Another political year is down in Kenya, and we enter another.
Now, Kenyan political leaders have been accused of many things: greed, incompetence, selfishness, corruption, tribalism … name it.
However, few politicians in the world are as good as the Kenyan ones in controlling the terms of public discourse and social media conservation and comprehensively dominating national narratives.
Right now, the only other person out in the world who can do what Kenyan politicians do is US President Donald Trump.
In Kenya today, most critics of the political establishment are not beaten, jailed or bribed with money and jobs.
They are, instead, driven out of their minds, forcing them to careen into frustrated unhinged rants, thus discrediting themselves.
As 2019 ended, the number of critics who would be considered “objective” and “balanced”, keeping the spotlight on the government, had diminished significantly compared to the end of 2018.
It’s cynical, and likely very harmful in the long-term, but it takes extraordinary skill to pull it off. Consider where we were at the start of 2018.
With Kenya reeling from the crisis of the 2017 presidential election that was nullified by the Supreme Court, and a repeat poll that was a damp squib, the buoyant opposition National Super Alliance’s (Nasa) People’s Assemblies was on a roll.
Promising a radical bottom-up reform of what they deemed Kenya’s broken political system, it ran into the rocks when one of its main protagonists, Raila Odinga, made peace with his then-arch-rival, President Uhuru Kenyatta, in their dramatic ‘Handshake’ of March 2019.
But emotions were still too raw, and the sense that something needed to be done still too deeply felt.
In came to be Thirdway Alliance Kenya party leader Ekuru Aukot’s “Punguza Mizigo” (reduce the baggage) — a widely consultative process that was quite appealing.
Dr Aukot’s initiative sought to amend the Constitution to, among other things, slash the number of MPs from 416 to 147, end the entrenched gender inequality in Kenya’s politics and punish the corrupt particularly hard.
It looked like it had a prayer — until it didn’t.
Meanwhile, the ‘Handshake’ was greeted by anger from both sides of the Kenyan political divide.
Both Odinga’s Nasa troops and Kenyatta’s Jubilee paratroopers had been mobilised for a mother of all political wars, and all of a sudden the generals were kissing and making up, and telling them there would be no war, that they should go home and spend quality time with their spouses and children.
The sense of betrayal was palpable.
It was all the Kenya commentariat talked about and, on social media, it spawned all sorts of labels as the “handcheque”, “handcheat”, “handthief” and so on.
But it had taken centre stage. Then it was a given a name: the Building Bridges Initiative, with a catchy abbreviation, BBI, to go with it.
Then a committee was cobbled up to write a BBI report as a basis for constitutional reform. The report has been lampooned and ridiculed but still serving the purpose for which it was meant.
Seen as an attempt by Kenya’s old political families to preserve their interests, by persisting with it despite spirited opposition, something finally gave.
Feeling abused and acting out of noble outrage, critics nevertheless became so angry they were calling for Kenya to be burnt down so everyone loses, and even a return to colonialism.
The angrier and more extreme a criticism, the more the next one felt it had to be even more extreme to be heard.
Kenya descended into a remarkable anti-BBI and ‘anti-dynasties’ fury.
The BBI principals must be very pleased because, even if their motives are selfish, since they keep banging on about how it is meant to “unite Kenyans and heal wounds”, they actually sound more moderate and reasonable than those calling for slashing and burning everything.
And they must be surprised how many smart people they forced to become hysterical and burn themselves up in bouts of political fury.
If the political dynasties had 100 fine intellectual critics at the start of 2019, they start 2020 with probably no more than 10.
They are in a stronger position. And they achieved all that without beheading one of them and hanging his limp body on a lamppost, and with two years to spare to 2022.
Punguza Mizigo is now a faded memory. There’s no alternative being debated. Many are exhausted. BBI is the only show in town. You have to give the devil his due.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is curator of the Wall of Great Africans and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com. @cobbo3
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