The broad-based government didn't raise Kenya Kwanza popularity

When President William Ruto unveiled Raila Odinga as Kenya's candidate for the AUC chairmanship. [PCS]

The formation of the broad-based government and President William Ruto's subsequent successful tour of Nyanza should have given Kenya Kwanza a new lease of life. However, the government remains largely unpopular. If it was unpopularity stemming from well-thought-out policy interventions, it would have been a different ball game. For, say, a year later when the positive effects of such policy intervention begin to show, then a sigh of relief would wash over the land.

But Kenya Kwanza has proven to be a government by blunder. They carefully turned the impeachment of the deputy president into a fully-fledged reality TV show. Media houses competed to be the first to announce a new development or an emerging angle.

But one thing stuck out. The people are still unfazed. So many citizens have refused to become part of the circus. In a conversation at my local car wash, the attendant posed, “What if it’s the head that is bad but they want to change the neck?”

When one of the media houses was collecting views from the people, a video clip lit up the internet when a lady in Kondele, to wild cheers from the crowd around her quipped, “Huyu akienda na huyu anawachia nani” that if the deputy goes, to whom is he leaving his boss yet they came in together.

The government may take the people for fools but it’s clear that circus is no longer going to be a successful strategy to contain the people. Some friend with ties to law enforcement agencies told me after the President’s Nyanza tour that so much money was poured to whip the people to come out and line the streets and throng the venues. He told me that it was intended to cast Dr Ruto as the political chess master who had turned a constituency that had opposed him for two years into his stronghold overnight. I then remembered the attempt to liken Ruto to Abraham Lincoln when he named the broad-based Cabinet.

For context, there was nothing Lincolnesque about the broad-based government. None of the four Cabinet appointees fit the profile of William Seward, Salmon Chase or Edward Bates. Had Ruto embraced the opposition immediately after elections in good faith, we would have believed him to be the Lincoln his people were desperate to cast him to be. To paraphrase what Senator Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quale during the 1988 US vice presidential debate, Ruto is no Lincoln and the broad-based government is no 'Team of Rivals'.

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If he were, we would not be hearing and seeing government bloggers boisterously telling us about the return of the Pentagon. Political common sense would have guided our friends manning the State that such calls would fuel vicious tensions as they would reawaken the memories of nefarious political slogans such as '41 against one'. If he were Lincoln, the violence and the brutality that his police unleashed on unarmed men and women in Nyalenda in 2023 would not have happened.

I single out that episode not to appeal to ethnic emotions but to underscore the fact that such a move was calculated to subdue people in Kisumu and the larger lake region by use of brute force. A year later, no intelligent attempts have been made to compensate the victims and to right the wrongs that so many citizens have been subjected to by law enforcement agencies. So to expect such people to move on and cheer the regime on account of some two ministerial appointments in the day and age of the Internet of Things is to find new territories using old maps.

The people might not be able to comprehend legalese and fancy political phrases, but they know instinctively that the so-called impeachment is not about them. They know that the drop in fuel prices was intended to stop them from talking about the Adani-Ketraco deal. They know if they blink, then we might have an emperor for a president. Like Mosese in the play 'Betrayal in the City', we now know it was better while we waited. They have killed our past and are now busy killing our future.

Mr Kidi is the convener of the Inter-Parties Youth Forum. [email protected]