Post by Onyango Oloo on Dec 31, 2005 6:57:07 GMT 3
A Digital Dissension from Onyango Oloo in Nairobi
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Yesterday, Friday, December 30, 2005, when I took a virtual digital stroll along the information superhighway, I stopped by the Africa-Oped to scan what Kenyans and friends of Kenyans have been saying. It is then that I came across the powerful statement from the NCEC.
It is a scathing indictment of the present Kibaki regime; it delineates some of the glaring social, political and economic problems that bedevil Kenyans today. I doff off my kofia to the compatriots who drafted that bold statement.
My reason for writing this morning is to go beyond the syrupy paeans that I have just showered the NCEC with. There is one part of that statement that I have isolated for critical feedback. It is the following extract:
In focusing the Nation to the Next year, NCEC therefore suggests that the nation focuses as a beginning point on the completion of the constitutional review process through a people driven, legitimate and legally secure process. This is to ensure that the 2007 elections are held under a new constitutional dispensation as it is the overwhelming demand and expectation of Kenyans.
NCEC fully endorses the review Road Map that was developed by the National civil society conference on December 8th, 2005. We reject the proposals of President Mwai Kibaki and those of Hon. Raila Odinga on the way forward to the completion of the review.
The President’s suggestion that he puts together a committee of experts is both escapist and unworkable. We expect the President to know that the constitutional jurisprudence so far established makes his Moi-KANU presidential committees and commission strategies of the 1990s unacceptable and overtaken by events. On the other hand the Hon. Raila Odinga’s call for a Constituent Assembly that includes Members of parliament is simply a proposal that will lead us back to the captivity of the political class. We must free the process of the vested interests of MPs and other actors. The successful completion of the review process now entirely relies on the scrupulous observance of the sound principles of constitutional drafting, negotiation, validation and ratification. We failed through the Bomas and Bunge route and must not repeat the same mistakes again.
While the constituent Assembly concept has since 1997 been the NCEC’s chosen Strategy for successful constitution making, it must of necessity exclude the members of Parliament and all those who wish to aspire for political office in the subsequent elections. Political parties, religious, civil society and private sector representatives should participate along side directly elected delegates.
We reiterate that in observance of the civil society Road Map on the review, the government should facilitate the convening of a national stakeholders Conference in February 2006 to finalize negotiations on the agreeable road map and legal framework to secure the review process. NCEC on its part shall commence high level consultations, advocacy and outreach activities across the country from January 2006 to ensure that the country in accordance with the Road map gets a new constitution by December 2006.
The part that disturbs me the most is this one:
On the other hand the Hon. Raila Odinga’s call for a Constituent Assembly that includes Members of parliament is simply a proposal that will lead us back to the captivity of the political class. We must free the process of the vested interests of MPs and other actors. The successful completion of the review process now entirely relies on the scrupulous observance of the sound principles of constitutional drafting, negotiation, validation and ratification. We failed through the Bomas and Bunge route and must not repeat the same mistakes again.
While the constituent Assembly concept has since 1997 been the NCEC’s chosen Strategy for successful constitution making, it must of necessity exclude the members of Parliament and all those who wish to aspire for political office in the subsequent elections. Political parties, religious, civil society and private sector representatives should participate along side directly elected delegates.
I find it both surprising and disingenuous for the NCEC to pin the call for a constituent assembly on one individual, Raila Odinga. If memory serves me right, the one body that has been most strident in demanding a constituent assembly is none other than the NCEC itself- as they acknowledge in the second paragraph of the above excerpt.
Further than that, I continued to be mystified by the increasing employment by a section of Kenya’s civil society actors of the imprecise and unscientific term, “political class”. As I asked Prof. Makau wa Mutua and Maina Kiai recently, what is exactly is this animal called the “political class”?
As someone who grounds ALL my political and ideological contributions on a rigorous class-based analysis I cannot quite fathom what a “political class” is. Of course my approach is the classic Marxist-Leninist standpoint and we may be talking at cross-purposes because we are possibly conversing in differing and possibly clashing ideological languages.
As far as I know, classes are composed of large groups of people which are differentiated from each other depending on the position and role they occupy in a historical determined mode of production. The identity of classes is not restricted to a narrow economistic terrain- from the economic substructure: classes have identities at the super structural level which may be legal, political, cultural, ideological and so on and so forth.
Flowing from this, Marxist-Leninists the world over have long accepted that each and every class in society over a period of time, develops its own politics and its own ideology, which may or may not eventually seep through other classes, strata and fractions of society through a process of acquiring a hegemonic leadership in society.
From a historical and dialectical materialist standpoint therefore, it is UTTER POPPY* to talk of a, or even worse, “THE POLITICAL CLASS”. Each class has its own politics and its own ideology.
Let me bold to say that the imprecise and unscientific term, “political class” is an attempt by petit-bourgeois ideologues to smuggle in a “radical” sounding terminology into popular discourse without having to back up this term with solid, empirical evidence that such an organism actually exists in real life.
Many of Kenya’s leading POLITICIANS have a long history as leading civil society actors or prominent professional technocrats. Let us just name a handful: Prof. Kivutha Kibwana, the newly fangled minister for the environment and Prof. Wangari Maathai, his deputy; Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo and Ms. Njoki Ndung’u; Information minister Mutahi Kagwe, and his predecessor and current Foreign Affairs minister Raphael Tuju; one could go on and on.
When Profs Kivutha, Wangari and their colleagues in the Kenyan civil society sector jumped into the electoral fray fighting for MAINSTREAM parliamentary seats in the year 2002, the very same civil society actors who today decry the presence of “the political class” not only acclaimed these moves-they ardently campaigned for these civil society actors to run for parliament because it was felt they would push forward the much touted “reform agenda”.
If I am not mistaken, at least one of the people who signed the NCEC statement actually vied for a parliamentary seat in 2002.
I have pointed out elsewhere that one of the most strident exponents of the “political class” proposition-Prof. Makau wa Mutua- attended the national constitutional conference at Bomas, NOT as the Chairperson of the Kenya Human Rights Commission but rather as a MEMBER and CO-FOUNDER of the Safina POLITICAL PARTY!
The NCEC did NOT quibble, when one of its leading lights and some one I still consider a friend and ideological comrade-Dr. Willy Mutunga- CHAIRED the organism that was the forerunner of the NAK, the NAC!
In 1997 I played a leading role in helping to organize a trip to Canada of some of Kenya’s most influential POLITICAL figures- Davinder Lamba, Rev. Timothy Njoya, Dr. Willy Mutunga and Mrs. Rose Waruhui. They can attest to this. In October of that same year, I vividly remember moderating a panel featuring all four, plus Dr. Akoute of Rights and Democracy when they came to Ontario Institute for Studies in Education located at 252 Bloor Street West in Toronto.
In all of their political pronouncements, they were overtly and explicitly political.
What in their demeanour and utterances excluded them from the much vaunted “political class”?
In the particular case of Rev. Timothy Njoya, his national and international reputation was secured, not so much for his theological work, but for his courageous, militant and consistent POLITICAL ACTIVISM.
Folks in the NCEC:
Let us remain IDEOLOGICALLY HONEST if we want to engage in PRINCIPLED DEBATE and POLITICAL DISCOURSE. It is SIMPLY COMICAL, in my humble opinion, for the NCEC to DISOWN their own CHILD- the Constituent Assembly thesis because one Raila Amolo Odinga has decided to support the concept.
On a related note, I find it disturbing for the NCEC to subtract Raila from his Orange Democratic Movement colleagues as if he is some lone ranger who simply blurted out his support for the Constituent Assembly thoughtlessly without any consultation with the LDP, the ODM or both. In doing so, the NCEC is replicating the transparent and discredited stratagem used by the Banana camp in trying to reduce the referendum campaign into a two man show down at a Kenyan OK Corral- divorced from the aspirations of millions of Kenyans who embrace similar views. There is something more than a little mischievous and malicious about this.
In any case, it is more than a little foolhardy for the NCEC to imagine that a credible constitutional review process can be successfully effected in Kenya without the involvement of the Orange Democratic Movement-the one force most singularly responsible for galvanizing over 3.5 MILLION Kenyans to reject the Wako Mongrel.
In this connection, I find it RIDICULOUS for the NCEC to subtly and indirectly claim credit for the NO victory at the referendum polls. I am referring to this passage:
The more than 15 years of struggle for a democratic and just constitution were tragically mismanaged at the end. Fortunately, the people of Kenya spoke loudly and authoritatively through the historic referendum on November 21, 2005.
NCEC is proud to be the Citizens’ Movement that won the right of the people to determine their destiny and exercise their sovereignty through the constitutional facility of a popular referendum by filing and winning the historic case that resulted in the Ringera ruling on March 25, 2004. It is the Ringera Ruling that established the people’s right to a referendum to ratify a New constitution.
Come On, NCEC! C’mon. Please give me a freaking break.
The NCEC was NOT the force that spearheaded the NO referendum victory. In fact I am a bit shocked that the NCEC has the AUDACITY to display its rather shameful court intervention as a democratic victory for the Kenyan people. My memory is still very fresh with how comrades and compatriots I respect very much RUSHED TO COURT TO TRY AND THWART THE PASSAGE OF A DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION AT THE SAME BOMAS WHERE THEY WERE DELEGATES. The Ringera decision was a SETBACK for the constitutional review process and helped to delay, if not derail our quest for a people-driven constitution.
I remember when people like Onyango Oloo, Adongo Ogony and Miguna Miguna pointed this out in the first half of 2004, we were publicly DENOUNCED in very TRIBAL terms as “ LDP agents abroad” by online supporters of the NAK clique.
WHO BENEFITED from the Ringera Ruling?
Certainly NOT the Kenyan people who had been hankering for a democratic constitution for a decade and a half.
The MAIN BENEFICIARIES of the Ringera decision were people like Ringera’s former law partner, my former lawyer and former Justice and Constitutional minister Kiraitu Murungi and the very NAK cabal which was to come up with the NOTORIOUS Wako Mongrel a year later.
The Ringera ruling helped to hold up the constitutional review process, not hasten it. If I were in the NCEC I would not hail the referendum as a very positive development in the context in which it was unleashed.
Ndugu Ng’ang'a Thiong’o: let me ask you a direct question since our political ties go back way much longer than any of the other signatories to this NCEC statement.
In July 2005, you did a very good job, along with people like Otieno Ombok, and yes, Orina Nyamwamu and Kepta Ombati and many others in helping to organize the three days of mass action. What was that political activism about?
It was to oppose the stratagems of the NAK clique in trying to impose an unpopular document on the people and ratify it with a fraudulent referendum. Some of your comrades in the Yellow Movement actually went to court to try and block the very same referendum that the NCEC is now trying to claim credit for.
What gives, Ndugu Ng’ang’a Thiong’o, what gives???
In fact, I will try and call you tomorrow and maybe we can thrash this out over a couple of drinks at the same oasis where we whetted our throats about two weeks ago, ama?
As a matter of fact, no SANE progressive Kenyan wanted the referendum of Wako, Kiraitu, Kibaki and his other Banana colleagues.
The fact that the NO camp galvanized the wananchi to defeat the Wako Mongrel was a clear repudiation not just of the troubled document itself, but the very idea of an unpopular referendum to rubber stamp looming imperial and tribal usurpation of the sovereignty and popular will of the Kenyan people.
I happen to know most of the signatories of the NCEC statement, and many of them are familiar with my ideological beliefs and stances. I happen to be a committed socialist revolutionary. I have commented several times on the need for progressive Kenyans to form their own independent political parties and movements outside the mainstream contestations for political power and parliamentary supremacy.
I therefore concur wholeheartedly with the NCEC’s call along similar lines expressed in the statement that I am commenting on.
At the same time life experience has taught many a revolutionary of the danger of being part of a dwindling political sect totally divorced from the ongoing democratic struggles of the very people we rush to speak on behalf of.
For instance as a Marxist-Leninist who was born and raised and now lives and works in Kenya, I find it unfathomable for any reformer, leave alone serious revolutionary to even IMAGINE that they can carry out a successful democratic campaign without involving the Orange Democratic Movement which managed to convince millions of Kenyans in seven out of eight provinces to massively reject Kibaki’s and Kiraitu’s “government project.”.
Now I am NOT that naïve as to imagine that the ODM is a socialist revolutionary vanguard. Indeed, having spoken at length to some of its key insiders, I find that the ODM leadership is under no such illusions either. They see the ODM as a very broad, loose coalition of a wide array of Kenyan political, social and dare we say it, civil society forces that are united by the common agenda of striving for a new constitution. Beyond this broad shared agenda are the specific partisan, regional and even personal agendas of the various “luminaries” of the Orange Democratic Movement. For instance there is the LDP and KANU, two political parties that at the end of the day are
COMPETITORS, not allies for political power in Kenya. Uhuru Kenyatta still wants to be President of Kenya- so do Kalonzo Musyoka, Raila Odinga and possibly William Ruto. If one looks at the political manifestos of these mainstream parties, one does not see a discernible difference with the NAK political platform.
But here is the twist: whatever one may think of Raila, Balala, Anyang Nyongo, Musalia Mudavadi etc, one must acknowledge a simple fact:
These are the individuals that millions upon millions of Kenyans are listening to. When they call a rally ANYWHERE in the country with the possible exception of Central Province and Meru District, tens of thousands, sometimes HUNDREDS of thousands of wananchi show up.
I have heard some elitist jibes from otherwise very well respected civil society figures like Father Gabriel Dolan and so on dismiss these crowds as idle and unemployed youth who have time on their hands to attend public rallies midweek. But it is these very “idle and unemployed youth” who turned up in their millions to bury the Wako Draft.
Kenyan progressives have a choice:
They can continue burying their heads in the sand, oblivious to the political clout that the ODM enjoys among what some Latin American revolutionaries refer to as the “popular classes” OR they can see the ODM, the referendum campaign as CONTESTED POLITICAL TERRAIN that go EITHER Left OR RIGHT depending on the constellation of forces on the ground.
As a practicing Kenyan Socialist, I prefer to engage critically with where the majority of ordinary Kenyans are knowing that the wananchi are HUNGRY for an IDEOLOGICAL message that CAN ONLY BE DELIVERED BY SOCIALISTS and Kenyans of a RADICAL, ANTI-IMPERIALIST political persuasion.
In fact I happen to know that many Kenyan Marxists and veterans of the anti-imperialist underground played a very key role in the NO victory, working behind the scenes as part of the Orange Camp.
It is therefore a very GRAVE INSULT to read of the NCEC’s dismissive attitude towards a movement that galvanized the country and shook the political establishment to its foundations- forcing the isolated President to overthrow his own government!
Who exactly, I ask comrades and friends of the NCEC, “discredited the Orange camp”?
I see most of the political trash talking against the Orange camp coming from the NAK POLITICAL establishment and its apologists and ideologues in the Kenyan civil society sector.
Sadly, the NCEC, despite its rhetoric, is still a closeted mouthpiece of the NAK cabal. This, by the way, IS NOT A COMMENT on the ideological consistency of individuals in the NCEC like Ng'ang'a Thiong’o, Orina Nyamwamu and Ndung’u Wainaina. I am talking of the organization, NCEC.
Onyango Oloo prefers stating his opinions candidly, openly and publicly and he is sure that he is very far from winning any upcoming popularity contests by his forthright statements.
Since most of the people who signed the NCEC statement share the City of Nairobi with Oloo and millions of other residents, I can state here and now that I am ready to repeat, in even more militant detail, the sentiments I have expressed in this essay which will first see light as a digital essay online.
One last thing that I wanted to tell my NCEC comrades and compatriots:
“The Reform Agenda” is passé, old hat, yesterday’s news.
Let Kenyans of a progressive mien start putting forth a REVOLUTIONARY agenda. For how long will we tinker and tailor the same neo-colonial order, trying to REFORM it here and there while leaving its structures, assumptions and modus operandi intact?
