In 2016, Miguna Miguna offered himself as a candidate in the general election. He sought the office of the Governor of Nairobi City County. He participated in the campaign by appearing on TV shows, publishing long-winded screeds on social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) and making public comments on a rash of political questions of the day. His campaign would not be described as a softly-softly hearts-and-minds one; he relied on a sharp wit and a sharper tongue to excoriate those who dared to challenge his political bona fides. In the end, his campaign failed out in spectacular fashion and Mike Mbuvi Sonko was elected as Nairobi City's second, and epically disastrous, Governor.
Today, Okiya Omtatah has appointed an exploratory committee to "gather, analyse, evaluate, and act on information on the viability of the Senator's presidential bid for the August 2027 general election". Mr. Omtatah represents Busia County on the Senate as a member of the National Reconstruction Alliance Party of Kenya. I don't think I have ever heard of that political party; I don't know any of its other officials, or even if Mr Omtatah is its only representative in Parliament. So, it is enough to say that Mr. Omtatah has a long road to State House ahead of him.
Mr. Omtatah starts with one advantage over Mr. Miguna; very few people actively hate him. He is popular among a diverse group of online constituents and, obviously, in Busia from whence his senatorial campaign bore fruit. Many of his public positions have the support of professional associations and the political actors. Indeed, his reputation as a fighter for the people is unrivalled; only the Katiba Institute appears to have the same level of public legitimacy for the public interest litigation it engages in, a ball that was truly set rolling by Mr. Omtatah. Millions of Kenyans thank Mr. Omtatah for delaying the draconian taxes imposed under the Finance Act of 2023.
Therefore, Mr. Omtatah comes to this campaign with many positives in his favour. However, he is not a superman. He cannot do it all because he does not know it all. One of the things for which his knowledge still has large gaps is how the machinery of government truly functions. A perusal of many of the pleadings he has filed in many of his suits against the Government will show that he has a superficial understanding of the machinery of the Government but a fundamental lack of appreciation about its complexity.
If he is to offer himself as a viable chief executive of the Government, he must educate himself on how the Government is run, why some pieces of it are efficient and effective and others are wasteful and corrupt money pits. Not all Government institutions are the same, or equal, or suffer from the same malaise. In order to know whether reform is possible, he must know what is reformable and what must be eradicated root and branch. He must resist the urge to buy Parliament or the Judiciary, something no president has successfully been able to do since Jomo Kenyatta engineered the 1964 constitutional amendments that turned Kenya into a Republic.
Mr. Omtatah is intelligent but he is also a parliamentarian, where intelligence sometimes is sacrificed at the altar of expediency. The horse-trading among parliamentarians is how so much of the peoples' interests receives short shrift. It is also notable that Mr. Omtatah has not used the parliamentary process to advance any of his pet projects; the Senate website indicates that he has not sponsored a single Bill on any subject, even his pet subjects of fiscal probity and tax justice. This is not reassuring. Every president needs to know how laws are made and why bad laws are enacted and good laws are sabotaged.
I don't know if Mr. Omtatah's committee will recommend that he moves forward in his bid for the highest political office in Kenya but I hope that if he does, he does the necessary homework to know how to govern, when to rule with ruthlessness and when to use a light touch to get shit done. If he doesn't do his homework but is nevertheless elected, his will be a tumultuous and tempestuous presidency, more than that of his predecessors. Mark my words. Kenyans are no longer interested in presidential dilettantes; that ship went down in flames in August 2022.
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