the cesspool of tribal confrontation. He actually named the steps as agendas. Today Kenyans are preoccupied with Agenda Four which concerns long term issues and solutions involving Constitutional, institutional and legal reforms; land reforms; poverty, inequality and regional imbalance; unemployment particularly among the youth; consolidation of national cohesion and unity; transparency accountability and impunity. These are all extremely important hurdles for the country to jump before we can really claim to have sorted out all the latent causes of the 2007-8 post election conflict.

Be that as it may, it is Agenda One that poses a great threat to Kenya’s stability today. The Agenda was concerned with the immediate stoppage of the violence that tore the country apart. Though the bloodbath as it occurred after the 2007 elections has stopped, the country can hardly be said to be peaceful. The animosity between certain tribes of Kenya, fanned by the paymasters of the hooligans now threatened by Moreno-Ocampo’s possible criminal charges, seems to have gone underground. Some of the paymasters are holding Cabinet portfolios which grant them an automatic audience with the people wherever they go. Using their ill-gotten powers, they continue to agitate xenophobic feelings among members of their tribe in preparation for the day they will meet their fate with Moreno-Ocampo.

When Kofi Annan stepped into the scene in January 2008 he identified Agenda One as immediate action to stop violence and restore fundamental rights and liberties with the aim of stopping all incidents of political violence. By March 2008, the Ghanaian diplomat had succeeded to substantially end all political violence in the affected areas.

Today his own office reports that while widespread rioting arson and killings have stopped, political conflict at the national level tend to trickle to the local level resulting in renewed threats of violence, particularly against IDPs. The respected diplomat’s report says the end of political violence has not translated into a violence-free society and gang violence and armed crime has increased.

This is an extremely worrying situation. Talking about Agenda Four may be extremely important, but leaving the problems of Agenda One not fully solved still leaves the country in a political quagmire. Our leaders don’t seem to be concerned with that problem. Instead they are so preoccupied with their own self-interests even when they are talking about ICC or the TJRC. Kofi Annan’s office clearly says new forms of violence in the flashpoints beyond post election violence affected districts such as cattle rustling, cross border incursions from Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia still occur. And he warns that new political violence is likely to repeat similar patterns in the same regions may be caused by subterranean tensions of an ethnic character. This is an extremely disturbing situation; yet our leaders, the President and the Prime Minister included, are tightlipped about it.

Agenda One was also concerned with the disbandment of illegal groups. These include the Mungiki, Taliban, Kamjeshi and Chinkororo a Machuma. Everyone in Kenya knows that these are terror gangsters in the payroll of politicians, including some sitting in the current Cabinet. Those who are in powers in Kenya today know they won party nominations through violence and they ended up in Parliament through violence and got themselves appointed in the Cabinet through violence because everyone knows leaving them out could end up in another bloodbath since they all have gangsters with chilling names that constantly threaten peace and security in the country.

Because organized gangsterism in Kenya has proved to be an important political ladders to power and prosperity, no one in the political class want to dismantle them. They are a guarantee to power and unquestioned village despotism which is the prerequisite of national dictatorship. So no one in Kenya’s political power wants to even discuss the number of such gangsters in the country. The chances are that every Member of Parliament has one in his or her constituency. This makes it extremely difficult for the subject to be sincerely discussed in Parliament, leave alone the Cabinet where some well known Minister are said to be the highest paying masters of the most heinous terror gangsters. Talking of the demobilization of such gangsters in Kenya is building castles in the air.

In his report Kofi Annan says so far no organized gangster group has been disbanded due to political support. The crackdown of Mungiki in 2004 showed some success but in March 2008 the group was revived. The report says military operation to clamp down on SLDF in Mount Elgon in March 2008 saw 92 suspects arrested in post election affected areas. The report says groups for political hire have hibernated, but members are reorganizing autonomously into criminal gangsters.

The reports adds that between August and September 2008 human right bodies released accounts of torture by the military in Mt. Elgon and systematic execution of the suspected members of an illegal group by police “hit squad”, and since the release of the report the groups seem to have reorganized and their presence poses a dilemma for everyone concerned with human rights – rights’ defenders advocate for sanctity of human life while ordinary citizens seem to support extra-judicial killings of suspected illegal group members. The report further explains that arrests kicked off amnesty debate as civil society groups raised concern that suspects from one community which organized retaliatory violence were not arrested. The details of these activities will come up during the ICC trials at The Hague, so Agenda One issues are far from exhaustion.

What is most shocking about Agenda One is that none of the groups have been disarmed. As a matter of fact it is believed they are more armed with heavy weaponry obtainable in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area where the Somalis have established a little Mogadishu in the city. Kofi Annan’s report says no arms have been recovered from political gangsters in Kenya. The report says between 2008 and March 2009 there have been 2,800 firearms recovered from civilians.

It further says in February 2009 there were five arms caches intercepted in Nandi but none of these arms was specifically recovered from illegal political groups, which did not use firearms in the post election violence but instead used peacetime agriculture or kitchen tools. According to Annan widespread allegations of increased armaments among the ethnic groups in preparation for future violence have been reported. All this is extremely bad news for the future of political stability in the country and clearly indicates that Agenda One’s goals are far from being achieved. Yet our leaders are saying nothing about the matter. What a terrible shame!