Stop Jubilee mandarins from taking Kenya back to dark age

By next week, China’s National People’s Congress will have rubber-stamped a proposal by the Communist Party to scrap presidential term limits of two five-year terms.

This should allow President Xi Jinping to rule for as long as he likes, even for life, cementing his position as the most powerful leader in China since the likes of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

That should be worrying, very worrying, for all lovers of freedom and democracy.

But it is Kenya that I am worried about, not China.

BORROW LEAF

President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto might be tempted to borrow a leaf from China as they ramp up their plot to take Kenya backwards through re-imposition of the police state redolent of the single-party Kanu dictatorships of their political mentors.

Jubilee Party has been sending delegations of party cadre to China to study how the Communist Party has become an unchallengeable monolith.

We have also seen in the recent past Jubilee legislators being made to understand that they sit in Parliament to parrot the party line rather than as members of an independent arm of government.

There is also still a great deal of confusion from President Kenyatta’s ‘appointment’ of Jubilee Party Secretary-General Raphael Tuju to sit in the Cabinet in an undefined ‘need’ basis.

To understand that, perhaps we need to go back to the Jubilee campaign manifesto, which proposed a strange structure where party functionaries would exercise supervision over Cabinet secretaries.

This could be dismissed as Jubilee’s internal affairs but, when concurrent with moves to terrorise the legitimate political Opposition into silence, elevate the Executive and the provincial administration and ‘securitate’ apparatus above the law, and neuter the Judiciary, media, civil society and independent watchdog organs, we have to be very afraid.

Despite failure of the recent petition aiming at removal of Chief Justice David Maraga and the other Supreme Court judges seen as not ‘Jubilee-compliant’, the ruling party’s threats last year to “revisit” the Judiciary are still very much alive.

We have seen fresh appointments packing the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) with individuals who owe allegiance to the ruling party and will do as instructed.

LAW AND ORDER MACHINERY

We have also seen a slew of changes in the entire law and order machinery — the police and State Law Office — which will place at the helm trusted acolytes who will pursue arrests and prosecutions according to the dictates of the political establishment rather than as a function of justice and security.

That is why an entire platoon of heavily armed policemen, in mufti undistinguishable from your common gun-toting thug, will waylay opposition activist Jimi Wanjigi merely to serve court summons.

That is criminal misuse of resources at a time the police have surrendered parts of the coastal region and the entire north-eastern Kenya to marauding terrorists!

At this rate, we can expect the return of something like the Mwakenya trials of the Kanu era, when anyone suspected of thinking ill of the regime can be arrested, locked up incommunicado and tortured to plead guilty to trumped-up charges before a ‘friendly’ judge.

Jubilee, right now, is confident that it can get away with anything because the Opposition is splintered and clueless. National Super Alliance (Nasa) chief Raila Odinga is isolated on being abandoned by coalition colleagues Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetang’ula, who do not share his ideology and resistance credentials and have no stomach for a fight.

Ruling party mandarins are happy that the pesky Western diplomats, led by the American, British and German ambassadors, have abandoned the fight for human rights, democracy and good governance and closed their eyes to emerging repression.

The civil society and religious groupings that in the past called the State to account no longer have the moral legitimacy to mobilise against dictatorship. Most have become extensions of political formations.

As for the media, Jubilee is extremely jubilant that a once-powerful watchdog of society has voluntarily transformed itself into a lapdog of the State.

We have not only seen media leaders collude with State House to castrate themselves in those outrageous gagging orders around Mr Odinga’s self-swearing-in but they are silencing reporters, editors and commentators who do not toe the straight and narrow official line.

The last person to leave, please switch off the lights.

[email protected] Twitter: @MachariaGaitho