My friend, Eric Ng'eno, may not want me to repeat this, but our mutual friend, Kirono, is right: in 2017, the general election (if there will be one, to begin with) will be #TeamDigital's to lose. A majority of the voters made the generational leap of electing a President and Deputy President who were under 55 years of age. #TeamAnalogue has expended goodly sums of disposable income to ensure that Baba, Brother Steve and that guy from Western Kenya continue to retain a patina of youthfulness. (We all know that it has failed and failed abjectly but who will bell the cat?)
It is important to remember that until the #TeamJubilee triumph, Kenyan leadership was old, crotchety, doddery and prone to gall stones, gout and multiple bimbo eruptions. Post-2013, it seems, the new look leadership has jettisoned all the foibles of the Old School - except bimbo eruptions. Nairobi's senior-most elected representatives are just the most famous of the Bimbo Eruption School of Politics.
It is difficult to express why the likes of Makau Mutua are living in a fantasy world. Mr Odinga - Baba - is the consummate Kenyan politician, but he does not have the touch - the one that elevated a shady Governor from a no-name rust-belt State to the White House in 1992 or a toothy lawyer with a pushy wife to No. 10 Downing Street in 1997. He does not seem to have the killer instinct that led to a frumpy politician being underestimated as she made her way to becoming the Chancellor of Germany in 2005. He is not shrewd enough to cobble together winning coalitions such as the most hated Hindu in India managed when he became the fifteenth Prime Minister of India. What Mr Odinga is is old, tired and bereft of any ideas that would work in the digital world. If #TeamJubilee even had one good idea, Mr Odinga wouldn't have a leg to stand on or acolytes in far-flung places singing his praises.
It is Kenya's tragedy that fresh ideas have not percolated to the top with the ascendancy of the Kenya's youngest government in two decades. Jubilee has done everything it can to sabotage its place at the top of the political food chain. Its Cabinet is one of the most reactionary in a generation. Not even Mwai Kibaki in the middle of the Orange Rebellion had such a problem with his Cabinet; sure, it had rent-seekers and some of the dodgiest crooks in Kenya's history, but it had certain cohesiveness that Uhuru Kenyatta must envy. If Mr Kenyatta's government were to be dumped into a swimming pool, it would have the aquatic abilities of a suitcase.
It is not the Cabinet-level officials who deny Jubilee a chance at glory; sub-Cabinet and sub-sub-Cabinet minions have done everything in their power to shoot Jubilee in the foot. Free laptops, Standard Gauge Railway, Kasarani Concentration Camp, Lamu, Westgate, Konza Technocity, Saba Saba...the list is long and it reads as an indictment of a Team that boasts youthfulness and fresh ideas but operates as if it were the reincarnation of the Kiambu Mafia and Mwakenya Movements rolled into one neat package of retrogressive thought. Every time Jubilee has been given an opportunity to drag Kenya into the Twenty-first Century, it has hesitated and every time things have proven difficult, it has fallen back on tried-and-tested analogue ideas, tools, tactics and actors.
Despite all that, despite the epic under-performance of Team Jubilee and the because of the decrepitude of Raila Odinga and his Minion-Principals, it almost as good as certain that in 2017, if you are significantly over 55 years of age, you will be laughed at when you come trolling for my vote. You can salvage some pride by simply doing the less expensive thing: buy a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, get a nice place in one of those shiny new flats along Rhapta Road, install a comely twenty-two-year old there and never, ever be seen anywhere near the precincts of Parliament. This is a game for the ones who don't start their sentences with the phrase, "In 1978, when Mzee died..."
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