Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Dirty Kenyan Politics Part 2

Read Part 1 of this article first

For you to be able to analyze anything soberly you must be able to step back and away from all your emotions and the immense euphoria that engulfs most Kenyans during any election.
If you do this you will quickly realize that election 2013 is already shaping up to be the most violent in our history. Yep, even more violent than 2008.

Interestingly the fiery earthquake prophet Awuor has already predicted the following about the upcoming general elections;

I see terrible animosity, with a worse magnitude than the 2008 violence. It will sweep Kenya with flood of blood and wananchi will hack one another like ones hacking down trees. Kenyans will kill one another with renewed appetite and the agony will be as horrible as never ever seen in the land. It will occur simultaneously with the elections to disguise the cause.

Even if you do not believe in prophets, it is abundantly clear that the chief dirty trick being used in these elections is violence. There are few political strategies that are as effective as violence when it comes to winning elections. Kenyans urgently need to be educated on this and you can do a great service to the nation by forwarding this article to as many of your friends as you possibly can. This is a message that those  who own Kenya do not want Kenyans to know. They are determined that we remain naïve and swallow the cock and bull story that two tribes who have been living peacefully together for years can suddenly wake up one morning and start killing each other over some livestock or watering holes. This is hogwash. Just carefully study cattle rustling and compare it to the troubles we have seen in recent times. Look for where women and children were hacked down or houses burnt and if you find the same pattern then you can believe some of the down right lies being peddled to Kenyans with abandon.

The Tana clashes are linked to presidential politics. Sadly I cannot say more here but readers of my raw notes will get all the info in their inboxes.

But how does violence win elections? Here’s how;

a) Your opponent's voters are forced to relocate from the place where they need to be to vote. In many cases your core supporters are the ones you are using to keep the fire of trouble and violence burning and so they will remain to vote. Those who remain who are not with you, can hardly make an objective choice when their priority is to stay alive. (This is one reason why the law should be changed to allow people to vote from anywhere).

b) In the ensuing violence and the chaos that follows there is nobody to stop you "importing" thousands of voters to win the election for you.

c) Violence spreads fear. The idea is to create very serious fear, then come in and quell the violence. It is then very easy to convince the voters that if they don't vote for the "people who quelled the violence" then the violence will return if the other side wins.

d) It becomes easy and much cheaper to collect voters cards from those who remain in return for their lives and security. (Our new electronic voting system seems to have nipped this one in the bud which is great news.)

e) It becomes impossible for any candidate to sell their agenda to the electorate.

In brief election violence and intimidation works like magic. That is why people use it. When you are seated in safety in that posh apartment in some smart neighborhood or in some foreign country, it is impossible for you to understand what it is like to live in constant fear of your life in your own country. Chances are that you have never lived in a populated area where election violence has broken out. How then can you even begin to understand?

Adds Kumekucha; 

Certain politicians are inciting the Tana tribal clashes, to eject one community from the region. It is political.
 

The aim is to speedily assemble evidence against the persons implicated and arraign them in a court of law. There is also strong indication that prosecution of the key perpetrators will restore law and order and bring the killings to a halt.
- Inspector General of Police David Kimaiyo- 
 

The violent clashes have little to do with communal rivalry over shared resources. In most of these attacks there has been no theft of property and where it has occurred, it is more of an afterthought [rather] than the actual motive. In one incident, 60 heads of cattle which could have been easily stolen were instead killed.- Police Spokesman Eric Kiraithe addressing a press briefing on behalf of the Inspector General-


To be continued. Next post: The man who invented extreme election violence warned Kenyans first.
 

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Dirty Kenyan Politics Part 1

Most Kenyans think that political elections are not much different from the elections they may have had in primary school to elect a class monitor. How laughable.

I see it in the numerous cocky but extremely naïve comments both here in this blog and social media. Apparently we have a new generation of young Kenyans who know everything, especially the ones who have made a little cash from some corrupt government tender deals.

It was former influential AG Charles Njonjo who remarked as he was going down that politics is a very dirty game. Most Kenyans dismissed the statement as sour grapes, however the truth is that the man was coming to this realization rather late in his brief political career. Njonjo is a man who has his suits flown out to the UK to be dry cleaned at Saville Row. Despite his slight Kikuyu accent the man must have some pure English blood flowing through his veins, the way he behaves. The fact that he wielded immense power both during the Kenyatta and Moi days probably made him think that he was above petty politics. He was of course wrong.

Njonjo and Mwai Kibaki have always been bitter enemies despite the fact that they both served in the same cabinet for many years. However Kibaki made exactly the same mistake and has paid for it with a troubled presidency where he has to reach out for spin doctors to tell the people what he has achieved when his achievements are actually supposed to be doing the talking for him. The truth is that the president has only delivered 10 per cent of what he was capable of.

Admittedly it did not help that he hardly ever gets out of bed before 11am meaning that almost half the day is already gone. But even then Kibaki came into office with many good ideas that would have revolutionized and impacted Kenyan lives positively. This is why it is very sad that his was a presidency of under-achievement. The chief reason was simply because he thought the presidency was an office that was above politics and mostly petty politics at that.

The truth is that politics is a very dirty game indeed and a lot of the politicking is usually petty but deadly.

Let’s go back a little in time to elaborate this key point of this post. There was a leader of a nation called King Saul and one day as he rode into town with his trusted soldier called David Jesse, the women broke into songs of praise for the two men. That is where the trouble started. The King must have felt that it was wrong for his majesty to be included in songs of praise being sung for a commoner. Matters were made worse when the women (probably carried away by David’s looks, because we are told he was extremely handsome) started singing in their song that King Saul killed thousands and David killed tens of thousands. From that day the King did everything in his power to assassinate the young boy called David Jesse.

Human nature has not changed thousands of years later.

There was a leader of a nation called President Moi who went on a trip to the United States. At one point during that trip his American hosts remarked that his polished foreign minister, Robert Ouko would have made a better president of Kenya than him. (Why is it that Americans still want to measure people’s intelligence from how eloquent they are in English?). A few days later Dr Robert Ouko was dead. The mystery of his death has never been officially solved to this day.

And I can go on and on.

My point is that even as we analyze our politics let us never forget that the world over this is indeed a very ugly game (if you want to even call it a game).


To be continued. Next post: Examples of dirty politics in this election.
 

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