Post by LIONEL NGATUNYI on Apr 29, 2007 17:05:23 GMT 3
How Raila missed real lesson of Nigerian polls mess by a mile
RAILA WILL CLEARLY MISS OBASANJO ON THE AFRICAN AND WORLD STAGES
LIONEL NGATUNYI
Presidential hopeful Raila Amolo Odinga passed up a golden chance to add to his democratic credentials when he returned from observing Nigeria’s gross forgery of a General Election this past week and failed to utter a single word of regret or criticism about outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo, one of Africa’s greatest electoral fraudsters ever.
Instead, Raila waxed disingenuous by carrying on about the awesome power of incumbency and the dangers of a splintered Opposition, taking the opportunity to appeal for unity inside Orange Democratic Movement Kenya, whose Presidential ticket he is poised to secure.
As usual in a Kenyan General Election year, the sub-text of a major political player’s remarks did not bear much scrutiny. After all, that dangerous place called “incumbency” is the one address Raila has spent his political life so far yearning to occupy, and never more so than now. As for “unity” in ODM-K ranks, it means first and last, “fall in line — and keep in line — behind Tinga”.
For those who might not readily recall the fact, it is worth noting "Tinga" has over the last one decade or so sought to lionise and even emulate President Obasanjo, the guest of honour at the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s mausoleum unveiling. And whenever "Tinga" wanted to impress by name-dropping at many a consultative meeting of his high-level contacts, President Obasanjo’s name and elder statesman credentials peppered his talk.
It remains unclear whether the soldier-politician returns the compliment as often as Raila invokes his name and the apparently symbiotic relationship between the two is something of a mystery, given the Nigerian’s maltreatment of Opposition figures in his own homeland. What does the General see in Kenya’s perennial political gadfly? Perhaps, some of the boisterous and ebullient nature (not to mention ostentation — remember the Hummer?) of Nigerians themselves refracted in a Kenyan prism? Whatever the mutual admiration is based on, Raila will clearly miss Obasanjo on the Africa and world stages.
But "Tinga’s" failure to share with his Kenyan audience their feeling of betrayal by extension in his friend, hero and benefactor’s utter abuse and disregard for the Nigerian electorate will, sooner rather than later, come to haunt him. It was shocking that Agwambo had no consolatory words for the 140 million people of Nigeria, especially the 60 million registered voters, in the face of the daylight robbery, complete with 200 election-related deaths, of their enfranchisement He had no word of rebuke for Obasanjo, a one-time uniformed, seasoned suspender of national constitutions and junta chief and now the robber of what was billed as Africa’s most crucial General Election of 2007.
The 2007 Nigerian Election was held on April 14 and April 21. Governorship and State Assembly elections were held on April 14, while the Presidential and National Assembly elections were held exactly a week later on April 21. Few analysts around the world expected the polls to be completely free and fair but the overwhelming rigging documented across the country dashed hopes that the polls would be legitimate. This is how the Economist of London, in an eyewitness poll monitoring report, described what it called “The Art of Rigging” in the Nigerian General Election, complete with Hummer vehicles:
“Take Anambra State, about six hours’ drive south of the capital, Abuja. Here, one of Mr Obasanjo’s closest allies, Andy Uba, had been imposed on the local PDP party as its candidate for governor. By contrast, a prominent opposition candidate, Chris Ngige, one of those disaffected former Obasanjo men, was mired in court actions to keep him off the ballot. Despite winning a court order just four days before the poll to let him run on April 14th, his name, cometh the day, was still mysteriously off the ballot.
“Plenty of votes were rigged on the day itself, just to make sure. In Anambra State, most people could not vote at all. They turned up at the voting stations, but often INEC’s officials simply did not arrive. When a polling station did open, usually about six hours late, the officials did not have enough materials, notably a register, to let voting begin. On a tour of a dozen voting stations in the state capital, Awka, on the afternoon of polling, your correspondent did not see a single vote being cast, just angry mobs of frustrated would-be voters saying they had been ‘disenfranchised’. Barely any polling stations were provided with a results-sheet, on which officials and party agents are supposed to record the number of votes cast for each party; presumably these were being filled in elsewhere.