Enuff Sed.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Yesterday, Friday, December 30, 2005, when I took a virtual digital stroll along the information superhighway, I stopped by the Africa-Oped to scan what Kenyans and friends of Kenyans have been saying. It is then that I came across the powerful statement from the NCEC.
It is a scathing indictment of the present Kibaki regime; it delineates some of the glaring social, political and economic problems that bedevil Kenyans today. I doff off my kofia to the compatriots who drafted that bold statement.
My reason for writing this morning is to go beyond the syrupy paeans that I have just showered the NCEC with. There is one part of that statement that I have isolated for critical feedback. It is the following extract:
In focusing the Nation to the Next year, NCEC therefore suggests that the nation focuses as a beginning point on the completion of the constitutional review process through a people driven, legitimate and legally secure process. This is to ensure that the 2007 elections are held under a new constitutional dispensation as it is the overwhelming demand and expectation of Kenyans.
NCEC fully endorses the review Road Map that was developed by the National civil society conference on December 8th, 2005. We reject the proposals of President Mwai Kibaki and those of Hon. Raila Odinga on the way forward to the completion of the review.
The President’s suggestion that he puts together a committee of experts is both escapist and unworkable. We expect the President to know that the constitutional jurisprudence so far established makes his Moi-KANU presidential committees and commission strategies of the 1990s unacceptable and overtaken by events. On the other hand the Hon. Raila Odinga’s call for a Constituent Assembly that includes Members of parliament is simply a proposal that will lead us back to the captivity of the political class. We must free the process of the vested interests of MPs and other actors. The successful completion of the review process now entirely relies on the scrupulous observance of the sound principles of constitutional drafting, negotiation, validation and ratification. We failed through the Bomas and Bunge route and must not repeat the same mistakes again.
While the constituent Assembly concept has since 1997 been the NCEC’s chosen Strategy for successful constitution making, it must of necessity exclude the members of Parliament and all those who wish to aspire for political office in the subsequent elections. Political parties, religious, civil society and private sector representatives should participate along side directly elected delegates.
We reiterate that in observance of the civil society Road Map on the review, the government should facilitate the convening of a national stakeholders Conference in February 2006 to finalize negotiations on the agreeable road map and legal framework to secure the review process. NCEC on its part shall commence high level consultations, advocacy and outreach activities across the country from January 2006 to ensure that the country in accordance with the Road map gets a new constitution by December 2006.
The part that disturbs me the most is this one:
On the other hand the Hon. Raila Odinga’s call for a Constituent Assembly that includes Members of parliament is simply a proposal that will lead us back to the captivity of the political class. We must free the process of the vested interests of MPs and other actors. The successful completion of the review process now entirely relies on the scrupulous observance of the sound principles of constitutional drafting, negotiation, validation and ratification. We failed through the Bomas and Bunge route and must not repeat the same mistakes again.
While the constituent Assembly concept has since 1997 been the NCEC’s chosen Strategy for successful constitution making, it must of necessity exclude the members of Parliament and all those who wish to aspire for political office in the subsequent elections. Political parties, religious, civil society and private sector representatives should participate along side directly elected delegates.
I find it both surprising and disingenuous for the NCEC to pin the call for a constituent assembly on one individual, Raila Odinga. If memory serves me right, the one body that has been most strident in demanding a constituent assembly is none other than the NCEC itself- as they acknowledge in the second paragraph of the above excerpt.
Further than that, I continued to be mystified by the increasing employment by a section of Kenya’s civil society actors of the imprecise and unscientific term, “political class”. As I asked Prof. Makau wa Mutua and Maina Kiai recently, what is exactly is this animal called the “political class”?
As someone who grounds ALL my political and ideological contributions on a rigorous class-based analysis I cannot quite fathom what a “political class” is. Of course my approach is the classic Marxist-Leninist standpoint and we may be talking at cross-purposes because we are possibly conversing in differing and possibly clashing ideological languages.
