The campaigns for the 2017 general elections are on. It is a battle of un-equals, either as belligerent as the other. Jubilee is muscular, bashful, and haughty.
Its strategy is shaping up as a drawn out campaign aimed at brazenly exhausting an already weakened opposition.
Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto can count on the psychological advantage of incumbency, a powerful state machinery and an intimidating war chest. CORD is resource-starved, somewhat disillusioned and almost entirely dependent on the sheer force of Raila Odinga, arguably its biggest, most potent asset.
He is bellicose and desperate. This is his last real shot at the presidency.
Yet the battle for 2017 is therefore not only an electoral contest between Odinga and Kenyatta.
It is also a battle for a place in history.
Odinga knows that he is on the back foot against a daunting opponent and is making a wager for moral victory, whether he wins or loses the 2017 elections.
He is poisoning the well, driving a street campaign to discredit the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), thus creating a legitimacy gap in the 2017 elections, months in advance.
A legitimacy gap would destabilise Kenyatta’s legacy plans.
Taking the battle to the street disrupts Jubilee’s road-show to punt their development record.
The street is Odinga’s natural habitat. It is an unfamiliar battle-ground for Kenyatta, who is already floundering, deploying truncheons instead of artful counter-propaganda.
It still is a massive gamble for Odinga, but that is all he is left with. That plays into Odinga’s mission to conjure himself up as the moral edifice of Kenya’s pathological democracy.
The end-game for Odinga here is easy to imagine; re-establishing the epic of the Odingas’ battle against a weighty establishment and lewd national history whose real face is Jomo Kenyatta, who has been re-lived for 38 years by his own parodies: his long-standing and loyal underling, Daniel Moi, his Finance Minister of 16 years, Mwai Kibaki, and now his son, who is brooding his own Kalenjin parody, William Ruto.
That changes the game from merely playing up uninspiring moments of Kenyatta’s first term.
He will be lampooned as the devious child of his father. Kenyatta now has to show cause why he should not be chalked down in history as the continuation of an insalubrious history of kleptocracy, authoritarianism and ethnic supremacism.
Even attempting a response dooms him to failure. He is his father’s son!
His best chances against Odinga is to shift the moral axis. He needs a soaring and game-changing feat that will atone for his father’s undeniable sins and give him a real chance of claiming a place in posterity.
Fortunately for him, there is a massive opportunity right under his nose to reset the moral contest. Kenya’s democracy needs fixing.
He has the means, and imperative to do so if he is serious about a place in history. He will need to focus on the problem rather than its symptoms.
The principal problem of Kenya’s democracy today is the lack of a solid constitutional and regulatory framework for political funding. What exits needs shaking up.
Political party funding is not only about giving cash to political parties. It is also about regulating political funding; what kind of funds are acceptable, how they are spent with audits for the same, how much money a party can accept for a single funder and how much of it is used on what.
It is the very means of protecting democracy itself. It insulates the state from contamination, and even capture by rogue privateers to who use political funding to move the levers of politics.
It also moderates the resource differentials between competitors and rigs the playing field in favour of right, rather than might.
The nature of political funding in Kenya has a tortured history that somewhat clouds its real implications on competitive politics.
The 1990s saw a significant infusion of foreign funds to support democratisation and the institution of a culture of human rights, primarily a foreign agenda that coincided with that of discontents of Daniel Moi’s dictatorial rule.
While this helped a rag-tag opposition’s political agenda, wealthy politicians directly funded their own political parties, which they also used as vehicles for their very personal presidential ambitions.
The ruling party itself, KANU, directly self-funded from state resources.
From 2003 to 2013, a precarious balance of power between Odinga and Kibaki created an equilibrium of political odds in the 2007 and 2013 elections, that forced the owners of wealth in the country, acutely aware of the force of state power in determining fortunes, to wager on either.
The result was a political environment flush with cash from privateers whose contribution to campaigns was the ante for capturing the government.
The result was a blind spot on the constitution making process, so that the current constitution, developed, and eventually passed at the tail end of Kibaki’s rule, glossed over political funding.
Today, such privateers are not willing to fund a weakened opposition that, to put it bluntly, is unlikely to wrest power from the incumbent in the coming elections.
The brusque implication is that the incumbent, who already has access to immense political resources, is in a better position to raise even more resources. The opposition on its part is likely to at the very best attract only a fraction of the resources it raised for the 2013 general elections.
Today’s opposition is not an innocent victim.
Politicians across the political spectrum have to date been happy conduits of shady political funding. Citizens themselves have not questioned the sources of stupendous amounts of money that trade hands during campaigns.
They should. In this game, there are no free lunches. Those that we borrow from to purchase political power always demand their pound of flesh once we are in power. This is the axis around which grand corruption in Kenya rotates.
Shady political funding too is what puts Kenya on the cusp of metamorphosing into a fully-fledged robber-baron democracy.
Certain trends already seem to damn us in this direction; an illicit dalliance between politics and money; a sick ethic that legitimates this link; a consistent pattern of scoundrels making it to the top; acceptance, or resignation to corruption as part of the everyday and ‘normal’ order of democracy; an unusually high tolerance for political hypocrisy; a lottery mentality obsessed with the miniscule odds of ‘striking it’; ‘ownership’ of political parties, and one could go on.
The result is a vicious cycle, which helpfully, can still be broken, by not by ordinary citizens, but by an unfettered executive that does not have to pander to popular whims.
This is where John Wayne Kenyatta should strut in. Kenyatta does not need additional private funding. He controls state resources. He is also a man of no modest means.
Barring a stellar fight-back by the opposition, he will likely stroll into a second term. It means he can, and should cut out the moneybags in the shadows from the 2017 campaigns. His means can only be a stout framework for state funding of political parties.
Kenyatta should table a bill for princely state funding for political parties. He should peg the figure for funding on the budgets that political parties used in the 2013 political campaigns.
The country’s intelligence agencies should have a very good sense of these numbers. That is a huge carrot that should whip parliament to support the bill.
He will however need to couple the funding with a stringent regulatory framework that requires parties to address internal democracy and governance issues, most importantly, having substantial representation across the country’s 47 counties, democratically elected party officials, and stringent regulations on expenditure.
Such a move will be doubly expedient. It helps his moral battle against Odinga by changing the terms of political debate, and increases his odds for posterity.
In the immediate term, it alters the priorities of political parties, and in particular forces a cash-starved opposition to sort out internal governance issues to access political funding. Even to opposition parties, that would be a justifiable distraction.
It is also expedient that Kenyatta does not really need state funding to win the next election. In fact, he does not need a political party.
That means that Jubilee parties can present a schedule for meeting the requirements for political funding that runs past August 2013.
Kenyatta’s opponents do have this luxury, especially if the bill creatively pre-empts all options but compliance.
There is also a public interest dividend. Providing public funding to political parties will decapitate despotic party patriarchs, give parties legs and the guts to contend with the real business of democratic politics – winning electoral support on the basis of their vision for the good society.
This will not stop Odinga. It will only give Kenyatta footing to box himself into posterity. He needs to. He will retire young, and has decades here on earth to account for what he did with his life as President of the Republic of Kenya.