It used to be, in the dying days of Kenyatta the Elder's presidency, that any fool bold enough to imagine, countenance, contemplate and other wordy adjectives employed by Charles Njonjo the death of Jomo Kenyatta, he or she would have his or her ass hauled in front of a judge and charged with treason in the full expectation of conviction and a swift hanging thereafter. The immediate reaction to the latest leak out of the National Executive - that asking for the proper interpretation of the law on treason - will be a strengthening of the restrictions regarding access to information, and an investigation in the Attorney-General's Chambers to find out who leaked the damning letter. The "why" should be pretty obvious. But perhaps it is not.
Was the demand for a legal opinion a sensitive security matter? Did it affect the defense of the Republic? Did it affect the foreign or diplomatic relations of the Republic? So far as I can tell, the answer is "No." The request from the Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service seemed like a political request at the behest of someone high up in the presidency to find a legitimate reason for taking the leadership of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy into protective custody.
Why is #TeamJubilee (Jubiree! Jubiree!) pursuing this course, when better alternatives are available? Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetangula are suffering a terrible malady. Their malaise can be traced back to the height of the 2012 campaigns. Then, Mr Odinga had been informed that the Orange Democratic Movement was facing a crisis in the Western Region; both in Nyanza and Western, nominations had led to very popular outsiders challenging lacklustre insiders and the insiders were seeking his protection lest they be left out in the political cold during the life of the Eleventh Parliament. Mr Musyoka, on the other hand, had just been reminded why Mwai Kibaki was the survivor; he had refused to endorse Mr Musyoka, his vice-president, while quietly assuring those who needed assurances, that he was foursquare behind the young upstart from Gatundu South. Mr Wetangula remained colourless among the chubby jolliness of Musalia Mudavadi, the earthy witticisms of Bifwoli Wakoli and the misguidedness of that Eugene Wamalwa fellow.
The CORD is a political joke, never mind the numbers it attracts at its rallies countrywide. Both its friends and enemies know that it is a political joke. So it is baffling why the presidency is so interested in ensuring that there is legal action against the CORD's leadership and why this legal action must be in the form of prosecution for a capital offence in the shape of a treason charge. Kenya is yet to execute anyone since 1989. It's last hangman is probably dead. Even if these two could be resolved, Messrs Odinga, Musyoka and Wetangula arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to hang on treason charges without setting the nation on fire, who would stand to gain? CORD may be bankrupt and bereft of ideas, fresh or otherwise, but Mr Odinga remains popular. Any attempt to kill him, whether using the law or some Aboud Rogo-style assassination, will only end in greater bloodshed than the Republic could bear.
The CORD's thirteen demands resonate with many Kenyans, but their resolution will not be possible if the CORD's Parliamentary Group remains the intellectual backwater it has become. Parliamentary stars of the coalition have become mutes; they never say anything, and when they do, it is nothing of note. What makes this state of affairs tragic is that the #TeamJubilee side is made up of crass men and women whose imagination only runs so far as anti-Raila rhetoric and foreskins and no further. If CORD is in an intellectual dessert, #TeamJubilee is marooned on a dessert island with a copy of Hustler magazine for intellectual nourishment. So one has to ask himself why the presidency would even bother to find new and creative legal tools for cutting Raila Odinga and CORD down to size and why the only tool they have found is the sledgehammer of treason.
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