As far as I know, classes are composed of large groups of people which are differentiated from each other depending on the position and role they occupy in a historical determined mode of production. The identity of classes is not restricted to a narrow economistic terrain- from the economic substructure: classes have identities at the super structural level which may be legal, political, cultural, ideological and so on and so forth.
Flowing from this, Marxist-Leninists the world over have long accepted that each and every class in society over a period of time, develops its own politics and its own ideology, which may or may not eventually seep through other classes, strata and fractions of society through a process of acquiring a hegemonic leadership in society.
From a historical and dialectical materialist standpoint therefore, it is UTTER POPPY* to talk of a, or even worse, “THE POLITICAL CLASS”. Each class has its own politics and its own ideology.
Let me bold to say that the imprecise and unscientific term, “political class” is an attempt by petit-bourgeois ideologues to smuggle in a “radical” sounding terminology into popular discourse without having to back up this term with solid, empirical evidence that such an organism actually exists in real life.
Many of Kenya’s leading POLITICIANS have a long history as leading civil society actors or prominent professional technocrats. Let us just name a handful: Prof. Kivutha Kibwana, the newly fangled minister for the environment and Prof. Wangari Maathai, his deputy; Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo and Ms. Njoki Ndung’u; Information minister Mutahi Kagwe, and his predecessor and current Foreign Affairs minister Raphael Tuju; one could go on and on.
When Profs Kivutha, Wangari and their colleagues in the Kenyan civil society sector jumped into the electoral fray fighting for MAINSTREAM parliamentary seats in the year 2002, the very same civil society actors who today decry the presence of “the political class” not only acclaimed these moves-they ardently campaigned for these civil society actors to run for parliament because it was felt they would push forward the much touted “reform agenda”.
If I am not mistaken, at least one of the people who signed the NCEC statement actually vied for a parliamentary seat in 2002.
I have pointed out elsewhere that one of the most strident exponents of the “political class” proposition-Prof. Makau wa Mutua- attended the national constitutional conference at Bomas, NOT as the Chairperson of the Kenya Human Rights Commission but rather as a MEMBER and CO-FOUNDER of the Safina POLITICAL PARTY!
The NCEC did NOT quibble, when one of its leading lights and some one I still consider a friend and ideological comrade-Dr. Willy Mutunga- CHAIRED the organism that was the forerunner of the NAK, the NAC!
In 1997 I played a leading role in helping to organize a trip to Canada of some of Kenya’s most influential POLITICAL figures- Davinder Lamba, Rev. Timothy Njoya, Dr. Willy Mutunga and Mrs. Rose Waruhui. They can attest to this. In October of that same year, I vividly remember moderating a panel featuring all four, plus Dr. Akoute of Rights and Democracy when they came to Ontario Institute for Studies in Education located at 252 Bloor Street West in Toronto.
In all of their political pronouncements, they were overtly and explicitly political.
What in their demeanour and utterances excluded them from the much vaunted “political class”?
In the particular case of Rev. Timothy Njoya, his national and international reputation was secured, not so much for his theological work, but for his courageous, militant and consistent POLITICAL ACTIVISM.
Folks in the NCEC:
Let us remain IDEOLOGICALLY HONEST if we want to engage in PRINCIPLED DEBATE and POLITICAL DISCOURSE. It is SIMPLY COMICAL, in my humble opinion, for the NCEC to DISOWN their own CHILD- the Constituent Assembly thesis because one Raila Amolo Odinga has decided to support the concept.
On a related note, I find it disturbing for the NCEC to subtract Raila from his Orange Democratic Movement colleagues as if he is some lone ranger who simply blurted out his support for the Constituent Assembly thoughtlessly without any consultation with the LDP, the ODM or both. In doing so, the NCEC is replicating the transparent and discredited stratagem used by the Banana camp in trying to reduce the referendum campaign into a two man show down at a Kenyan OK Corral- divorced from the aspirations of millions of Kenyans who embrace similar views. There is something more than a little mischievous and malicious about this.
In any case, it is more than a little foolhardy for the NCEC to imagine that a credible constitutional review process can be successfully effected in Kenya without the involvement of the Orange Democratic Movement-the one force most singularly responsible for galvanizing over 3.5 MILLION Kenyans to reject the Wako Mongrel.
