For Uhuru, peace meant keeping Raila off the streets

It is worthwhile to reflect at some length about certain astounding features of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s numerous disquisitions on the subject of his handshake with Raila Odinga.

Interrogation of these extraordinary discourses is bound to be abundantly fruitful if one is after forms of political truth simultaneously hidden in plain sight and announced in the most public spaces of this country.

Kenyatta relentless and effusively insisted that the Handshake in its original form was a private affair between him and his obdurate tormentor, Odinga.

At the same time, he went to great trouble to profile the pact as a high-minded and public-spirited display of exemplary patriotism and statesmanship.

As pertains to the motivations and rationales for this immensely mystifying gesture, Kenyatta has been emphatic, if significantly more cryptic. It was about peace, he claims. 

“Peace! Peace! Peace! Amani! Amani! Amani!”, a bewildered nation has watched agog as the head of state intoned his inscrutable mantra. 

A nameless dread

Indeed, the intensity of Kenyatta’s fervent declamation of these fairly innocuous expressions, apropos of nothing whatsoever, subliminally imbued “Peace!” with unsettling implications which quickly aggregated into a nameless dread.

It is as though this peace that so fascinated Kenyatta, given its counterintuitive exposition, was in fact something completely else, a sinister effect which rendered “peace” threatening where it should be comforting.

Kenyatta’s definitions and descriptions of peace in relation to his handshake vary.

He has defined it positively and negatively and described it as a personal as well as a national good.

He proudly declares that only a handshake with Odinga could have stopped the ghastly ferment instigated by Odinga’s electoral grievances and insistence on “peaceful mass action”.

Odinga’s deployment of “peaceful” in this context easily rivals Kenyatta’s, and perhaps should be a cardinal giveaway.

By necessary implication, Kenyatta admits that the state was overwhelmed by Odinga’s ‘peaceful’ onslaught and that to that extent, the machinery of government had no capacity to assure Kenyans of tranquillity and security.

As President, Commander-in-Chief of the defence forces, and Head of State and government, Kenyatta determined appeasing Odinga to be the most prudent course of action.

To do this, he circumvented all the legitimate authority invested in him to pursue a private arrangement extra-constitutionally.

This is how Kenyatta secured peace, understood as the cessation of Odinga’s assaults on state authority and Kenyatta’s legitimacy.

It is a negative peace, obtained extra-constitutionally.

That is the utmost extent of the scope of this peace as a national good: Odinga’s undertaking to stay off the streets.

As pertains to its private dimension, however, Kenyatta has, without doubt, enjoyed a much more creatively defined peace in robust and productive ways.

To the extent that he insists that the handshake afforded peace to apply himself to governing with exclusive emphasis on his legacy, this dimension of the peace has been positive.

Odinga’s parliamentary delegation was the comprehensive insurance cover Kenyatta coveted.

His fanatical constituency, the basis of his triumphant tyranny of numbers, had expectations that encumbered Kenyatta’s vision of his legacy.

Time being of the essence, he craved a permissive framework whereby he could ignore this constituency without political consequences. If you will, it was peace from nagging accountability and freedom to be.

A considerable portion of the accomplishments Kenyatta intends to accrue to his legacy could only have been made extra-legally.

For them to even be feasible, and for them to be accomplished within the time allotted by the operation of law, Kenyatta had to deploy an expeditious technology wholly agnostic of constitutionality, legality, checks and balances.

From the NMS through KMC to KU, via the Expressway, the footprint of this technology is displayed in high definition.

Violence deployed viciously and arbitrarily, is the engine of this technology.

The pursuit of visible elites by land and air, dramatic arrests, arraignments on spurious charges, threats and humiliations were tactical components of a strategy to turn the entire country into a nation of silent, meek and obedient citizens led by anxious and traumatised elites.

This violent technology was also effectively deployed to fabricate the numerous hollow parties and amorphous coalitions that ultimately constituted Azimio, itself a most anomalous political phenomenon.

It is held together by fear and violence.

State violence that proved redundant in the face of Odinga’s irate charge was redeployed, and Odinga’s threatened violence similarly relocated from the streets in the service of electoral justice, to the BBI and Azimio in pursuit of political monopoly.

The Handshake must be understood to be a signal moment in the alchemy of violence.

Azimio’s multi-pronged assault on the IEBC, and recent moves by the police to arrest IEBC election technology contractors are strong indicators of the direction in which this violence is to be deployed.

The means and ends of Handshake-BBI-Azimio are inexorably violent.

Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno