It is difficult to respect a political party that is named Wiper, even if it is a name that resonates with certain parts of the country where the populace is prone to a certain level of syntactical challenges. It is downright impossible to respect the party, or its apparatchiks, when it goes out of its way to publicly verbally chastise one of its leading lights, who happens to be its Secretary-General, and is the nation's second-seniormost legal practitioner (or is it third, after the A-G and the CJ?) Therefore, none should feel shy about ridiculing the Wiper party (like I said, a stupid name). When Mutula Kilonzo speaks, he does so after having practiced law, brilliantly by all accounts, for over two-and-a-half decades, and in his capacity as the Minister for Justice, Constitutional Affairs and National Integration. Even his most ardent critics must acknowledge that the Justice Minister knows exactly what he means when he says what he says and it will be a poor man's bet to bet against him being right.
The verbally incontinent members of the Wiper party (I can't get over how stupid that name is) have attempted to parse what the Minister has said, but they must now realise this cannot be successfully accomplished. They have attempted to compel him to take back his words, again without success or even the chance of one. Now they seek to initiate disciplinary proceeding against him for his statements regarding the viability of the candidacies of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto in the next general elections now that the International Criminal Court has confirmed charges against them. The main thrust of the party hacks' grouse is that by making what are surely legal pronouncements, Mr Kilonzo has complicated the political field for the Wiper party leader, the Vice-President, by creating the impression that Kalonzo Musyoka is secretly happy that his two erstwhile allies may be eliminated from the presidential campaign by an ICC trial and that only he will benefit, especially if the vote-banks held by Messrs Uhuru and Ruto are transferred to him en bloc.
Instead of marshalling their arguments in a coherent manner, even if only to shore up the political structure erected by their party leader, the Wiper apparats have merely reacted in a jingoistic manner, spewing vitriol for the man who dares point out the emperor's nudity. "As a party, we are not pleased ..." are words that should be ridiculed by one and all. Why they have not taken advantage of the dozens of lawyers who agree with their assessment of the legal environment, especially now that this point of view dovetails perfectly with their desire to keep the Veep's political options open, remains a deeply shrouded mystery. Despite the certainty with which the good minister has expressed his opinions, the matter is not so cut-and-dried and it will take the determination by a court to lay the matter to rest. The fact that the Wiper party (stupidest name ever) fails to appreciate this window of opportunity or even to exploit it must explain why their reaction to the minister's public utterances has been overwhelmingly KANU-like, that is, heavy-handed with a whiff of Okiki Amayo's KANU Disciplinary Committee's tactics.
This party, just as KANU did in the 2007 general elections, is making a fool of itself. It has managed to conflate the traditional ethnic arithmetic of elections past with the snowball's-chance-in-hell of a Kalonzo presidency and determined that even where their seniormost members stray from the Kalonzo-ordained script, they shall be yanked back in line and forced to toe the line. It is just too bad that they party does not really have the power to do much and it will eventually dawn on them that it is better to have the Minister in the party tent pissing out than the reverse. If they are foolish enough to kick him out of the party, and he decides to peddle his skills to the surviving ODM, Mr Musyoka may have more than a disgruntled ex-wiperist on his hands; he'll have a full-blown insurrection that he will struggle to control. For the moment, the other Kilonzos, Kiema and Charles, are quiet; if Mutula Kilonzo's insurgency becomes a fireball, they may decide to throw in their lot with their namesake. And then things may get out of control.
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