At long last, William Ruto unveiled ‘The Plan’, a manifesto containing his detailed commitments on what his administration will do for Kenyans, how it will all be accomplished and at what cost. The salient conceptual threads that run through the entire document evoke radical transformational potential, accountability, feasibility and credibility.
The Kenya Kwanza commitments encapsulate Kenya’s overdue turn-around strategy to get our politics, our economics and our governance back on track in the direction of rapid growth and shared prosperity. The manifesto indicates with clarity where the jobs are going to come from, where the growth is going to be generated, and how everyone is going to participate in nation-building and share in the fruit of growth.
Owing to its entailed provenance, The Plan is invested with profound credibility and legitimacy. It was developed through extensive and painstaking consultation with Kenyans of all walks of life, from every part of the country. Everyone can hear their voice and read their mind in The Plan.
Azimio took vast trouble to ridicule the Hustler Nation and its joyful fraternisation with ordinary Kenyans. They sneered at the idea of mama mboga having a say in the constitution of an administration, or formulation of policy. For them, governance, policy and politics are exclusively an elite affair. Accountability only bears meaning within the rarefied domains of elitist discourse, while legitimacy is all a matter of elite optics. The idea of engaging the people that Azimio likes to term hoi polloi in any manner beyond ordering them around, patronising and taking their views for granted, is absurd, insulting and utterly out of the question.
Thus, Azimio mocked Ruto’s bodaboda and mama mboga forums. At first, they derided them as cheap populist gimmicks and empty publicity stunts of a man smarting from the devastating humiliation of being ejected from government through the Handshake. Azimio affirmed their fanatical elitist predilections by caricaturing the entire discourse as being about wheelbarrows.
Rhetorically, they scoffed that the wheelbarrow is backward technology that cannot take Kenya into the information age, or be associated with ‘graduates’.
So radicalised were Azimio’s elitist fundamentalists by their fevered outrage at the imagined slight of a wheelbarrow-pushing graduate that they began to lampoon Tangatanga with the wheelbarrow. The commitment to engage Kenyans from the bottom upwards in nation building had taken firm hold in the Hustler Nation. There was going to be no problem at all with being scorned with the wheelbarrow caricature. Tangatanga (another proud appropriation of a derisive label kindly donated by the proto-Azimio Handshake cabal) therefore appropriated the wheelbarrow with tremendous relish and adopted it as the official emblem of the United Democratic Alliance, the cornerstone and flagship of the Kenya Kwanza family.
Over time, engagements with Kenyans in productive forums became the mainstay of the Kenya Kwanza campaign. They were formatted to be as responsive as possible, conducive to more talking by the people, and more listening by the campaign.
Kenyans love their country and are profoundly invested in its condition, its struggles and its destiny. Kenyans have strong and coherent views about what ails their state, economy and society, as they do about what needs to be done. Kenyans believe that turning this country around is doable and overdue.
To be Kenyan is to share in an experience that is common throughout the country, around which are anchored specific endemic and individual experiences. Out of our spectacular diversity, we remain durably one.
Addled with the venom of incorrigibly elitist propensities, Azimio’s approach to leadership, governance, politics and governance observes the artificial and repugnant divide between the people and their leaders. The contempt for the lower socioeconomic rung suffocates with its pungent, odious fragrance. The obsessive desire to preserve the privileges of the elite, and ferociously gate-keep upward mobility means that Azimio are irrevocably committed to the sort of feudal programme under the ethno-political consociation mooted in BBI, which is solely devoted to the conservation of the status quo through cynical trickle-down economic governance that renders the aspirations of the majority nothing but Sisyphean futility.
This explains why inclusivity and social justice possess restricted meaning in Azimio, and why accountability and public participation are only fancy buzzwords. It also reveals why Azimio have nothing to tell the people in all their encounters apart from vitendawili, Raila na mpira, tibim and tialala. Liberation is a false promise that must remain elusive and deceptive, never to be anchored in anything more meaningful than nostalgia and persiflage.
Azimio sell individuals and romantic narratives which profile Odinga as a supernatural messianic phenomenon who is the platform, the agenda, the movement and the manifesto.
Mama mboga came through on Thursday, and Azimio are stunned. They have complained that the manifesto is too detailed. But many can no longer ignore the fact that the forthcoming electoral contest will be decided on the tyranny of credibility and won by the Team with The Plan.
Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno
