Having served a maximum of two-five year terms, President Uhuru Kenyatta, on paper is expected to exit from Kenya’s top seat in 2022. But a fledgeling campaign seeking to have him back on the ballot, this time, as Prime Minister has understandably opened up political fissures that are threatening to upend the government.

But these are early days and the future is fraught with eerie possibilities.

In big measures, the forces seeking Kenyatta, 58, to arguably circumvent the constitution are drawn from a faction of the ruling political party, including ironically the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), the country’s biggest opposition party.

Turns out the ruling Jubilee Party is currently divided with a subtle supremacy war pitting two antagonistic wings – one coalescing around Kenyatta while the other owes its allegiance to Deputy President, William Ruto, 53, who publicly has made it known that he will be on the presidential ballot in 2022.

The origin of the resolution is traceable to March 2018 when Kenyatta struck a public rapprochement with Raila Odinga, 73, the de facto leader of the opposition and head of the ODM party that caught the nation by surprise.

Famously referred to here as “the handshake”, the peace accord is widely credited with bringing closure to post-election violence that had threatened to push East Africa’s biggest economy down the precipice after hotly contested elections in 2017 that saw Kenyatta controversially installed as President in repeat elections that Odinga and a sizable part of the electorate boycotted.

“Our differences are not that big. What is bringing all this problem is political competition our opinions are not that different. We decided to sit and even look beyond 2017 election. Why is it after every five years Kenyans must fight each other? Why must we shed blood and destroy properties? Why do business come to a halt and fear engulfs our people? These questions were the beginning of building bridges initiative idea,” said Kenyatta during the initial introduction of “the handshake”.

A spin-off of “the handshake” saw the formation of what is referred to as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI). This incorporated a selected team of imminent Kenyans drawn from across the political aisle mandated with canvassing the country to curate views from the citizenry on how and what needs to be done for the country to avoid civil instances of violence that have been witnessed after every cycle of an election since the country embraced plural democracy in 1990.

Unequivocally, the feuding parties agreed also to rewrite the country’s constitution. The putative 156-page report unveiled this past December indicated that the BBI had reached a consensus that the nation was craving for the creation of a prime minister’s position among a raft of other options as a relief to the routine violence occurring in the country after every election.

In retrospective it’s observably clear the BBI move is old hat.

In early 2008, in the aftermath of another presidential election gone awry that ignited widespread bloodletting, then-President Mwai Kibaki and his rival, Odinga, shook hands on what came to be known as the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) agreement.

The KNDR had four components including overcoming the immediate crisis, ending the violence, dealing with the humanitarian crisis it had occasioned and dealing with the political crisis occasioned by the electoral crisis.

With hindsight, its’ apparent the KNDR initiative was simply snake oil.

Meanwhile, it has not been lost to close Nairobi watchers that the two competing leaders deliberately blackballed the deputy president from the March 2018 accords, emboldening a belief that an irreparable fallout had taken place at State House, the official address of the President.

Understandably, the Deputy President’s wing has not hidden its mistrust of the BBI initiative, alleging its purpose is simply to stop its candidate from running for the country’s top seat.

Also, the group is carrying a narrative that categorises Kenyatta and Odinga as belonging to a lineage of the country’s dynasty families. While Ruto traces his ancestral roots to a life of peasantry like a disproportionate size of the country’s population,  it is likely he would empathize with the daily struggles of the electorate compared with the competition.

However the Kenyatta-Odinga group, the Achilles heel of Ruto’s candidature is a public perception that paints him as the godfather of graft in Kenya, as evidenced in reports in the local daily papers’ and therefore should be barred from running, they say.

For Kenyatta to become a Prime Minister his political party must muster a majority of seats in parliament, leading a President to tap him for the premier position and he must be the head of the party at the time, according to the BBI arrangement.

For now, Kenyatta has said he would not mind playing the role of a premier. It would not be a wonder if it were to happen, for extreme acts have taken place elsewhere in Africa.

In neighbouring states of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, for example, current leaders have arm twisted and cajoled their respective Parliaments to extend their reigns by simply amending their country’s constitution. Proponents supporting Kenyatta’s bid to become a prime minister have a myriad of reasons as to why they think the move is unstoppable.

