Sam Okello On The Traitor

By Sam Okello

Fellow Kenyans,

Each generation of Kenyans has had to put up with a traitor. Ours is Kalonzo Musyoka. But unlike the traitors of the past, men who wielded enormous power and wore mean faces and behaved as if their shit smelled more perfumy than ours because they shopped at exclusive chains, this Musyoka guy wears a sweet face, drops the name of God at every chance and points an accusing finger at people who dare take on a sweet guy like him. Why can't Kenyans see a savior in me, he wonders.

What Kalonzo does not realize is that Kenyans don't wear blinders. People see him a lot differently than his wife tells him he looks. When we look at the man who shamelessly took the VP seat while Kenya was literally burning, what people see is Judas incarnate. What we see is a man who has never bothered to explain why he met President Moi at Kabarak just months before the election. Was it just about strategy? Some money that was collected in London tell a different story. But that's a matter for another time.

Indeed, what Kenyans see in Kalonzo is a man who has no principles whatsoever. When he said, months before the vote, that it was his party's policy to be in the government...then he went ahead to cast his lot with the PNU, did he have premonition that the PNU would form the government? How could he have been so categorical about an ify situation? Seems to me he was part of the scheme that was going to deny the Hon Odinga the presidency at any cost. But what Kalonzo may have not counted on was that by shortchanging Raila, he was actually shortchanging Kenyans and the move was going to backfire spectacularly. Because what he was essentially doing was helping Kibaki and Moi tell Kenyans that their votes amounted to mavi ya kuku.

Then yesterday you saw him trying very hard to upstage the Prime Minister at the Northern Rift function. In his flawed calculations, this tragic figure sees himself as a more important man than Raila. For a man like him, the fact that he came a distant third to Kibaki and Raila means nothing. For him all that matters is where he is going. If he has to trample on our core decency and climb on our backs to get to the top, so be it.

But now the time has come to tell this man in his face that he is the reason Kenya is where she is. The elections were stolen with his knowledge. He blessed the scheme to deny Raila the presidency so that he'd be awarded the vice presidency. He urged the electoral commission to read deeply flawed results because they were in keeping with the agreement he'd entered into with Kibaki and Moi and all the forces bent on denying Kenyans their democratic rights. He was the man with thirty pieces of silver in his hand.

When history is written, Kalonzo must take his place alongside the sons and daughters of Kenya our nation would have been better off if they'd not been born.