Is Vice President Musyoka a pragmatist or opportunist?

Many people who watched Kenya's Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka on the BBC's Hard Talk last week could not help but pity the man. Long before the flawed elections that returned Mwai Kibaki to power, the former long-serving foreign minister had lost allure within the anti-Kibaki fraternity. The cascade from a potential president within ODM ranks to an ineffectual, tribal leader saw Mr Musyoka shrink, winning only ethnic Kamba support at the December elections.

Yet, more than the election which indicted his claim to national leadership, the post-election crisis, his party's complicity in it and the vice-presidency have exposed the opportunistic instincts of a wrongly respected politician in Kenya. Throughout the ongoing crisis, whose resolution appears imminent thanks to Kofi Annan's mediation, Mr Musyoka has come across as a man fighting personal battles towards irrelevance in the emerging political dispensation in Kenya.

At the BBC forum he tried unsuccessfully to defend himself on earlier charges that Kibaki rigged the elections. He justified the Kibaki win that makes his position tenable, creating distinctions between “fraud” and “rigging” in a vain attempt to sanitise his new role. He tried to sound clever by juggling terms and grandstanding on the national desire for peace, but ended up sounding grandiose with no grand ideas.

As the Annan-led talks blossomed in Nairobi last week on the back of international pressure on Kibaki, Musyoka was away in America rationalising the Kenyan crisis and downplaying the electoral fraud that his ODM-K party abets in return for junior positions. While Musyoka was in Washington DC, for the International Prayer Breakfast, an unofficial gathering of Christians, his press service churned reports of the VP being on a “diplomatic offensive to charm the West” over the Kenyan situation. Earlier the service gave the impression that he was welcomed to No.10 Downing Street to deliberate on the Kenyan crisis with British officials.

In his absence, the Nairobi talks broke new grounds with ODM and Kibaki's negotiators climbing down from earlier hardline stances. When, on Saturday, Musyoka returned, to the news of a power-sharing agreement between Kibaki and ODM leader Raila Odinga, the VP castigated the “rushed process” that would undermine Kenya's multiparty democracy. “Kenya must remain a multiparty democracy, that is the ideal of our constitution,” he said, counselling against a power-sharing pact with ODM but conveniently masking the fact that his party, which lost miserably, should play its role in the Opposition.
Apparently suffering from the Osman Taha syndrome of self-preservation, Musyoka has not hidden the personal interest in ongoing negotiations, all the time scheming to end with a potion of power. As a powerful vice-president of Sudan during the SPLM/NCP peace process, Khartoum's chief negotiator Taha caused enough trouble, hoping to retain a prize for himself in the emerging Garang/Bashir power-sharing pact. Ultimately and regardless of the efforts he lost his seat thanks to the inviolable agreement guaranteeing the SPLM of the vice-presidency.

Clearly Mr Musyoka abhors any agreement which incorporates ODM into government and which would render him irrelevant. Having opposed international mediation from the beginning as a Kibaki sycophant, his motivation now is to prove his worth by posing as a hardliner and to assuage his guilt of going to bed with the very people responsible for this mess. Equally he now realises that he made a big mistake, losing the credibility of backers and exposed as a power-hungry opportunist before the international community which he has been trying to court lately.

Motivated by vendetta against Odinga with whom he has been obsessed with all along, greed for power blinded him to the ability to focus what was going to happen after a historic election that was closely watched globally. Like most people who favour the status quo he underestimated the popular revolt against Kibaki; neither did he anticipate mediation by the international community which he opposed selfishly.

Domestically he has not explained how he hopes to be Kibaki's VP till 2012, how to manoeuvre the sharks around Kibaki who have proved that when it comes to preserving power, everything, even rigging or killing, is permissible. Yet his predicament is hardly surprising given his legendary lack of intellectual depth, ideological basis, tenacity and principle.

Despite his Christian protestations and rhetoric on 'integrity', Mr Musyoka has emerged as a godless tribalist welded to an imaginary Eastern Bantu alliance which appears a stillbirth with current mediation. Previously, Musyoka has got away with half-baked accounts for his role in Kanu-era repression, vague stances on reform or change, and last year's break-up of ODM. Now exposed even before children, only time will tell whether he can emerge from the scandal of ODM-K's role in last year's electoral theft and his subsequent effort at concealing it.
jkotieno2000@yahoo.co.uk