Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Hair-do gets it wrong

Rachel Shebesh, the hair-do that recently threw in her lot with TNA, writes in the Democracy at Work column that she wants to "nurture the women agenda with the benefit of relatively moderate experience in grassroots mobilisation activities under "Wamama na Uhuru" initiative" (I switched political parties to one with realistic agenda for women and youth, Daily Nation, October 31, 2012). She really should not have bothered attempting to explain herself. But she did. Now it's our turn to interrogate her reasons and reasoning. Sadly, she sounds about as bereft of fresh ideas as Uhuru Kenyatta is.

Mrs Shebesh does not state unequivocally that she has broken faith with her erstwhile Parliamentary Party, ODM; she simply states that she holds dearly the values of democracy which she implies she will find in TNA and are absent in ODM. She may be right. Raila Odinga, over the past three years has demonstrated a Nyayo-like intolerance that has alienated his erstwhile deputies, Musalia Mudavadi and William Ruto. In his zeal to stamp his imprimatur on the party, he has done more to sully what may have been a reputation for consensus-building and servant-leadership. Today, Mr Odinga measures his reputation against that of men and women who spent their formative political years learning the political dirty tricks in the KANU School of Politics. He has realised the folly of his acts and is taking steps to reassure those who may have been disappointed by his party leadership that he is the best bet in a field full of political dwarfs. Despite Mrs Shebesh's admiration for the Prime Minister, she is strangely unwilling to draw the proper lessons from his political resume. Neither does she seem to willing to learn from Martha Karua's or Charity Ngilu's, women who have not only defied the received wisdom of patriarchal Nairobi, but who have defined their political careers independent of any male handholding. By hitching her wagon to Mr Kenyatta's train, Mrs Shebesh not only betrays the legacies that Mrs Karua and Mrs Ngilu will no doubt leave behind, she betrays her own ambition and submits it to the caprice of an untested national statesman.

Mrs Shebesh claims that "a mechanism that transfers hearings from The Hague to local jurisdiction can only serve to emphasise Kenya's sovereignty" when she seeks to pull more wool over Kenyans' eyes regarding the ICC Four who include Mr Kenyatta. The Sovereignty Debate is settled ground; it is in politicians with political chips to cash in that this debate is being waged. Mrs Shebesh is justified in defending the innocence f Uhuru Kenyatta against all comers; she is on less firm ground when she asks Kenyans to trust a Judiciary that is yet to be truly tested when it comes to the question of the trial of the four Kenyans accused of international crimes in connection with the thousands of deaths, billions of shillings in property damage and the displacement of hundreds of thousands after the 2007 general election.

What Mrs Shebesh should have done was to quit ODM without even bothering to explain herself. It is what politicians do in Kenya, what they have always done. If she was going to even attempt to justify herself, she should have avoided all mention of the ICC trials and instead concentrated in painting ODM and Raila Odinga as the undemocratic institutions they are.

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