Arrogance of regime will see it forced out of power

By Dominic Odipo
The fact of the matter is that the President gave me a job to advise him on corruption, especially when grand corruption threatened the Presidency.
"I found out that grand corruption did exist and it was being perpetrated by my very own colleagues. It was an absurd situation.
"At the end of the day, I had no one to report to since the President ignored my advice — and ultimately flat out opposed me. Yet it was our people doing the very things I had spent my career in the anti-corruption field fighting.
"I had campaigned against the blatant corruption of former President Moi and his cronies; I had written about it. Yet now I found our fellows — some of them once great reformers — were the very ones doing what Moi had been doing.
"They also inherited a sense of impunity from the Moi regime — the idea that Kenyans are idiots who can be fooled repeatedly."
These are excerpts from an interview given by Mr John Githongo, the former Governance and Ethics Permanent Secretary, which appeared in The Sunday Standard, yesterday.
When Githongo says "our people", he means mainly those people who were close to the President at the time, many of whom now operate under the umbrella of the Party of National Unity (PNU) on whose ticket the President is seeking re-election.
Githongo continues: "The tragedy of the forthcoming elections is the tremendous ethnic polarisation that has been encouraged by leaders on both sides as they try to mobilise their tribes to vote for them. This polarisation has been helped along because a significant number of Kenyans have been deeply angered — and with good reason — by the endemic corruption, conspicuous consumption and sheer arrogance of a ruling elite that is predominantly from one part of this nation. This elite often speaks as if Kenyans from other tribes can never rule."

Who will win the 2007 presidential elections? There are many commentators who are avoiding posing this question, let alone venturing an answer. Fortunately or unfortunately, I suffer from no such reservations.
As someone who has closely and keenly observed the ‘great game’ for many years, I have no doubt whatsoever that, barring a political earthquake or heavy mass rigging, the ODM torch-bearer, Mr Raila Odinga, will win hands down.
He will win no matter what the latest opinion poll says. He will win no matter what Finance minister, Mr Amos Kimunya, says about him and his ODM Pentagon colleagues. And he will win in all provinces except Central and Eastern, no matter what President Kibaki does between now and election day.
Why is Raila poised to push the President out of power? The answer, incidentally, has been perceptively captured by Githongo in the few paragraphs quoted above.
I don’t know how many of the President’s close advisors happen to be familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For those who may not be familiar with it, here it is: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. To put this simply, if you throw a stone, the stone pushes you back in the opposite direction with a force equal to what you used to throw it.
No one has yet refined this law for politics and society in general as Sir Isaac did for dynamics. Yet it is not hard to see that this law, or some crude version of it, applies widely in the political sphere and in society in general. If you attack or strike somebody, he will do something to hit back at you, if he has the means or the capacity to do so.
If there is one issue more likely than any other to doom the President’s re-election bid, it is the ethnic factor.
After he took over the presidency, Kibaki moved, by omission or commission, to structure his Government along markedly ethnic lines.
He looked but did not see as the Treasury, the Ministry of Education, the Kenya Revenue Authority and other top State organs were blatantly tribalised. He failed to notice that the other Kenyan communities were closely watching.
On December 27, the President’s chickens will come home to roost. The majority of the other people of Kenya will strike back with their most potent weapon, their vote.
In tandem with Newton’s thesis, they will strike back with a force, not necessarily equal to, but certainly opposite. It is this Newtonian reaction that I see driving Raila to State House.
And, as Githongo said, "the sheer arrogance of a ruling elite that is predominantly from one part of this nation" will come back to haunt the President’s re-election bid.


"The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history." Churchil