Commentary & Analysis

Kalonzo’s stand on power-sharing bafflingUpdated on: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Story by:

By OHN OTIENO-ONYANDO

http://kenyatimesonline.com/content.asp?catid=5&articleId=855

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Many people who watched Kenya’s Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka on the BBC’s Hard Talk last week could not help but pity him. Long before the flawed elections that returned Mwai Kibaki to power, the former long-serving foreign minister had lost allure within the anti-Kibaki fraternity.
The cascade from a potential president within ODM ranks to an ineffectual, ethnic leader saw Mr Musyoka shrink, winning only Kamba support at the December elections. Yet, more than the election which indicted his claim to national leadership, the post-election crisis, his party’s complicity in it and the vice-presidency have exposed the opportunistic instincts of a wrongly respected politician in Kenya.
Throughout the ongoing crisis, whose resolution appears imminent thanks to Kofi Annan’s mediation, Mr Musyoka has resorted to fighting imaginary battles in the emerging political dispensation.
At the BBC forum he tried unsuccessfully to justify the Kibaki win that makes his position tenable, creating distinctions between “fraud” and “rigging” in a vain attempt to sanitise his new role. He tried to sound clever by juggling terms but ended up sounding grandiose with no grand ideas. As the Annan-led talks blossomed in Nairobi last week following international pressure on Kibaki, Musyoka was away in America downplaying the electoral fraud that his ODM-K party abets in return for positions.
While Musyoka was in Washington DC, for the International Prayer Breakfast, an unofficial gathering of Christians, his press service (VPPS) reported that he was on a “diplomatic offensive to charm the West” over the Kenyan situation.
Earlier the same VPPS gave the impression that he was welcomed to No.10 Downing Street to deliberate on the Kenyan crisis with British officials. In his absence, the Nairobi talks broke new ground with ODM and Kibaki’s negotiators climbing down from their earlier hard-line stances.
When, on Saturday, Musyoka returned, to the country news of a power-sharing agreement between Kibaki and ODM leader Raila Odinga, the VP castigated the “rushed process” that would undermine Kenya’s multiparty democracy. “Kenya must remain a multiparty democracy, that is the ideal of our constitution,” he said, counselling against a power-sharing pact with ODM but conveniently masking the fact that his party, which lost miserably, should play its role in the Opposition.
Musyoka has not hidden the personal interest in the ongoing negotiations, all the time scheming to end with a portion of power. Mr Musyoka seems to abhor any agreement that incorporates ODM into government and which would render him irrelevant. Having opposed international mediation from the beginning as a Kibaki sycophant, his motivation now is to prove his worth by posing as a hard-liner and to assuage his guilt of going to bed with the very people responsible for this mess.
Equally he now realises that he made a big mistake, losing the credibility of his backers and exposed as a power-hungry opportunist before the international community which he has been trying to court.
Motivated by vendetta against Odinga with whom he differed over ODM-K party ownership when he used Daniel Maanzo to shut out his opposition presidential rivals, greed for power blinded Kalonzo that he did not see beyond the general election.
Like most people who favour the status quo he underestimated the popular revolt against Kibaki; neither did he anticipate mediation by the international community which he opposed selfishly. Domestically he has not explained how he hopes to be Kibaki’s VP till 2012, how he plans to manoeuvre through the sharks around Kibaki who have proved that when it comes to preserving power, everything, even rigging, is permissible.
Despite his Christian protestations and rhetoric on “integrity”, Mr Musyoka has exhibited negative ethnic bigotry welded in an imaginary Eastern Bantu alliance which appears a stillbirth with current mediation. Kalonzo has got away with half-baked accounts for his role in Kanu-era repression, vague stances on reform or change, and last year’s breakup of ODM.