Post by Onyango Oloo on Aug 1, 2015 18:02:19 GMT 3
A digital essay by Onyango Oloo
Abstract:
This essay, dedicated to the victims and survivors of the Moi-KANU regime’s state terror against peace loving and democracy seeking Kenyan social justice activists, examines the convoluted and often contradictory political trajectory of three age-mates who first rose to prominence when they were part of the student representative council at Kenya’s oldest university almost thirty five years ago.
Today, each one of them is at the helm of a political formation which has carved for itself a niche on the national stage. One is at the apex of a portmanteau party bringing together the coalition parties which constitute the present day Kenyan regime, in power since the 2013 elections; another one heads the secretariat of the single largest political party and senior partner in the country’s official opposition; the third one leads an openly socialist and revolutionary entity, one of the oldest in the country.
Apart from being contemporaries at the University of Nairobi in the early 1980s and comprising part of the inaugural SONU administration, the trio has a shared history of having been arrested, interrogated, tortured and railroaded to maximum penitentiaries after hastily arranged kangaroo trials by hacks,apologists and apparatchiks of the Moi-KANU one party kleptocracy. Two of the three served single terms in parliament as elected MPs; all have contemplated vying for similarly prominent national positions including senator and governor. Still in their mid-fifties, all three seem destined to remain part of Kenya’s political landscape for the foreseeable future.
What lessons can one draw from their historic interventions and patriotic contributions to national processes and strivings for a new constitutional dispensation and efforts to restructure and transform Kenya’s social, economic, cultural and political modes, mores, values and priorities over the past three decades?
The writer, Onyango Oloo, is not a detached scholar buried deep in the esoteric caverns of haughty academia but rather, a slightly younger activist contemporary with less stellar accomplishments who co-lived and shared part of the trials, travails and tribulations of the trio.
The writer makes the argument that Mwandawiro, Ong’wen and Murathe, given their shared undergraduate radical and militant past and broad social democratic and patriotic credentials; the SONU trio are uniquely placed, given their strategic vantage points at their respective political formations, to potentially shift and restructure the national ideological discourse and lay the infrastructure providing the much needed framework to construct the nucleus of the Kenyan national democratic state so pregnant in the heady aspirations captured in the hopeful 2010 Constitution.
But will the trio’s subsequent political evolution, over the last three decades of intense and internecine partisan contestations for electoral dominance at the Kenyan national state levels, render any warm fuzzy notions of an imminent rapprochement and looming détente among the three SONU SRC Musketeers a whimsical, unlikely quixotic chimera?
NOW READ ON BELOW:
demokrasia-kenya.blogspot.co.ke/2015/08/sonu-trio-murathe-ongwen-mwandawiro-and.html