Pyrrhic victories.

It is 2015, isn't it?

I think it is, though I have been known to lose a year or three every now and then. It must; I still hold a job, so it definitely must be 2015. Even if it is a hallucination, there are some things that we must now accept have become a permanent state in Kenya. Like the fact that political campaigns never end. Raila Odinga is still campaigning. So is Kalonzo Musyoka. Moses Wetangula thinks he is in it too. Mutua wa Masaku is definitely in it. Kidero in Nairobi wishes he could be in it. Ruto confirmed that he never stopped campaigning and worries that his enemies think so too.

The campaign that matters to all of them is to replace Uhuru Kenyatta in 2022 or William Ruto in 2017. No one seriously thinks Uhuru Kenyatta will be succeeded in 2017; only the perennially dewy-eyed over Agwambo hold out that forlorn hope.

The Dynamic Duo - by the way, what is with their nicknames? - never stopped campaigning when they were sworn in in 2013. They kept at it. They even converted their campaign teams into "strategic communications units" and carried on with public funds where they had left off with campaign funds. The results, to say the least, have been mixed.

Name recognition remains at stellar numbers; approval of their jobs sinks every time an opinion poll is run. What is strange for a pair that has had prior experience of the Moi Way and the Kibaki Style is that they have been on the defensive since their election. They have reacted to political events, they have reacted badly to administrative events, and they have reacted catastrophically to national security events. Why?

This unusual lack of authority when they had all the power in their hands must explain why their campaign never folded shop in -2013 and kept on ticking long after Agwambo became a punchline and Kalonzo faded from our collective memories. It is why they seem so earnest when they promise, promise this time it will be better, every time they are called to deploy police or army to quell some other insurrection in the cattle-rustling belt or to respond to an incursion from the increasingly belligerent Ethiopians or the Shabaab. Public safety and national security have continually defined the scale of their failures and the extent of their lack of imagination. They have plumbed the depths of the barrel and come up with nothing but dross.

Pyrrhic victories define their two years of achievement. They have slowly dismantled the Kibaki-era networks of graft; they've forgotten that where one set of rats is caught in the trap, without a feral cat to patrol the halls, it is other rats who take over. There are rats that are taking up what was left over from the last purge. If they believe that their SGRs and laptops-for-babies boondoggles will come out on time, on budget and on spec, then they really never paid attention when they were being schooled by Baba Moi and the Silent One.

You never know, this might be 2017, only just we don't know it yet.