Last kicks of a dying ODM?

At the moment, reports of the death of former PM Raila Odinga’s ODM party appear to be exaggerated.

The party is so alive that its members and hired goons expressed its vibrancy on TV a few days back, kicking and slapping their party Executive Director Magerer Lang’at, as they unceremoniously evicted him from a meeting.

At least he now knows that the party has its owners, and that it doesn’t matter how big the post you hold. He tried to mount a comeback of sorts — being dragged out like dirty linen is bad for one’s political reputation — but the party sank him further when it replaced him a day or two later.

His subsequent declarations to be “in ODM to stay” are thought to mean little more than the usual recourse of a wounded ego, a pride mortally stabbed and an ambition dashed on the rocks of ODM’s ruthless ethno-centric politics.

 Bwana Magerer, the party has its owners and if they want to kick you out, they’ll do it upende usipende! Even if it means hoisting you up in the air by the waistband of your trousers and dumping you outside the gate!

 Orchestrated booing, jeering

But ODM has not, in the last few months, particularly endeared itself to those members whose political opinions it dislikes, and who exhibit unwelcome signs of ambition.

A senior governor found this out the hard way when an orchestrated booing and jeering campaign at party rallies forced him to scamper to the party leader for support.

After the party leader made his support for the governor known to party’s members, the booing subsided but, ODM wags claim, the members have still “kept the governor” for a reckoning to come.

And so it was for a couple of youthful MPs, who wanted to run for party positions seen as too close to the leadership of the party, and therefore possibly alternative centres of power.

The elections were scuttled at the last minute, and the young MPs — henceforth labelled “moles” in the party — were invited to quit the outfit and create their own parties if they didn’t want to “toe the line”.

How far we have fallen. When the official opposition in the country, the largest party at national level, is reduced to a playground of thugs and amorphous characters dressed in black to terrify and stifle internal dissent, how then can that party honestly pretend to offer alternative political leadership?

If the party that is loudest in calling for more devolution of national State powers and resources cannot countenance a devolution of powers within its own structures, then why the hypocrisy? Dying horses, it is said, kick hardest just before they give up the ghost.