Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend, Chairman Mao Zedong said.
If you have a candidate that you are passionately pushing to take power in next year’s presidential, you want the race closed and no more candidates admitted especially if your man, there are no women running so far, is doing very well.
Right now Deputy President William Ruto is flying way ahead of the field with the election 12 months out. Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga is hurtling down the field a distant second, but he is still just warming up, having joined the race somewhat more recently.
Ardent supporters of Mr Odinga and Mr Ruto would like to close the race now. Why? Because they don’t want unknown quantities to muddy the waters and upset their vote arithmetic. They know each other, they know each other’s support bases, they know the strengths and weaknesses; each believes he can beat the other.
The only candidates they would like in the race are those that they have sponsored to mess the vote for the other. And, if there is need, they can always strike what the US Pentagon would delicately refer to as a pragmatic agreement – such as the Taliban escorting US citizens to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul for evacuation – and easily co-exist. Kenyan politicians are never, ever enemies. They can always do a deal and leave their followers gasping for breath.
Running on charisma
So, the argument is that it is too late for another candidate to mount a credible bid for the presidency; it takes more than a year to really popularise a political platform. I think there is some bit of truth in this but I do not know enough about politics to conclusively declare that it is gospel.
There is no woman in this race. There is no outsider in this race, only career politicians. There is no young candidate in this race. So far, Mr Odinga, bless his soul, has not even had time to formulate a platform on which to seek office, he is running on charisma, experience, past glory, South Korea and the national anthem.
Mr Ruto’s agenda of bottom-up economics, wheelbarrows and hustlers while popular, is untested. He needs strong, consistent opposition and alternative policy ideas to really think through and clarify those populist ideas. How will this happen if we close the race?
I have been re-reading, with great pleasure, The Private Life of Chairman, written by his private physician, Dr Li Zhisui. I consider this book the point in my life when my journalism career started. I had written and worked as a journalist previously but it is only after I read it and reviewed it that my mind opened to the awful possibilities of raw power, its attendant cruelty and the capacity for destruction and evil in corrupt politics. The choosing of leaders in fragile countries is a matter of life and death.
I remember reading somewhere that it was Germany’s thinkers, not its thugs, who were the pillars of racial hatred and genocide. Intimidation, shaming and the ganging up comes from idealists whose minds are inflamed with the possibilities of seizing power and tearing through the boundaries of class to realise cognitive and material actualisation. It is not really the machete and arrow wielders who author intolerance and the subjugation of dissent, it is the Bentley-loving nabobs of spite and conspicuous consumption.
We want real choice
It is not just the race that needs to be kept open, the debate stage also needs to remain open so that we can speak our minds and genuinely express our differences. If we allow ourselves to be intimidated by the emergent class of graft-bloated chatterboxes, we shall have a same-old, same-old election accompanied by ethnic hatred and manufactured bloodshed and brutality. And we shall have same-old, same-old country where the economy works for a small clique and the majority are worked to death to support the fake lifestyles of West-aping, vacuous and shallow elite.
Ordinary working men and women such as ourselves want a country that loves its youth, wants what is best for them, support their dreams and give them opportunities to be whatever they want to be, not just wheelbarrow pushers.
And if they must own wheelbarrows, then let them own 100 and not just one. We want a country that our children can venerate through the national anthem but also a country that loves them back and does not discriminate against them on the basis of who knows whom.
We want to examine proposals – many proposals – on how this can be achieved. We want choice, real choice, not being asked to pick between a big pineapple and a smaller pineapple.
As a collection of African tribes, we may not have preserved complex systems of ideas and all that, but we have rights that traditionally we will not give up. As a matter of fact, we fought a war partly because of this. We are used to having the space to stand and speak for ourselves in the councils of our people. We are used to being free to drive our cattle or to move from plot to another for cultivation without let or hindrance. The Mau Mau did not just fight for land, they fought and died to assuage our hunger to remain African, to keep our native dignity.
Let candidates flood into this race, let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. BY DAILY NATION