“Among those unable to vote was the outgoing governor himself, Peter Obi, and several other notables. No local INEC officials could be found to account for the failure to deliver any materials to the voting stations. The result, a huge victory for Mr Uba, was sneaked out at 5.30am on the morning of April 16th in Abuja, to avoid any scrutiny. The official turnout was also high—higher, indeed, than the number of people registered. Mr Uba’s celebration party, with plenty of booze, guns and Humvees, was quite an event. It was a pattern repeated throughout the country.”
A Humvee is a Hummer, Raila’s latest preferred vehicle.
And where was the rest of Kenya’s political class when the Nigerians were being robbed of their most important General Election since Independence? Where was Raila archrival and would-be nemesis Kalonzo Musyoka, who is also supposed to be part and parcel of Kenya’s and the AU’s foreign policy and diplomacy establishment? How could Kalonzo allow Raila to reduce him to a spectator and put such a wrong-headed spin on such a glaring case of electoral wrongdoing? Are Kenyan leaders across the political divide seriously contemplating jetting out to Abuja on May 29 for Umaru Yar’Adua’s inaugural rituals?
Much more is at stake in the aftermath of the rigging of the Nigerian election than that populous nation’s own pride and not inconsiderable ego. No African can hold his head high just now in an international gathering and lecture any other peoples on the democratic virtues. Even entities such as the AU and all its NEPAD mechanisms for civilised behaviour, not to mention Africa’s extended civil society sector, stand to very considerably lose face, both inside Africa and in the rapidly globalizing community of nations at large.
As prominent Ghanaian economist Nii Moi Thompson lamented: “Nigeria has once again failed to rise to the occasion... Size isn’t enough... It is a failed giant.” He compared the elections to those of Liberia in 2005, and observed: “Even Liberia, which is coming out of war, had more credible elections than Nigeria.”
Scott Baker, a professor at Champlain College in the US city of Burlington, Vermont, deplored the abomination passed off as a General Election by Obasanjo & Co in these despairing terms: “How can Nigeria sit at the meetings of the African Union African Peer Review Mechanism or Ecowas and talk about other people’s elections?”
Unfortunately, for both Africa and Nigeria, the French Presidential elections took place concurrently with the Nigerian. What a galling comparison and contrast!
This year is the 200th anniversary of the transatlantic slave trade (March 25, 1807), the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s pioneering Independence (March 6, 1957) and the 13th anniversary of the end of the apartheid regime’s so-called “separate development” racist ideology (April 27, 1994) at least as a power incumbent on African soil. But listen to Obasanjo, once he realised that few both inside Nigeria and outside would accept the massively rigged polls: he quickly asserted that European or Western standards were un-African. This is putting the insult to humanity formerly known as “separate development” in reverse. It is the “undo delete” of the abolition of the slave trade and all those other milestone restorations of Black pride and dignity of the past two centuries. What becomes of the much-vaunted African Renaissance so beloved of Presidents Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki in the face of the unmitigated disaster of Nigeria’s stolen election?
President Obasanjo does not live in less-than-European splendour; his motorcade is every bit as flamboyant as outgoing President Jacques Chirac’s, his bodyguard as well trained and well armed; he flies around the continents in a private jet kitted out for a king. His retirement will be similarly world-class. So why should Nigerians be compelled to suffer a third-hand “democracy”? Why doesn’t Obasanjo ride a bicycle or fly economy if he is at the top of a democracy pyramid that should have lower expectations, fewer rights and rock-bottom standards?
Poorer standards of living, healthcare, education and infrastructure imposed on the population of a land endowed with massive oil reserves by a tyrannical and thieving military high caste do not — and cannot — and will not translate into an inferior, “non-Western” standard of human rights for Nigerians. There are no two ways about it: Either the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to Nigerians or it does not and the Obasanjos of this world are at liberty to place their countrymen under such alternative, inferior “rights” categories as national associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals — and sub-humans.
