Bend or Break.

If you are one of the few sadists who does not feel for the Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, stop reading now and go find a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray or something. President Kenyatta the Younger is having a crap year. He is slowly coming to the unappetising realisation that he cannot govern without Raila Odinga and he cannot govern with Raila Odinga. Baba Moi found this out. So too did Baba Jimmi. Sooner or later, President Kenyatta the Younger will arrive at that unpalatable banquet and eat crow.

Raila Odinga is the Kenya political landscape, even when he has proven disappointing at actual governing. He has wrecked three successive governments with his hard-to-meet demands. Baba Moi wouldn't choose Agwambo as his successor, so Tinga rode roughshod over KANU before flouncing out of the government with his MPs in tow. Baba Jummi reneged on a dodgy deal and Agwambo fucked up his constitutional referendum forcing Baba Jimmi to find a last minute political vehicle to bring him to the 2007 general election. Baba Jimmi's second governemnt was going nowehere until he got into bed with Tinga; that marriage was the stuff of poisonous dreams that it inspired books.

In 2013, #TeamJubilee was sitting pretty, the cats that swallowed the canaries. They were chuffed that they had trounced the CORD's Raila Amolo Odinga. They used the Odinga Petition in the Supreme Court to humiliate him, saying cruel and intemperate things that did not befit their narrow numerical victory. They did not contend with the man's giraffe-like vision. It is barely a year and a half later and Uhuru's #TeamJubilee is staring at the wreckage of their agenda: Standard One pupils are yet to see their laptops; the Standard Gauge Railway may have been commissioned but a single kilometre of rail is yet to be laid; the Million Acres Irrigation Scheme has been commissioned but it turns out that neither the money nor the land has been set aside for a #TeamJubilee flagship project.

But worst of all, despite white folks in the United States and Europe going crazy over Kenya's first foreign-floated, dollar-denominated bond issue, Kenyans continue to be slaughtered like sheep by brigands, bandits and thugs. #TeamJubilee has attempted every propaganda trick in the book, but Kenyans simply refuse to heed the flowery rhetoric by dying at the hands of brigands, bandits and thugs. On national security and public safety, #TeamJubilee has been an abject failure. The only thing left is to feel deeply for the men who wanted the job: Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. On their watch, more terrorists, brigands, bandits and thugs have killed more Kenyans than at any eighteen month period in history. Not even the Mungiki were this prolific when Baba Jimmi ordered the late John Michuki to deal with it.

So that he does not have to speak about it on national TV, the Commander-in-Chief, the man we handed over a sword as a symbol of his authority over our disciplined forces, is now reduced to flagging off trucks of relief food from the safety of the militarised State House. His Strategic Communications Unit has been asleep for far too long and it is time they started to really consider the strategic part of their agency's role. For a nation that is boldly going into the Twenty-first Century without any illusions about its place in the world, what is the message our President communicating to our friends and enemies alike when he allows a security chief reduced to the caricature of a chef out of his depths? Or a food-surplus nation asking for food aid?

I feel for the President. No matter what he does, the flaws in his administration are the Achilles Heel that Raila Odinga intends to exploit. Whether he is in or out of government, Raila Odinga will be the one setting the agenda. #TeamJubilee will be the one playing catch up and attempting to misuse the tools in their hands for political ends. A change of tack is warranted. Whether the President's and Deputy President's egos permit them to do so remains the known unknown. Their current strategy to contain Raila Odinga is a tragic joke. Will they bend or will they break?