Saba Saba at Thirty-five

I was a boy when Kamukunji became a battleground between the restore-multiparty zealots and Baba Moi. And a boy, I filtered the political questions of the day through the lens of my parents' anxieties. It is thirty-five years since "the opposition" forced Moi to decree that Section 2A of the former constitution would be repealed and Kenya would be restored to multi-party politics.

The more things change, the more thee stay the same.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr  (1849).

History is a funny thing. The longer you live, the more you forget, the more you must be reminded by those who are younger than you. The Seven Bearded Sisters initiated a sequence of political events that culminated in the restoration of multiparty democracy. They could not have predicted how wildly the pendulum would swing against the principles they held or, even more wildly, how many of the pro-democracy campaigners would betray those principles or how.

Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibakli oversaw a security apparatus that murdered pro-democracy campaigners with impunity. Extra-judicial executions of Kenyans fighting for a more democratic political environment defines some of the darkest moments of the Kenya political project. In 2025, the political environment is redolent of the accusations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In many cases, the same faces feature. Where once they were bit players in a larger political narrative, today, they are star players.

What has not changed is that the pro-democracy campaigners are young, educated and highly motivated. They will not win, though, unless they learn the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s. They must eschew the narrative that revolutionary change ends with the toppling of an existing order. They must accept that the project they are engaged in is a multi-generational one, one that will require the highest level of dedication and sacrifice for the longest period and that it shall need to be handed off to successive generations who, even in the most optimistic scenarios, may not enjoy the fruits of.

One of the defining features of the 1990s was the fracturing of "the opposition" and the co-option by Moi's KANU of opposition stalwarts. Many "ate ugali" in State House. They never lived down the accusations of betrayal and died as pariahs. Many "crossed the floor" of the National Assembly and entered into "coalitions" with the ruling party. What they got in return was lucrative public tenders that were never closely scrutinised by the Controller and Auditor-General - or Parliament.

I was in India when the Congress government of Inder Kumar Gujral fell. I was still there when the BJP government of Atal Behari Vajpayee succumbed to the anti-Muslim Hindu supremacism of the RSS and Sangh Parivar culminating in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. The six years between the two events demonstrated to me the value of a coherent ideological consistency for a political party. The relatively swift destruction of the Congress's socialism between the election of Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda and the resignation of IK Gujral was mirrored by the ascension of AB Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. In the former, the party stopped believing in its own ideology; in the latter, the party solidified its ideology, purged the party of Doubting Thomases, and cemented its own rule for the next two decades, culminating inn the ascension of the Hindu purist, Narendra Modi.

Kenya's Gen Z, violently effective as they may be, do not have a coherent political ideology. They will never take political power so long as this remains true. They are a mirror to the ideological nakedness of the Second Liberation Movement: it was only invested in the restoration of multiparty democracy, and no more. Saba Saba 1990 forced Moi to recalibrate his politics; it did not establish an alternative political philosophy and therefore, it was easy to fracture the opposition.

We are in 2025. The names in the parliamentary Hansard are almost all new. The same narrative is being told, though. Laws that make no sense. Constitutional amendments that cement politicians' power but offer nothing for the electorate. "Activists" demanding "change" but whose members are only held together by vague promises of "full implementation of the constitution" and not much else. The Gen Z may have developed into a political force; but they have no political identity or ideology. (These contradictions befuddle me, I promise.) Thirty-five years after Saba Saba, the shedding of blood is the same; the lack of ideology is the same; will the political outcome be the same?

What goes around, comes around

Toadies are an exhausting lot. There is one in the senate, and I won't say for whom he toadies, who's fat smug face arouses a deep and baleful rage that it is a wonder he has not been smothered in his bed by the woman he shares it with. There is another one in the National Assembly who speaks with cut-glass kizungu who does so much to remind the people why they hate her and hate her with a passion that it boggles the mind that her not-so-great wealth and power has so far managed to insulate her from the national bile she inspires.

These sorts of people can be found in all sorts of places. They all have the same qualities, though: they are just decently smart enough to be noticed but not so smart as to make anything meaningful of themselves. They are very good at sussing out the direction of the wind, even if the wind happens to be their patrons farting in their face. And because their noses are so finely tuned to wind-direction, they know when to lay supine for the boss's belly rub and when to push whoever happens to be in the vicinity into the path of their boss's inevitable rageful flip-out. And their bosses ragefully flip out a great many times.

They are excellent snitches and, in this day and social media age, expert snitch-taggers. The more successfully they toady, the more they are rewarded, and they usually turn these rewards into armies of 578/= snitch-tagging bloggers who do nothing but parrot the praise-singing of the toadies. They are also well acquainted with the use-and-dump philosophy; so long as it is in their masters' interest, they will use you, abuse you, and dump you faster than they dispose of the prophylactics they use during their more careful assignations. Yet, they forget, they too, are equally disposable.

This is, in fact, their defining characteristic. They assume airs and turn their noses up at the rest of us, believing that the boss would never turn on them. They step on toes and bury knives in so many rivals' backs, it is a wonder that don't notice the blood trails they leave behind wherever they go. This blindspot stays firmly in place until the day they are replaced by brand new toadies. When their usefulness ends, because they no longer pay attention to the task at hand, their fall from grace is so abrupt and so violent, many never recover.

A former chief justice cuts a pitiable sight these days. When he was at the height of his powers, members of the Bar and Bench feared him, and grown men and women quaked in their shoes in terror whenever he turned his attention to them. He wielded power with a brutal viciousness, all in the service of the man he served. He was pitiless. He was remorseless. He was relentless. He did it all to please his master. Then the end came. It was quick. It was brutal. One minute he was in in. The next minute he was a pariah.

Gone were the whispered silences whenever he entered a room; he no longer had rooms to enter. Gone were the furtive glances whenever he passed one by; now even children stare him dead in the eye without fear. Gone was the respectful attention with which people listened to his declamations; now he is lucky if a matatu kange notices he has asked for his thirty-bob change back. Toadies think that they will reign with their masters forever. And while karma doesn't exactly work that way, what goes around, comes around.

What is Judge Maraga playing at?

When Mr. Okiya Omtatah was elected in 2022, his election as declared at several polling stations in Busia County. Several judgments of Kenya's superior courts have ruled that the election results at the polling station are final; the results at the county level declaring, for example, Mr. Omtatah to be elected as the Senator of Busia County, are tallies of the results from the polling stations within the county. If Mr. Omtatah wanted to ensure that he was not cheated of his victory, he would have had an agent to represent his interests in each of the 760 polling stations in Busia County.

Now Mr. Omtatah, and Chief Justice Emeritus David Maraga are eyeing the presidency. Mr. Omtatah is familiar with the cut-and-thrust of an election to the senate, though on a considerably smaller scale to that of a presidential election which in 2022 consisted of around 56,000 polling stations. Judge Maraga is not so lucky.

While he may have a clue as to the scale of a presidential election - after all, as Chief Justice he presided over a presidential election petition at which statistics were bandied about by the parties - he has not yet participated in a cutthroat contest such as the one a presidential election usually is. What little we know of his plans to secure victory in the presidential election does not inspire confidence.

The presidential election consists of the election results at each of the 56,000 polling stations as captured in Forms 34A, the tallies at the county level captured in Forms 34B, and the final tall at the national tallying centre captured in Form 34C. If he is well-prepared (and well-resourced), he will have at least one agent at the 56,000 polling stations, 47 agents at the county tallying centre, and a battery of agents, lawyers, political operatives and supporters at the national tallying centre to ensure that none of his votes is stolen. For this to be true, he needs to have started the onerous job of setting up from scratch a ground game to mobilise supporters who will volunteer time, resources and energy to support his candidature, whether he stands in the election as an independent or as a candidate sponsored by a political party.

Since he has not declared that he is a registered member of a political party yet, we shall assume that he is still mulling where to pitch his tent or he is seriously considering a dark horse campaign as an independent. Either way, he still needs a team to help him organise his campaign.

First, he needs forty-seven county team leaders. They will help him map the 290 and constituencies and identify the current 1,150 elected county assembly representatives, 290 constituency representatives, 47 county woman representatives, 47 senate representatives, 47 county governors and deputy county-governors, 47 speakers of county assemblies, 47 clerks of county assemblies, 47 county secretaries, and the nominated members of the National Assembly, Senate and County Assemblies, together with he political parties that sponsored them to the various legislatures, and the strength or weakness of the incumbents.

He will need all this baseline data to decide whether he should sponsor his own slate of candidates or poach the incumbents from the political affiliations they are members of. The dossiers will be voluminous and tedious to read. But read he must. This is not swotting for the Bar; its way more difficult than that.

Second, he will need to commission several polls to gauge his level of popularity at this point, to gauge the most resonant political questions that he can exploit, to gauge the level of support the incumbents enjoy, to gauge the level of opposition he is likely to face when the campaign is up and running, among a host of many other political issues.

Third, he will need to identify the sources of his campaign finances to pay for the cost of campaigning. County offices. County staff. County volunteers. Cars. Airplane tickets or charters. Airtime. Internet data bundles. Computers. Mobile phones. Meals. Hotel accommodation. Several thousand line items in a complex budget.

Fourth he will need to form a headquarters team of campaign staff. Lawyers (of course). Accountants. Personnel managers. Finance managers. Transport officers. Drivers. Bodyguards. IT technicians. Webpage developers. Telephone operators (or their modern-day equivalent). Mailroom gremlins. Secretaries. Personal assistants. Messengers. Dozens of jobs that have nothing to do with politics have to be staffed up over a matter of months.

Fifth, he needs to fashion a manifesto. The Message he will campaign on. The political brand he will fashion for himself. It is not just vibes and Inshallah. Professional politicians have been doing this for as long as he has been an adult. He is starting the race at the back of the pack and whether he can build a brand that can surpass the current brand in power is all a matter of intuition and storytelling. Judge Maraga is not an intuitive or natural storyteller.

So far, he appears happy to portray himself as a man who has announced that he intends to seek the presidency. He doesn't not appear to be doing much else. While there is a coterie of social media mavens and dingbats who will sing his praises to the moon and back, they do not appear to be a political campaign team of any sort. Time flies when you're in the aluminium siding business, as they say in the United States. If he is not careful, Judge Maraga will blink and find himself locked out of the ballot for want of a real political campaign strategy.