Raila is apparently so beholden to Obasanjo he completely failed to notice that those who stole the Nigerian Election did so in order to prevent the coming to power of a figure from the past who, in his own way, provokes extremes of political reaction that are as divisive as those associated with Agwambo himself. This is retired General Muhammadu Buhari, who misruled Nigeria from January 1, 1984, to August 26, 1986. In Nigeria, one either hates Buhari with a passion or loves him to distraction.
In Kenya, Raila Amolo Odinga, a.k.a Tinga, a.k.a Agwambo, is a not dissimilarly politically polarising personality. We have all heard of Railaphobics (implacable foes) and Railaphiles (besotted admirers). And when that polarising personality is as much of an unknown quantity as Raila is — he has never ruled, only yearned to — the effort to keep him away from the precincts of power can be all the more desperate.
A couple of months before the stolen election, the political analyst Adebayo Williams, writing in the February 2007 issue of the Nigerian newsmagazine Africa Today, observed presciently:
“…It is also true that Buhari is haunted by ghosts from his autocratic and anti-democratic past. There is a powerful local lobby with phenomenal global reach which sees Buhari’s attempted return as an affront to commonsense and natural justice and unless Buhari wants to rule Nigeria as a pariah and neo-Islamic state, he can only ignore this elite sector at his own political peril. In a worst-case scenario, this significant sector can scuttle the intricate broad-based alliances Buhari must forge in order to have national acceptance.”
Clearly, the elite forces ranged against Buhari scuttled an entire General Election process in order to thwart his return. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! According to Williams and other authoritative commentators on Nigerian affairs, Yar’Adua too is a devout Muslim — in fact widely considered to be fundamentalist for having presided over the introduction of the strict Sharia Law as governor of his state. But no one seems to fear that he has any agenda to turn Nigeria into a neo-Islamic state.
Whatever else the outcome of the Nigerian poll might have been, it was not going to break the mould of the North-South rotation of the Presidency agreed upon as long ago as 1999. Since then, the powerful Muslim North has been adamant that the Presidency changes hands in cycles of either four or eight years with the Christian South. But Buhari’s record as military tyrant and his own brand of ascetic, highly disciplined Islam were powerful non-recommendations for his ascent to power in the eyes of the powerful local elites with global reach that Williams speaks so ominously about.
Kenya, too, has its powerful local elite with global reach that have long viewed a Raila Presidential ascendancy as being worse than “an affront against commonsense and natural justice”, especially given his now widely reported support for the August 1, 1982, coup plotters who, among other undemocratic deeds, planned to suspend the Constitution.
And there is little doubt that this elite is all set to do its d**nedest to prevent Raila from becoming the next tenant of State House.
There is a school of thought, even among the elite of Raila’s near-fanatic Luo support base, which holds that Agwambo is not really interested in the Presidency as such, only in making a point. The point being that he has, not unlike Nelson Mandela, actually grown so much in iconic stature, resourcefulness and impact that he has outgrown any one office Kenya can offer him, including the Presidency.
One corollary of this line of thinking is that Raila’s entire Presidential campaign is a complex ruse based on parallel secret opinion polling that has clearly indicated he does not have the numbers necessary to win State House, a fact that, far behind the scenes, he has reconciled himself to. But he will persist in his overt posture of determined Presidential candidate until the very last lap, when he again issues a "Tosha" declaration, throwing the weight of his cohesive forces decisively behind another candidate — President Kibaki not exempted.
