Realpolitik of chess game that is presidency

By Dominic Odipo

Kenya: After Edmund Hillary first reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he was asked why he had attempted to climb the world’s highest mountain in the first place.

“Because it is there”, he answered.

About eight years later, when American President John F Kennedy undertook to put a man on the moon, he fell back to Edmund Hillary’s words: America was going to put a man on the moon because the moon was there.

Back to earth

In July, 1969 five and a half years after Kennedy himself had been assassinated, two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, actually landed on the moon, strolled around briefly and flew back to earth.

In the sense that the summit of Mt Everest and the moon are both there, the Kenyan presidency is also there. If you can scale the heights and reach it, you go for it. If you cannot, you leave it alone. It does not matter whether your father or brother ever served in that office.

It does not matter whether your community has ever been represented in that office or for how many years. This is apparently not a matter of empathy, sentiment or sensibility.

Handling the heat

It is a matter of realpolitik. If you can handle the heat, you stay in the kitchen. For those who aspire to play in the Kenyan presidential premier league in future, this is a very important message. Yet, having ears to hear, many of them are probably not listening.

First, however, a word about the political process and the ancient game of chess.

To make a major impact in a chess game, you need to ensure at least two things.

You need, first, to make maximum use of your most powerful pieces and, second, to ensure that those powerful pieces are not knocked out before the game is over.

The most powerful of these pieces is usually your queen. You can move it left or right, up and down and even diagonally. And, sometimes, you can make maximum use of it by just letting it stay where it is.

In other words, you don’t have to move the queen for it to exert its awesome power. To a very large extent, the political process is very much like  a power chess game.

There are two lessons which the last presidential election has left behind which no person intending to gun for the presidency next time can afford to ignore. The first is what we can refer to here as the “Queen Effect” and the second is what we can call the “Zero Effect.”

The Queen Effect refers to the ability or propensity of a potential presidential candidate to identify what would be the most powerful or game-changing element in his or her political arsenal in the course of the presidential campaign.

The Zero Effect refers to the ability of the presidential candidate to identify the critical or “Zero” hour at which the final political combinations must be enjoined and signed off before the last lap to Election Day begins.

Long before he formally launched his bid for the presidency, Uhuru Kenyatta knew that the most powerful piece in his political arsenal was going to be his ethnicity.

He recognised that if he could get the majority of his tribesmen and women to back him, then he would, given their numbers, immediately become the most formidable presidential candidate on the scene.

Lesson two

Like the queen on the chess board, his ethnic community did not have to be moved. It could exert its awesome political power “in situ” — by simply staying where it was.

Next, Uhuru’s strategists began looking out for the Zero Hour.

After testing the waters and analysing the national registration figures, they concluded that a political combination with William Ruto consummated at just the right moment was the most likely to get them past the 50 per cent plus one threshold required. The rest is history. A year to the date of the last presidential elections, the mere possibility of a Ruto-Uhuru political coalition sounded roundly preposterous.

The winning combination was finally concocted less than six months before Election Day. That means that we may not know what the winning combination of the 2017 presidential elections might be until the last six months before the election. That is lesson number two.

Lesson number one is much louder. The queen in the political arsenal of any major presidential candidate come 2017 will almost certainly remain his or her ethnic support base.

That ethnic base will not need to be flaunted or moved. It will just need to be there, menacingly hanging on the back of any serious candidate.

Against this Queen Effect, the political or personal CVs of the prospective presidential candidates will count for very little.

The problem with this realpolitik is that the seeds of political success germinate right next to those of political destruction, just like your queen can destroy you if it gets knocked out of your chess game. It is the Queen, stupid, as Bill Clinton might have concluded.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

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