Will ODM interim team go for negotiated democracy?

By JAMES MBAKA and FELIX OLICK

Nairobi, Kenya: A hard task awaits the interim team unveiled to manage ODM affairs before the election of substantive office bearers, as party leader Raila Odinga took charge to salvage his party from disintegration.

Part of the task for the Transitional Interim Executive Committee (TIEC) would be to defuse animosity and heal bruises smarting from the divisive campaigns that had threatened to split the party.

The team will also seek to reposition ODM in the race to State House by rallying unity among members, who lost faith in the party following the Kasarani fiasco.

“Part of the mandate of the new team will be to look at the status of CORD and how to strengthen it with an eye on 2017,” Raila said as he unveiled the team.

In an indication that the former Prime Minister had taken control at Orange House, Raila brokered a leadership deal to accommodate key aspirants whose bitter rivalry had threatened to tear apart the country’s single largest political entity.

He named Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho and his Kakamega counterpart Wycliffe Oparanya to co-chair the team.

However, former foes — Nominated Senator Agnes Zani and Budalangi MP Ababu Namwamba who were locked up in a fierce contest for the Secretary Generals’ position, will now be joint secretaries for the committee.

The two regions, Coast and Western, overwhelmingly voted for CORD in last year’s General Election. But aspirants appear to be reading from different scripts already; with some calling for negotiated democracy with others insisting that they have to square it through the ballot.

Further split

“It’s now evident that further campaigns would plunge the party into divisions. The committee should now look at the possibility of all aspirants agreeing on how to share positions,” Bomachoge Chache MP Simon Ogari told The Standard on Sunday.

Ogari, who vied for the position of Treasurer, warned that the party risks losing popularity and support if fresh elections are scheduled before campaign wounds heal.

The same sentiments are echoed by a number of aspirants, including Nominated MP Isaac Mwaura and Busia Women Representative Florence Mutua.

Ms Mutua said the party was reeling from cracks that were precipitated by divisive campaigns, insisting that holding fresh elections would be inappropriate.

“I think we should go the consensus way. We do not need to go through what we have witnessed so far. We need to move forward,” she said.

But Suna East MP Mohammed Junet said the party should prepare for snap elections once the new team puts in place structures to warrant a free, fair and democratic polls.

“We cannot run away from the reality of the need to hold an election to pick our officials. The new team should now focus on preparing for another election once everything is in place,” Junet said.

The 10-member­ team would now spearhead the party’s new polls but a section of aspirants upped pressure on it to adopt concensus to unlock the leadership standoff.

While unveiling the transitional committee, Raila failed to specify the duration of the tenure of the team, heightening speculations that the party might vouch for negotiated democracy after all.

“I can’t say it’s one month, two months or five months. But the task ahead for the team is enormous,” he said at Orange House.

Big dilemma

The team faces a herculean task of deciding timeframes for the campaign period and whether it would be appropriate and legitimate to campaign on the floor of the convention on the Election Day, as witnessed during last week’s National Delegates Convention.

At the arena at Kasarani, candidates openly distributed campaign fliers and other incentives including branded bottled water with their posters, before the infamous ‘men in black’ overturned everything.

They will also prepare and sanitise the register of the 2,800 ODM delegates following claims of some delegates who allegedly infiltrated the process.

In tightening party electoral laws, many of which were flouted during the Kasarani NDC, the team is expected to come up with a clear-cut system and procedures of picking office bearers. This will avert a repeat of the fiasco that erupted at the Gymnasium, throwing the elections into disarray.

“The team will also look at the form of ballot papers, systems, procedures, and methods for voting and counting of votes and the final announcement of results,” Raila said in Nairobi on Thursday.

The new leadership will also address the security challenges that marred the polls and decide whether security services should be outsourced.

As party members grapple with the identity of the goons who disrupted the exercise, ODM Executive Director Magerer Lang’at admitted that the secretariat hired 50 youths to provide supportive security.

Kasarani fiasco

“As the secretariat, we would take responsibility if investigations found out that any of the 50 youths we hired was involved in the disruption. But the preview of video clips so far has not implicated any of them,” he maintained.

The ODM secretariat, which has been under attack from a section of aspirants for mismanaging the process, yesterday survived disbandment after the interim leadership spared them the axe.