The Secretary-General of the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), the premier labour organization in the country, Francis Atwoli was the first person to forward the idea of Kenyatta morphing into a prime minister after leaving the presidency.

“I said about three years ago that this country needs a constitutional amendment because those in leadership are still young to retire and a new law will accommodate them in leadership,” adding, “President Kenyatta is not leaving office as his predecessors Mwai Kibaki and Daniel Arap Moi. He is young and the country should not mind his staying around as long as it guarantees stability.”

While David Murathe, former Vice Chairman of the Jubilee Party says Kenyatta will remain in power as a prime minister after the 2022 General Election.

In an interview with the local Daily Nation, Murathe said that once a new political dispensation envisaged in BBI report comes into fruition, Kenyatta will have the right to vie for any post since he will remain the de facto leader of Jubilee Party, and could even claim the proposed post of Prime Minister.

He argues that the political alignments that will arise once the BBI proposals are implemented will see the leader of the majority party in the National Assembly form the government, in a coalition with other parties, and that this has the potential of ensuring President Kenyatta does not disappear from the radar after the 2022 polls.

While Moses Kuria, an MP allied to Ruto and conspicuously better known as the legislator representing Kenyatta’s ancestral home says those pushing Kenyatta to consider the premiership position are “talking on behalf of dark forces that have captured the state apparatus but not the President himself. I’m certain the President will not want to suffer the ignominy of sacrificing his legacy at the altar of such transient goals and I believe he will follow the footpath of Mr. Kibaki,”

All the while Ruto says rumors are behind the push to have Kenyatta fill the prime minister slot.

“It is brokers and political merchants who are peddling that rumor across the country,” he said. “We are progressives. President Kenyatta has a rich legacy that cannot be stained by the push for constitutional changes.” Ruto says.

Indeed the days ahead will tell who will blink first between the President and his ambitious Deputy.

L'articolo President Kenyatta Angling for Premiership After Term Ends proviene da InsideOver.

Female politicians in Kenya are playing servile to their male counterparts by avoiding to run for the country’s top seat as they are presently rooting for putative candidates, who exclusively happen to be male, eroding a momentum of empowerment for women that began 30 years ago.

With elections scheduled for 2022, when current President Uhuru Kenyatta is expected to exit after serving a maximum constitutionally mandated two-five year terms, the emerging political realignment points to an all-male contest for the top seat, for now.

Martha Karua, 62, who contested for the presidential sweepstakes in 2013, emerged sixth in a field of eight candidates, after attracting 0.36% of the popular vote understandably throwing shade at the stance taken by the local women politicos.

As the current leader of the National Rainbow Coalition-Kenya (NARC-K) party which has three out of 349 members in parliament, Karua thinks the current crop of women politicians are stiffing Kenya’s women folks.

“The most unfortunate thing happening now in the Kenyan political space is that women parliamentarians are agreeing to become praise choirs for male politicians angling to succeed the current president,” says Karua, one of the few female politicians with an illustrious career that has also seen her work as the Cabinet Secretary in charge of Justice.

Beginning early this year, two disparate groups drawing in female politicians from across the country were unveiled, all beholden to two political camps. One coalesces around Deputy President William Ruto, going by the moniker name of Inua Mama – Kiswahili term meaning ‘uplift the livelihood of women’ – while the other calls itself ‘Team Embrace’ and is batting for a former Prime Minister and the country’s de facto leader of the opposition, Raila Odinga.

Despite the presidential elections being three years away from taking place, the country is oddly in a campaign mood.

This is after President Kenyatta and Odinga, 74, formerly bitter foes in the most recent elections held in October 2017, that almost pushed East Africa’s biggest economy down the precipice, publicly shook hands on March 2018. This historical gesture signalled a rapprochement between bitter political protagonists but it left the Deputy President’s political base feeling jittery.

“Everything was going well for him, and it was just a matter of counting the years. His chances at a shot at the top job were 100 per cent, now it has been reduced to 50-50,” says Dr Herman Manyora a political science lecturer at the University of Nairobi, the premier public institution of higher learning, referring to the Deputy President.

When Kenyatta ran for the presidency in 2013, he tapped Ruto as his running mate, publicly stating he would support his deputy in elections scheduled for 2022 after serving two terms. But after the 2017 elections, the president has been sending mixed signals.

“On his own Odinga is not a threat to Ruto. But backed by Kenyatta, who has the real power to thwart his chances, Ruto has a real reason to worry. Kenyatta and Odinga have become joined at the hip after the handshake, and together, they are a real threat, “says Dr.Manyora.

Currently, out of the 349 seats in parliament, only 76 members are female representing one-fifth of the total number.

According to Kenya’s 2010 constitution, women must have at least a third of seats in parliament and a third of appointed positions.

The constitution states that no more than two-thirds of an elected or appointed body can be of one gender, but does not set out a mechanism for attaining that goal.

Court rulings since 2012 have directed parliament to pass legislation to enforce the gender rule or risk dissolution – but previous attempts have failed, largely due to quorum hitches.

There are 76 female MPs in the current parliament, equivalent to just over a fifth of the 349 seats.

This underlines gender inequality in Kenya’s political system compared to neighbouring states.

Rwanda leads with 61%, followed by Tanzania at 36%, Burundi at 36%, Uganda and 34% and South Sudan at 28.5%.  Except Rwanda, none of these countries have attained the African Union standard of 50/50 representation of women in all leadership positions including political leadership.

In the absences of affirmative action, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would not have become the first woman in Africa to become president when in 2016 she ascended to the top seat in the West African state of Sierra Leone. Journalist Monique Ohsan Bellepeau, later on, pulled off a similar stunt in the southeastern state of Mauritius in 2012. While in the South African republic of Malawi, Joyce Hilda Banda became president in 2012.

In Uganda, two women have vied for president; first was Miria Obote, wife of former president Milton Obote, who ran in the 2006 election, but only managed to garner 0.08% of the vote.

In elections held in 2011, Beti Kamya gave it a go, but only managed 0.06% of the vote.

In Rwanda, two women have tried to vie for the presidency including Alvera Mukabaramba, who made a stab in 2003 but withdrew from the race on the eve of the election, handing President Paul Kagame a landslide victory. She tried again in 2010, but only got 0.04% of the vote

This is a telling indication that despite the patriarchal nature of African politics, woman are increasingly daring to run for the top seat.

When in 1997, a woman sensationally ran for presidency for the first time in Kenya’s 34-year-old history since gaining independence from British rule in 1963, this nation of 47 million people was under the heel of an intransigent regime that brooked no challenges to its hold on power.

And understandably the autocratic President Daniel Arap Moi, pulled out all the stops, cruising to victory with 40.4 % of the vote in elections held in that year.

Two women were on the presidential ballot that year. They included Charity Ngilu, 67, now one among five female governors in a landscape with 47 governors and Prof. Wangari Maathai who succumbed to cancer in September 2011 seven years after winning the Nobel Prize in 2004, verifiably, the icons who blazed the path for local women.

Fielding questions from the Los Angeles Times newspaper Ngilu had this to say:

“I cannot sit back and watch and wait and say, ‘Who can do this?’ I must do this. I am qualified because I am what Kenyans are looking for – a committed, dedicated, honest person who can lead them through the problems they have.”

In the elections, 15 candidates sought to dislodge Moi but floundered.

Ngilu emerged fifth with 7.8% of the vote while Prof. Maathai with 0.07% vote managed 13 position after the president exploited existing ethnic fissures that remain a feature in Kenya’s politics to his advantage.

The next time a woman ran for the top seat would be in 2007 when 40-year-old Nazlin Omar emerged sixth in a field of nine candidates after attracting 0.09% of the vote.

According to Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan writer, humanitarian advocate and political analyst, Kenyan politics, she says “will hold up women as emblems but denies them full participation in the highest levels of government, instead publicly referring to female politicians as “flower girls” and creating a political ghetto in the women’s representative positions that effectively writes women out of mainstream politics.

L'articolo Kenyan Women Reduced to Flower Girls in the Presidential Sweepstakes proviene da InsideOver.