Honeymoon wanes for Kibaki
By Patrick L. Thimangu
St. Louis, Missouri
July
12, 2004 (ML) --If anyone had doubts that the Kibaki administration's
honeymoon is over, the recent bloody riots in two Kenyan cities
offer ample proof. The mayhem also shows that the president can't
unite a weak nation by playing jigsaw puzzles with ethnic groups.
In
the disturbance June 3, hundreds of people took to Nairobi streets
demanding passage a new constitution promised by Kibaki, but one
they barely understand. They engaged police in running skirmishes,
tossed rocks, set trees that line boulevards ablaze and destroyed
property. A few days later, mobs ran rampant in Kisumu, Kenya's
third-largest city that sits on the shores of Lake Victoria, and
only stopped the terror when police fired their guns and fatally
shot three people.
To
be fair to the Kibaki administration, the bloody affair in Nairobi
did not look like an organized political mass action with a peaceful
agenda. The violence in the city was carried out by street urchins,
thuggish university student and slum riff raff, at the behest of
people who live in safe leafy suburbs, wrote Mutuma Mathiu of the
East African Standard on July 4. In Kisumu, riots bore a similar
tone, according to other media reports.
While
Kenyan mobs should be condemned for trying to destroy their own
cities, it's becoming apparent that weak political leadership in
the nation is the real problem.
Since
Kibaki became Kenya's president on Dec. 30, 2002, he has not formulated
any political ideology that differentiates his ruling, but fragile,
National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) party from what the Kenya African
National Union (KANU) became after it forgot its nationalistic leanings
under the leadership of former president Daniel Arap Moi.
Sure,
Kibaki has promised to rid Kenya of corruption, improve the economy
and create jobs. But did NARC opponents ever say anything different?
Did they come out and say they were trying to control the nation
so they could wreck its annual national budget and loot the Treasury?
What
does NARC really stand for? Does is it, for instance, go left, right
or center? Is it liberal or conservative? Does it believe in more
taxes or less taxes, more government or less government? Does it
lean toward federalism or centralized government? Does NARC stand
for free or controlled trade? What is the party's foreign policy
agenda?
Instead
of answering those difficult questions, which might help pull Kenyans
of diverse backgrounds together, Kibaki and his henchmen are shuffling
tribal cards to consolidate power, echoing the gamble that became
Moi's undoing. NARC also is slowly becoming a replica of the patronizing
and old Gikuyu Embu Meru Association (GEMA) that once sat at the
head of the table, invited a few other tribes to the feast, but
forced them to humbly wait for the scraps.
Kibaki
shouldn't be the only one blamed for exacerbating the pollical and
social mess in Kenya by confusing multi-party politics with the
multi-tribal groupings.
The
same questions of ideology can be asked of the Liberal Democratic
Party, a key partner in NARC and also the ruling coalition's biggest
threat; and the other big opposition parties including KANU. LDP
has no ideology, either, and one need not dig far to discover it's
really a Luo club that has allowed few other guests to come in,
so long as they bend to the will of supreme leader Raila Odinga.
What
the lack of ideology in Kenyan politics has done is alienate a large
section of middle-class and potentially influential citizens. They
are not engaged in politics and other serious issues, including
the constitutional talks. The parties appear to be driven by old
personal and tribal interests that have nothing to do with a united
democratic nation.
The
absence of ideology also makes it easier for some party leaders
to stir tribal and class passions among the millions of hungry and
poor Kenyans, who seem to suffer no matter who is in charge. This
ability to mobilize the mobs might partly explain the recent riots.
If
Kenya is to move forward, Kibaki and his opponents have to elevate
the nation's political discourse above personal and tribal interests.
Kenya has about 40 ethnic groups, and there's doubt that any party
can keep the nation stable merely by trying to cobble those groups
together by offering their leaders seats in the cabinet, irrespective
of what the leaders believe.
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