In this connection, I find it RIDICULOUS for the NCEC to subtly and indirectly claim credit for the NO victory at the referendum polls. I am referring to this passage:
The more than 15 years of struggle for a democratic and just constitution were tragically mismanaged at the end. Fortunately, the people of Kenya spoke loudly and authoritatively through the historic referendum on November 21, 2005.
NCEC is proud to be the Citizens’ Movement that won the right of the people to determine their destiny and exercise their sovereignty through the constitutional facility of a popular referendum by filing and winning the historic case that resulted in the Ringera ruling on March 25, 2004. It is the Ringera Ruling that established the people’s right to a referendum to ratify a New constitution.
Come On, NCEC! C’mon. Please give me a freaking break.
The NCEC was NOT the force that spearheaded the NO referendum victory. In fact I am a bit shocked that the NCEC has the AUDACITY to display its rather shameful court intervention as a democratic victory for the Kenyan people. My memory is still very fresh with how comrades and compatriots I respect very much RUSHED TO COURT TO TRY AND THWART THE PASSAGE OF A DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION AT THE SAME BOMAS WHERE THEY WERE DELEGATES. The Ringera decision was a SETBACK for the constitutional review process and helped to delay, if not derail our quest for a people-driven constitution.
I remember when people like Onyango Oloo, Adongo Ogony and Miguna Miguna pointed this out in the first half of 2004, we were publicly DENOUNCED in very TRIBAL terms as “ LDP agents abroad” by online supporters of the NAK clique.
WHO BENEFITED from the Ringera Ruling?
Certainly NOT the Kenyan people who had been hankering for a democratic constitution for a decade and a half.
The MAIN BENEFICIARIES of the Ringera decision were people like Ringera’s former law partner, my former lawyer and former Justice and Constitutional minister Kiraitu Murungi and the very NAK cabal which was to come up with the NOTORIOUS Wako Mongrel a year later.
The Ringera ruling helped to hold up the constitutional review process, not hasten it. If I were in the NCEC I would not hail the referendum as a very positive development in the context in which it was unleashed.
Ndugu Ng’ang'a Thiong’o: let me ask you a direct question since our political ties go back way much longer than any of the other signatories to this NCEC statement.
In July 2005, you did a very good job, along with people like Otieno Ombok, and yes, Orina Nyamwamu and Kepta Ombati and many others in helping to organize the three days of mass action. What was that political activism about?
It was to oppose the stratagems of the NAK clique in trying to impose an unpopular document on the people and ratify it with a fraudulent referendum. Some of your comrades in the Yellow Movement actually went to court to try and block the very same referendum that the NCEC is now trying to claim credit for.
What gives, Ndugu Ng’ang’a Thiong’o, what gives???
In fact, I will try and call you tomorrow and maybe we can thrash this out over a couple of drinks at the same oasis where we whetted our throats about two weeks ago, ama?
As a matter of fact, no SANE progressive Kenyan wanted the referendum of Wako, Kiraitu, Kibaki and his other Banana colleagues.
The fact that the NO camp galvanized the wananchi to defeat the Wako Mongrel was a clear repudiation not just of the troubled document itself, but the very idea of an unpopular referendum to rubber stamp looming imperial and tribal usurpation of the sovereignty and popular will of the Kenyan people.
I happen to know most of the signatories of the NCEC statement, and many of them are familiar with my ideological beliefs and stances. I happen to be a committed socialist revolutionary. I have commented several times on the need for progressive Kenyans to form their own independent political parties and movements outside the mainstream contestations for political power and parliamentary supremacy.
I therefore concur wholeheartedly with the NCEC’s call along similar lines expressed in the statement that I am commenting on.
At the same time life experience has taught many a revolutionary of the danger of being part of a dwindling political sect totally divorced from the ongoing democratic struggles of the very people we rush to speak on behalf of.