But Raila diehards are adamant that he is gunning for the top seat and will stay the distance, going right down to the wire. This school of thought also strongly believes that Raila would be Mandela-like in sticking to one term. But Agwambo’s detractors insist that the only way Raila would govern for one term and then go home is by dividing his Presidency into two phases — during the first and longer phase, say four years, he would use the awesome powers of the Executive Presidency to roll out an action-oriented agenda, for better and for worse, like none other that Kenyans have yet seen. In the fifth and final year, he would dismantle the Presidency as we know it today, leaving it a completely neutered institution with only the most ceremonial of powers, like the Indian or the German Presidency.
"Tinga’s" detractors choose to disbelieve him and his supporters when they hint at a single-term stay at State House for him. The older detractors, mostly from the Mt Kenya region, prefer to think of him as incurably power-hungry, insisting that he clearly exhibits all the pre-incumbency wiles of other legendary “PG” (Prison Graduate) candidates who had long yearned to rule and eventually did — Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta being two prime examples. They argue with whoever will listen that the PG mindset, which always publicly insists that it has undergone, in Jomo’s old phrase, “suffering without bitterness” but in fact harbours massive grudges, is hardwired into Raila, who is now full of talk of Opposition unity, a collegiate Executive, power-sharing and devolution, but who, once safely ensconced in State House, would resort to the oldest PG trick in the book: the question of “the quality of suffering” (as in “the quality of mercy”).
This is an essential building block in the erection of a cult of personality. Suddenly, questions would arise about Kalonzo's, Uhuru Kenyatta’s, William Ruto’s and Musalia Mudavadi’s quality-of-suffering credentials for the multiparty era’s Second and Third Liberation struggles, especially when they are placed alongside Raila’s one decade in serial detention-without-trial under Kanu.
What is the quality of their claim(s), in terms of having suffered and persevered, to a share of Executive power in a Raila Presidential era that would begin under the present powerful Constitution?
Buhari of Nigeria has ruled once and is therefore pretty much of a known quantity, but the politically polarising figure of Raila excites passions that are as hugely contrasting and mutually repellent as those stoked up by the prospect of a Buhari return to power, with a crucial difference — Raila remains an enigma precisely because he has never governed. And there is no fear that is more potent than fear of the unknown. Look at what fear of the known has just wrought in poor, giant, oil-rich Nigeria.
RAILA WILL CLEARLY MISS OBASANJO ON THE AFRICAN AND WORLD STAGES
LIONEL NGATUNYI
Presidential hopeful Raila Amolo Odinga passed up a golden chance to add to his democratic credentials when he returned from observing Nigeria’s gross forgery of a General Election this past week and failed to utter a single word of regret or criticism about outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo, one of Africa’s greatest electoral fraudsters ever.
Instead, Raila waxed disingenuous by carrying on about the awesome power of incumbency and the dangers of a splintered Opposition, taking the opportunity to appeal for unity inside Orange Democratic Movement Kenya, whose Presidential ticket he is poised to secure.
As usual in a Kenyan General Election year, the sub-text of a major political player’s remarks did not bear much scrutiny. After all, that dangerous place called “incumbency” is the one address Raila has spent his political life so far yearning to occupy, and never more so than now. As for “unity” in ODM-K ranks, it means first and last, “fall in line — and keep in line — behind Tinga”.
For those who might not readily recall the fact, it is worth noting "Tinga" has over the last one decade or so sought to lionise and even emulate President Obasanjo, the guest of honour at the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s mausoleum unveiling. And whenever "Tinga" wanted to impress by name-dropping at many a consultative meeting of his high-level contacts, President Obasanjo’s name and elder statesman credentials peppered his talk.
It remains unclear whether the soldier-politician returns the compliment as often as Raila invokes his name and the apparently symbiotic relationship between the two is something of a mystery, given the Nigerian’s maltreatment of Opposition figures in his own homeland. What does the General see in Kenya’s perennial political gadfly? Perhaps, some of the boisterous and ebullient nature (not to mention ostentation — remember the Hummer?) of Nigerians themselves refracted in a Kenyan prism? Whatever the mutual admiration is based on, Raila will clearly miss Obasanjo on the Africa and world stages.
But "Tinga’s" failure to share with his Kenyan audience their feeling of betrayal by extension in his friend, hero and benefactor’s utter abuse and disregard for the Nigerian electorate will, sooner rather than later, come to haunt him. It was shocking that Agwambo had no consolatory words for the 140 million people of Nigeria, especially the 60 million registered voters, in the face of the daylight robbery, complete with 200 election-related deaths, of their enfranchisement He had no word of rebuke for Obasanjo, a one-time uniformed, seasoned suspender of national constitutions and junta chief and now the robber of what was billed as Africa’s most crucial General Election of 2007.
The 2007 Nigerian Election was held on April 14 and April 21. Governorship and State Assembly elections were held on April 14, while the Presidential and National Assembly elections were held exactly a week later on April 21. Few analysts around the world expected the polls to be completely free and fair but the overwhelming rigging documented across the country dashed hopes that the polls would be legitimate. This is how the Economist of London, in an eyewitness poll monitoring report, described what it called “The Art of Rigging” in the Nigerian General Election, complete with Hummer vehicles:
“Take Anambra State, about six hours’ drive south of the capital, Abuja. Here, one of Mr Obasanjo’s closest allies, Andy Uba, had been imposed on the local PDP party as its candidate for governor. By contrast, a prominent opposition candidate, Chris Ngige, one of those disaffected former Obasanjo men, was mired in court actions to keep him off the ballot. Despite winning a court order just four days before the poll to let him run on April 14th, his name, cometh the day, was still mysteriously off the ballot.
“Plenty of votes were rigged on the day itself, just to make sure. In Anambra State, most people could not vote at all. They turned up at the voting stations, but often INEC’s officials simply did not arrive. When a polling station did open, usually about six hours late, the officials did not have enough materials, notably a register, to let voting begin. On a tour of a dozen voting stations in the state capital, Awka, on the afternoon of polling, your correspondent did not see a single vote being cast, just angry mobs of frustrated would-be voters saying they had been ‘disenfranchised’. Barely any polling stations were provided with a results-sheet, on which officials and party agents are supposed to record the number of votes cast for each party; presumably these were being filled in elsewhere.
“Among those unable to vote was the outgoing governor himself, Peter Obi, and several other notables. No local INEC officials could be found to account for the failure to deliver any materials to the voting stations. The result, a huge victory for Mr Uba, was sneaked out at 5.30am on the morning of April 16th in Abuja, to avoid any scrutiny. The official turnout was also high—higher, indeed, than the number of people registered. Mr Uba’s celebration party, with plenty of booze, guns and Humvees, was quite an event. It was a pattern repeated throughout the country.”
A Humvee is a Hummer, Raila’s latest preferred vehicle.
And where was the rest of Kenya’s political class when the Nigerians were being robbed of their most important General Election since Independence? Where was Raila archrival and would-be nemesis Kalonzo Musyoka, who is also supposed to be part and parcel of Kenya’s and the AU’s foreign policy and diplomacy establishment? How could Kalonzo allow Raila to reduce him to a spectator and put such a wrong-headed spin on such a glaring case of electoral wrongdoing? Are Kenyan leaders across the political divide seriously contemplating jetting out to Abuja on May 29 for Umaru Yar’Adua’s inaugural rituals?
Much more is at stake in the aftermath of the rigging of the Nigerian election than that populous nation’s own pride and not inconsiderable ego. No African can hold his head high just now in an international gathering and lecture any other peoples on the democratic virtues. Even entities such as the AU and all its NEPAD mechanisms for civilised behaviour, not to mention Africa’s extended civil society sector, stand to very considerably lose face, both inside Africa and in the rapidly globalizing community of nations at large.
As prominent Ghanaian economist Nii Moi Thompson lamented: “Nigeria has once again failed to rise to the occasion... Size isn’t enough... It is a failed giant.” He compared the elections to those of Liberia in 2005, and observed: “Even Liberia, which is coming out of war, had more credible elections than Nigeria.”
Scott Baker, a professor at Champlain College in the US city of Burlington, Vermont, deplored the abomination passed off as a General Election by Obasanjo & Co in these despairing terms: “How can Nigeria sit at the meetings of the African Union African Peer Review Mechanism or Ecowas and talk about other people’s elections?”
Unfortunately, for both Africa and Nigeria, the French Presidential elections took place concurrently with the Nigerian. What a galling comparison and contrast!
This year is the 200th anniversary of the transatlantic slave trade (March 25, 1807), the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s pioneering Independence (March 6, 1957) and the 13th anniversary of the end of the apartheid regime’s so-called “separate development” racist ideology (April 27, 1994) at least as a power incumbent on African soil. But listen to Obasanjo, once he realised that few both inside Nigeria and outside would accept the massively rigged polls: he quickly asserted that European or Western standards were un-African. This is putting the insult to humanity formerly known as “separate development” in reverse. It is the “undo delete” of the abolition of the slave trade and all those other milestone restorations of Black pride and dignity of the past two centuries. What becomes of the much-vaunted African Renaissance so beloved of Presidents Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki in the face of the unmitigated disaster of Nigeria’s stolen election?
President Obasanjo does not live in less-than-European splendour; his motorcade is every bit as flamboyant as outgoing President Jacques Chirac’s, his bodyguard as well trained and well armed; he flies around the continents in a private jet kitted out for a king. His retirement will be similarly world-class. So why should Nigerians be compelled to suffer a third-hand “democracy”? Why doesn’t Obasanjo ride a bicycle or fly economy if he is at the top of a democracy pyramid that should have lower expectations, fewer rights and rock-bottom standards?
Poorer standards of living, healthcare, education and infrastructure imposed on the population of a land endowed with massive oil reserves by a tyrannical and thieving military high caste do not — and cannot — and will not translate into an inferior, “non-Western” standard of human rights for Nigerians. There are no two ways about it: Either the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to Nigerians or it does not and the Obasanjos of this world are at liberty to place their countrymen under such alternative, inferior “rights” categories as national associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals — and sub-humans.
Raila is apparently so beholden to Obasanjo he completely failed to notice that those who stole the Nigerian Election did so in order to prevent the coming to power of a figure from the past who, in his own way, provokes extremes of political reaction that are as divisive as those associated with Agwambo himself. This is retired General Muhammadu Buhari, who misruled Nigeria from January 1, 1984, to August 26, 1986. In Nigeria, one either hates Buhari with a passion or loves him to distraction.
In Kenya, Raila Amolo Odinga, a.k.a Tinga, a.k.a Agwambo, is a not dissimilarly politically polarising personality. We have all heard of Railaphobics (implacable foes) and Railaphiles (besotted admirers). And when that polarising personality is as much of an unknown quantity as Raila is — he has never ruled, only yearned to — the effort to keep him away from the precincts of power can be all the more desperate.
A couple of months before the stolen election, the political analyst Adebayo Williams, writing in the February 2007 issue of the Nigerian newsmagazine Africa Today, observed presciently:
“…It is also true that Buhari is haunted by ghosts from his autocratic and anti-democratic past. There is a powerful local lobby with phenomenal global reach which sees Buhari’s attempted return as an affront to commonsense and natural justice and unless Buhari wants to rule Nigeria as a pariah and neo-Islamic state, he can only ignore this elite sector at his own political peril. In a worst-case scenario, this significant sector can scuttle the intricate broad-based alliances Buhari must forge in order to have national acceptance.”
Clearly, the elite forces ranged against Buhari scuttled an entire General Election process in order to thwart his return. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! According to Williams and other authoritative commentators on Nigerian affairs, Yar’Adua too is a devout Muslim — in fact widely considered to be fundamentalist for having presided over the introduction of the strict Sharia Law as governor of his state. But no one seems to fear that he has any agenda to turn Nigeria into a neo-Islamic state.
