The Orange Democratic Party, ODM, is one of the stupidest political outfits. It isn't the stupidest; pride of place is occupied by the ne'er do well political parties with middling parliamentary presence and leaderships with the charisma of camels with gingivitis which they will not jettison because...my people! But ODM is in contention to be the stupidest party in Kenya.
It's latest inane suggestion is for the good people of Kenya to boycott Brookside's milk because Uhuru Kenyatta...who cares?! This kind of stupidity is something you expect of the petty and the small-minded. It has no place in public administration, public discourse or political combat. The last thing a hard-suffering Kenyan wants to engage in is an exercise in futility. How do I know that it will be futile? Oh, allow me to demonstrate.
First, the Tyranny of Numbers. The ODM presumes to speak for many Kenyans aggrieved by the trade deals allegedly struck by Uhuru Kenyatta during his state visit to Uganda. Therefore, so the theory goes, if ODM exhorts the aggrieved Kenyans to boycott Uhuru Kenyatta's milk, they will do so, and they will strike a financial blow against Uhuru Kenyatta and bring him to the negotiating table to sue for peace. What the ODM does not consider, or ignores, is that if Uhuru Kenyatta were to call on his supporters to buy Brookside milk, and they being more in number, couple with the Kenyans who traditionally don't give two shits about the political winds, ODM's plan comes a cropper. As it should, by the by.
Second, is the admission by the ODM that it is at the end of any meaningful ideas on public policy. Who will take seriously a party leadership that makes threats it cannot see through? Kenyans are not playthings, no matter what the ODM high command thinks. In the halcyon days of the NARC regime, Kenyans were hopeful because public intellectuals like Peter Anyang' Nyong'o contributed greatly to public policy-making; one of their flagship policies is the Vision 2030 and another is the Performance Appraisal System for the public service, policies that have greatly improved public service delivery.
For them to be reduced to making asinine suggestions like these is a testament to the decrepit thinking pervading the upper echelons of the party. This is not the stuff that garners popular public support except among the lunatic fringes of the party.
Third, luminaries of the party forget that they were in the heart of the government when many ill-thought decisions were made regarding commodities' production, including in the dairy industry. They were either members of the Cabinet or they were involved at the highest level in making decisions that affected dairy farming that allowed, to some extent, the rapid expansion of Brookside. They themselves, whether they will admit it now or down the road, took advantage of their offices to build up their business empires, some more successfully than others. Some might see this boycott call as sour grapes at being spectacularly bad at converting political power into economic power.
It should be obvious by now that Kenyans are not interested in economic boycotts. Too many of them have more pressing matters on their minds. If the ODM is too lazy to come up with a coherent political plan, credible trade policy alternatives and a believable narrative that is not all sour grape-y, maybe, just maybe, we may not think of it as the party of stupid. I fear, though, that we may have passed that point already.
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