Kalonzo Musyoka playing games with supporters as he looks for relevance

Wiper leader Kalonzo Mosyoka. [Harun Wathari, Standard]

Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka is on a mission to maintain relevance in a presidential transition year.

In transition, sitting presidents hand the instruments of power to the declared election winner because the Constitution says so. Thus, President Uhuru Kenyatta will hand over power to the official winner of the August presidential election as per the law and constitutional requirement. That will not be Mr Musyoka because he is not a candidate. Instead, Mr Musyoka finds himself in the political fix of trying to be relevant. While he succeeds in being visible and heard, he is hardly felt; so near and yet so far.

Mr Musyoka, a product of Mulu Mutisya and Daniel arap Moi political nurturing, was strong in the 1980s and 1990s as Kanu organising secretary. Having helped to organise others out of political visibility, he thinks he should have succeeded Moi as president. Since his Tanzanian foreign affairs counterpart, Jakaya Kikwete, had become president, he wanted to be Kenya’s Kikwete. He, however, had a problem of convincing Kenyan voters that they should elect him.

Being an experienced politician with a strong base in Ukambani, Mr Musyoka plays political guessing games that make him a visible candidate for political seduction. Sometimes, those games make him appear wishy-washy or watermelon-like; outside green and inside red. Swinging between ‘go’ (green) and ‘stop’ (red), he leaves admirers confused as to which way his roughly 500,000 diehards should go. The image of being wishy washy, however, is a bargaining political strategy to persuade leading political players to have ‘structured dialogue’ with him on sharing the spoils of likely electoral victories.

Since Kalonzo’s political moves sometimes leave his followers stranded, he often finds himself explaining his brilliance to skeptical audiences. Being a bright man who knows he is bright, he keeps reminding the public that he is a ‘senior counsel’ and cannot, therefore, make glaring mistakes. Unfortunately for Mr Musyoka, the repeated assertion that he is ‘senior counsel’ sounds like a defence mechanism when he finds himself politically cornered ad unable to explain. This happens when other brilliant minds in Ukambani and elsewhere find and publicise loopholes in his logic.

He has two sources of trouble, internal and external. Within Ukambani, governors Charity Ngilu of Kitui, Alfred Mutua of Machakos, and Kivutha Kibwana of Makueni are among Mr Musyoka's sharpest critics and have no time for his leadership. It was Prof Kibwana who claimed that Mr Musyoka was waiting for a Sh3 billion "persuasion" in order to join Azimio la Umoja movement.

He had helped to create One Kenya Alliance (OKA) as a bargaining tool with Azimio, demanded that ODM leader Raila Odinga honour previous political commitments, abandoned OKA by declaring 'Raila Tosha' and then said he did not know what he had signed. OKA was bleeding from within as he tried to "clarify" what he meant by repeatedly reminding the public that he was "senior counsel" and that he wanted "structured dialogue". Thereafter, OKA colleague Martha Karua of Narc Kenya received the Raila-Azimio kofia.

In addition, Mr Musyoka seemed to be under pressure from members of his Wiper party, those young enough to be his biological and cultural children, to show serious leadership quality in confronting political rivals. As a result, there was depletion, rather than replenishing, of his political capital. His deputy, Senator Mutula Kilonzo Jnr, insisted that any deal with Azimio should lead to Mr Musyoka clinching the Azimio running mate position. 

Mr Musyoka fixed himself when he announced that his 2022 primary mission was to defeat William Ruto; not necessarily to be president. This made him ‘available’ to gang up with other anti-Ruto forces in a ‘structured dialogue’. Azimio accommodated and gave him some relevance.