For instance as a Marxist-Leninist who was born and raised and now lives and works in Kenya, I find it unfathomable for any reformer, leave alone serious revolutionary to even IMAGINE that they can carry out a successful democratic campaign without involving the Orange Democratic Movement which managed to convince millions of Kenyans in seven out of eight provinces to massively reject Kibaki’s and Kiraitu’s “government project.”.
Now I am NOT that naïve as to imagine that the ODM is a socialist revolutionary vanguard. Indeed, having spoken at length to some of its key insiders, I find that the ODM leadership is under no such illusions either. They see the ODM as a very broad, loose coalition of a wide array of Kenyan political, social and dare we say it, civil society forces that are united by the common agenda of striving for a new constitution. Beyond this broad shared agenda are the specific partisan, regional and even personal agendas of the various “luminaries” of the Orange Democratic Movement. For instance there is the LDP and KANU, two political parties that at the end of the day are
COMPETITORS, not allies for political power in Kenya. Uhuru Kenyatta still wants to be President of Kenya- so do Kalonzo Musyoka, Raila Odinga and possibly William Ruto. If one looks at the political manifestos of these mainstream parties, one does not see a discernible difference with the NAK political platform.
But here is the twist: whatever one may think of Raila, Balala, Anyang Nyongo, Musalia Mudavadi etc, one must acknowledge a simple fact:
These are the individuals that millions upon millions of Kenyans are listening to. When they call a rally ANYWHERE in the country with the possible exception of Central Province and Meru District, tens of thousands, sometimes HUNDREDS of thousands of wananchi show up.
I have heard some elitist jibes from otherwise very well respected civil society figures like Father Gabriel Dolan and so on dismiss these crowds as idle and unemployed youth who have time on their hands to attend public rallies midweek. But it is these very “idle and unemployed youth” who turned up in their millions to bury the Wako Draft.
Kenyan progressives have a choice:
They can continue burying their heads in the sand, oblivious to the political clout that the ODM enjoys among what some Latin American revolutionaries refer to as the “popular classes” OR they can see the ODM, the referendum campaign as CONTESTED POLITICAL TERRAIN that go EITHER Left OR RIGHT depending on the constellation of forces on the ground.
As a practicing Kenyan Socialist, I prefer to engage critically with where the majority of ordinary Kenyans are knowing that the wananchi are HUNGRY for an IDEOLOGICAL message that CAN ONLY BE DELIVERED BY SOCIALISTS and Kenyans of a RADICAL, ANTI-IMPERIALIST political persuasion.
In fact I happen to know that many Kenyan Marxists and veterans of the anti-imperialist underground played a very key role in the NO victory, working behind the scenes as part of the Orange Camp.
It is therefore a very GRAVE INSULT to read of the NCEC’s dismissive attitude towards a movement that galvanized the country and shook the political establishment to its foundations- forcing the isolated President to overthrow his own government!
Who exactly, I ask comrades and friends of the NCEC, “discredited the Orange camp”?
I see most of the political trash talking against the Orange camp coming from the NAK POLITICAL establishment and its apologists and ideologues in the Kenyan civil society sector.
Sadly, the NCEC, despite its rhetoric, is still a closeted mouthpiece of the NAK cabal. This, by the way, IS NOT A COMMENT on the ideological consistency of individuals in the NCEC like Ng'ang'a Thiong’o, Orina Nyamwamu and Ndung’u Wainaina. I am talking of the organization, NCEC.
Onyango Oloo prefers stating his opinions candidly, openly and publicly and he is sure that he is very far from winning any upcoming popularity contests by his forthright statements.
Since most of the people who signed the NCEC statement share the City of Nairobi with Oloo and millions of other residents, I can state here and now that I am ready to repeat, in even more militant detail, the sentiments I have expressed in this essay which will first see light as a digital essay online.
One last thing that I wanted to tell my NCEC comrades and compatriots:
“The Reform Agenda” is passé, old hat, yesterday’s news.
Let Kenyans of a progressive mien start putting forth a REVOLUTIONARY agenda. For how long will we tinker and tailor the same neo-colonial order, trying to REFORM it here and there while leaving its structures, assumptions and modus operandi intact?
Enuff Sed.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi
