Kenya Kwanza failures led to Raila-Ruto handshake

President William Ruto and Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga at the Raila Odinga Stadium, in Homa Bay County for this year’s Genowa Governor's Cup on December 27, 2024. [PCS]

The man in the house on the hill, I must admit, is a consummate politician, but whose tenure at the top has been marked with a darker version of all the sins he accused his opponents of. The new spate of abductions is certainly going to decisively sink Kenya Kwanza unless the President proves he is willing to do that which in my view, he has failed to do from day one.

What could that be? Sir Winston Churchill while writing about the first world war quipped that a commander can either have a policy of audacity or one of prudence, but he can’t have both at the same time. I will say without prevarication that all the programmes that this administration has pursued from day one in office, have been predicated on so little to no audacity as well as prudence. If that were not the case, so many citizens would be willing to lend their support.

But while those who did not vote for this administration are proud to know that they were right, those who voted for it are abandoning it like rats fleeing from an old granary on fire. To continue burying its head in the sand, a few people working very much like mercenaries for hire are now inundating us with social media narratives premised on cutting the nose to spite the face. When bloggers mobilised for and by the State-run narratives like the Nilotic alliance, what does that portend for the country? I once posed this to someone associated with this intelligent by half narrative and what I got in response is not worth amplifying on a platform as hallowed as this.

So the primary question remains what is the President’s most audacious plan to reboot the political thinking in this country in a manner that would bury ethnic fissures while government efficiency is enhanced, thereby repairing the frayed social contract?

READ: The making of Raila-Ruto soft handshake

The much-talked-about closing of ranks with both former president Uhuru Kenyatta and former prime minister Raila Odinga might not get much done. So many ordinary people see it as the same old political networks looking out for their own interests at the expense of the people. When the new appointees are sworn in, what we now call a broad-based Cabinet could also be called ‘Wenyenchi Inc’. It appears that there was a determination to spread the pie within the major political families and old patronage networks.

While some of the new appointees like the National Treasury CS seem to have settled in well and are getting serious work done, we must call the new rapprochement for what it is; an executive who couldn’t get it right the first time. As a consequence, the two years’ mess and miscalculation forced him to engineer an appeasement equivalent to what is described in the game of chicken theory. As such what we have now in Cabinet is a conglomeration of the old political establishment and their cronies self-preserving at the expense of the people who are now impoverished and brutalised.

To put our faith solidly in them would be very preposterous of us. As such in the New Year, we must through all means necessary engineer an intellectual awakening that is going to help us forge a genuine alternative to the status quo. Through that alternative, we must out of necessity wage a political holy war that will help us obliterate the political catastrophe we are in come 2027.

For it is only such an awakening that can stop the political class from repeating the mistakes of the past. When Karl Max warned that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, and second as a farce, he must have understood how conventional thinking can stop a country from seizing its moments. In 2005, if the Kibaki Cabinet was not blinded by narrow ethnic calculations, we might have avoided the blood-letting in 2007. Had Uhuru’s Jubilee walked the path of prudence in 2015, we would have averted all the mess in the economy tracing its origin to Eurobond. 2025 must be different for change rolls not on the wheels of inevitability.

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