Whatever else the outcome of the Nigerian poll might have been, it was not going to break the mould of the North-South rotation of the Presidency agreed upon as long ago as 1999. Since then, the powerful Muslim North has been adamant that the Presidency changes hands in cycles of either four or eight years with the Christian South. But Buhari’s record as military tyrant and his own brand of ascetic, highly disciplined Islam were powerful non-recommendations for his ascent to power in the eyes of the powerful local elites with global reach that Williams speaks so ominously about.
Kenya, too, has its powerful local elite with global reach that have long viewed a Raila Presidential ascendancy as being worse than “an affront against commonsense and natural justice”, especially given his now widely reported support for the August 1, 1982, coup plotters who, among other undemocratic deeds, planned to suspend the Constitution.
And there is little doubt that this elite is all set to do its d**nedest to prevent Raila from becoming the next tenant of State House.
There is a school of thought, even among the elite of Raila’s near-fanatic Luo support base, which holds that Agwambo is not really interested in the Presidency as such, only in making a point. The point being that he has, not unlike Nelson Mandela, actually grown so much in iconic stature, resourcefulness and impact that he has outgrown any one office Kenya can offer him, including the Presidency.
One corollary of this line of thinking is that Raila’s entire Presidential campaign is a complex ruse based on parallel secret opinion polling that has clearly indicated he does not have the numbers necessary to win State House, a fact that, far behind the scenes, he has reconciled himself to. But he will persist in his overt posture of determined Presidential candidate until the very last lap, when he again issues a "Tosha" declaration, throwing the weight of his cohesive forces decisively behind another candidate — President Kibaki not exempted.
But Raila diehards are adamant that he is gunning for the top seat and will stay the distance, going right down to the wire. This school of thought also strongly believes that Raila would be Mandela-like in sticking to one term. But Agwambo’s detractors insist that the only way Raila would govern for one term and then go home is by dividing his Presidency into two phases — during the first and longer phase, say four years, he would use the awesome powers of the Executive Presidency to roll out an action-oriented agenda, for better and for worse, like none other that Kenyans have yet seen. In the fifth and final year, he would dismantle the Presidency as we know it today, leaving it a completely neutered institution with only the most ceremonial of powers, like the Indian or the German Presidency.
"Tinga’s" detractors choose to disbelieve him and his supporters when they hint at a single-term stay at State House for him. The older detractors, mostly from the Mt Kenya region, prefer to think of him as incurably power-hungry, insisting that he clearly exhibits all the pre-incumbency wiles of other legendary “PG” (Prison Graduate) candidates who had long yearned to rule and eventually did — Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta being two prime examples. They argue with whoever will listen that the PG mindset, which always publicly insists that it has undergone, in Jomo’s old phrase, “suffering without bitterness” but in fact harbours massive grudges, is hardwired into Raila, who is now full of talk of Opposition unity, a collegiate Executive, power-sharing and devolution, but who, once safely ensconced in State House, would resort to the oldest PG trick in the book: the question of “the quality of suffering” (as in “the quality of mercy”).
This is an essential building block in the erection of a cult of personality. Suddenly, questions would arise about Kalonzo's, Uhuru Kenyatta’s, William Ruto’s and Musalia Mudavadi’s quality-of-suffering credentials for the multiparty era’s Second and Third Liberation struggles, especially when they are placed alongside Raila’s one decade in serial detention-without-trial under Kanu.
What is the quality of their claim(s), in terms of having suffered and persevered, to a share of Executive power in a Raila Presidential era that would begin under the present powerful Constitution?
Buhari of Nigeria has ruled once and is therefore pretty much of a known quantity, but the politically polarising figure of Raila excites passions that are as hugely contrasting and mutually repellent as those stoked up by the prospect of a Buhari return to power, with a crucial difference — Raila remains an enigma precisely because he has never governed. And there is no fear that is more potent than fear of the unknown. Look at what fear of the known has just wrought in poor, giant, oil-rich Nigeria.