Photo: The People’s President Raila Odinga at a campaign rally Feb 2013
BY DIKEMBE DISEMBE
Princeton university professor of politics, Jan-Werner Mueller,
recently posed a critical question on the future of populist politics
after the election of Chavez successor, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela.
Can populism thrive without a genuinely popular, charismatic leader, or
are movements like Chávismo doomed to fade into insignificance once they
have lost their quasi-deities?
Let’s pluck this question from Venezuela and rephrase it here at
home: What are the implications of Mueller’s question on the future of
politics in Kenya? For two decades, Kenyans have enjoyed, and abused in
equal measure, the privilege to form and join political parties.
After repeal of section 2(A) of the former constitution, plural
politics returned to the people. The initial ‘fear’ of President Moi
then was that multiparty democracy would plunge Kenya into runaway
tribalism. As to whether Kenya was better off with one party under him
is a conversation for the future. However, we did enter multipartism.
Throughout our political experiment as an independent nation, there has
been popular politicking by an individual, a party, or a coalition of
parties.
By definition, populism, a grey area in the discipline of political
science, can be said to be any political formation which ‘panders to the
masses, by offering simplistic policy solutions’. It is playing
politics in the ideal sense. The contemporary Kenyan political dictum
can safely describe it as ‘massaging the masses’.
In the Kenyan context, no politician exemplifies the ideals of this
plurality than Raila Odinga. While Jaramogi is fondly referred to as the
‘doyen of opposition politics in Kenya’, the younger Odinga sure fits
the description of ‘father of popular politics’. He is, to paraphrase
Mueller, “genuinely popular, charismatic and a quasi-deity”.
In a decade where every political toddler is as ambitious as Eugene
Wamalwa, with the propensity to ‘speak’ on behalf of a ‘community’;
however disunited or diminutive that community is; Raila Odinga, despite
no current opinion polls, is still the most popular political leader in
Sub-Saharan Africa.
This popularity is centrally the result of a long era of political
populism, which is not necessarily the same thing as opposition
politics. For decades, Odinga projected himself as an anti-establishment
leader whom, given the reins of power, would ‘radically’ redistribute
the national cake to the ‘masses’ who felt neglected by the politics of
the day.
How then do we describe populism, safely, from opposition politics?
One of the defining features of populism is the idea of ‘pandering to
the masses’. Within the masses is a ‘public’ which each political leader
has to reify. Essentially, the ‘masses’ is a political abstraction. It
may or may not exist. In Kenya, it is the public within the masses which
counts.
Populism thrives when disproportionately higher members of a society
feel genuinely excluded. The populist leader provides a kind of
psychological solution (that things will be better) to a political
problem (that those in power do not care about our well-being). Populist
leaders provide moral voters with political identities.
They make voters identify with the disempowering results of
oppression, exclusion, exploitation and corruption of the ruling elite.
While this may be true in other regions, it has failed in Kenya, thanks
to ethnicity. The elites in leadership, being ethnic bigots, easily
hoodwink the masses they ravage.
Why did populist politics lose in Kenya? First, the number of
‘populist publics’ was lower than that of ‘ethnic publics’. I here mean
those who identified with the ‘ethnic figurehead’ were more than those
who identified with the ‘popular figurehead’ within the ‘masses’.
Odinga, a popular figurehead took on Uhuru, an ethnic figurehead and
Ruto, another ethnic jingoist.
The danger with populism is that it has no absolute monopoly over the
masses where ethnicity is stronger than the combined cast of poverty,
exploitation, corruption, and oppression. Again, on these issues, even
the bourgeoisie elites, the mutilator of the common sense of the masses,
can lay claim to. This explains why both the manifestoes and pledges of
the March 4 political protagonists had the same freebies for the
masses.
In the Kenyan context, populism has thrived due to the twin issues of
economic and social injustices, commonly referred to as ‘historical
injustices’. When Odinga was denied the pedestal to enumerate on these
issues, he lost the ground to ‘pander to the masses’, yet populism
cannot thrive without this pandering! Checkmate?
The other danger with populism is the unquestioningly righteous
leader. The divine leader. A lot has been said, for instance, on the
shambolic ODM nominations. A lot continue to be said of the mediocrity
with which Orange House conducted the affairs of the last campaigns.
Yet, despite all these clatter; no one really has the temerity to tell
Odinga that ODM must be reengineered.
When I saw the list of those engaged in the latest PR of picking a
new Executive Director for the ODM party, it just confirms one failing
of populism: the idea that because the leader holds the ‘authentic will
of the people’, thus must not be subjected to any checks. I still
maintain that heads should roll in ODM, otherwise, the ‘aggrieved
majority’ will turn their anger on the popular leader, as it already
happened in Nyanza during nominations.
Finally, on the question of whether popular leaders can nurture
dissidence, this again is an absolute no! Prof Mueller puts it thus,
“Populists can live with representative democracy; what they cannot
accept is political pluralism and the notion of legitimate opposition”.
Does this explain the phenomenon of Odinga stranglehold on Nyanza? And
the emerging Uhuruto power bloc?
Can populism thrive without a genuinely popular leader?
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