OPINION: What Kibra poll says about Kenya
The upcoming November 7 by-election in Kibra constituency in Nairobi, will go down in as one of the most high-stakes contest in recent Kenyan electoral history.
All the Big Men worth the coloured shirts on their backs, have made a stop to stomp for their candidate. Only President Uhuru Kenyatta has not yet planted his flag there, but before the vote is cast, we can’t count him out yet.
Kibra is the home of one of Africa’s most famous and militant slums, but also a remarkable Kenyan melting pot, and a hotbed of the innovation driven by the frantic urge to climb out of a deep hole.
Like other slums, it is the transition zone for those who come from the margins, as they work their way up the Kenyan food chain. Here is where the lowly-paid foot soldiers who enable Kenya’s industries to turn a fortune, live.
But that is not why there is a big political fight over it. The contest is not about Kibra. It is a proxy war.
The by-election is a test between the political reality that has galvanised around President Uhuru Kenyatta and veteran opposition and former rival Raila Odinga’s near-earthshaking “Handshake” of March 9, 2019, which led to a dramatic thaw in the post-election tensions that were threatening to tear Kenya apart, and the forces that see the handshake as a Trojan horse.
That is because, in turn, there is a new political compact, the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) which emerged from the handshake, and its critics speculate that it will be nothing more than a formula to ensure that Uhuru and Raila, children of Kenya’s founding fathers class, install their favoured successors to take their “dynasty” into the rest of the 21st century.
In the process, it would sideline both Uhuru and Raila’s allies, who were promised that the mantle would pass to them.
Kibra therefore is a dry run for the battle of Kenya’s presidency in 2022. Both Uhuru and Raila have rubbished the “dynasty” talk.
They have a point. Unlike the independence nationalists and rulers in other countries like Uganda, Kenya’s founder’s children like Uhuru and Raila have not shown great appetite for actively grooming their children to inherit their political kingdoms through direct appointment to government positions where they could learn to walk, before they run.
That doesn’t mean they don’t become politicians. They do, but as in the case of Mutula Kilonzo Jr, they usually come on from the substitute bench.
They don’t start in the first 11. Often, they ride in from the wings, taking advantage of the social capital built by their parents.
That said, the Kenyan ruling class still does its homework, otherwise it wouldn’t have been the most successful in East Africa. It’s just that it does it through misdirection.
As the drama of 2022 unfolds around Kibra, there is still a powerful story about the place itself that the by-election has revealed.
A few days ago I was at an event where one of those young people doing clever things in Kibra, said something that made us sit up.
He said that if you follow mainstream Kenyan media reporting on the Kibra by-election, you would not know that there were, at that point, 23 candidates vying to represent it in Parliament. Twenty three!
You would think that the by-election was a three-horse race between Jubilee, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Amani National Congress (ANC) parties.
To him it was a classic example of how most of Kenya is not heard or seen in mainstream media, and how at a wider level large sections of the country are excluded.
The argument of mainstream media is that you cannot possibly report on each of the two dozen candidates and splash their photographs in the paper.
There would no space left for anything else. And you would need to have a two-hour news broadcast on TV. After all, be in athletics or motorsport, the cameras don’t linger on the strugglers behind.
Additionally, that some of the candidates are “not serious”, being no more than local clowns.
Yes, but every clown has its owner, and the handful of people who love his or her act. If they don’t see his or her photo or story in the media, they feel hard done by, and will not love you.
For the media, Kibra is an unsolvable problem. For Kenya, it’s a window into the limitations of the national project.
