By Dorcas S
President Uhuru Kenyatta and his supporters are having a difficult time coming to terms with the just-announced details of the September 1 SCOK ruling that nullified his “win”. In their mind, as verbalized by Mr. Kenyatta, SCOK rejected a “valid election where he, Uhuru, was declared winner with a big margin”.
Overlooked in this pity party is the SCOK ruling – that 2017 General Elections were “irregular and illegal”; that the process used to arrive at the results and margins were fraught with “systemic institutional problems…..”
Simply put, Jubilants cannot wrap their collective heads around what CJ David Maraga alluded to in his brief but definitive September 1 comments:
That an election is a process, not an event and the August 8 process was flawed.
Viewed thus and as described by Blanchard & Fabyrcyk (Systems Engineering and Analysis), the 2017 Elections was a series of interrelated activities that should have been executed towards a common endpoint in this case, the election of a president. Briefly, the interrelated AND more importantly, sequential set of activities include (a) Voting, (b) Vote Tallying, (c) Transmission of tallied results to the IEBC, (d) verification of results by IEBC (e) formal announcement of the results. It is this perspective that informed the saying by the father of America’s quality evolution William Deming:
That “if what one is doing cannot be described as a series of steps i.e. a process, then one does not know what they are doing.”
Uhuru Kenyatta, and I’d argue his supporters, cannot grasp Mr. Deming’s observation, indeed universal truism either because (i) he is too dumb (he is not), (ii) he is too stubborn or he (iii) he has an overbearing sense of entitlement.
My bet is that he is the latter two – stubborn and entitled.
On being stubborn, let me offer Mr. Kenyatta’s handling of the NYS scandal as Exhibit A. The man was dragged kicking and screaming towards acknowledging what most of us already knew – that his confidante and CS of DevPlanning Anne Waiguru was front and center in a scandal that bilked almost one billion shillings from said department.
Regarding an overwhelming sense of entitlement, one word: “Uthamakism” – the deluded construct that the presidency of Kenya is the sole purview of one, maybe two tribes – in order, Gikuyus (mbari ya Mumbi) and Kalenjins.
The construct is deluded because once upon a time, the idea of the Kenyan presidency leaving the mythical “House of Mumbi” was considered a “passing cloud”; that whoever the “cloud” was would be a “pliant leader” terrified into doing the bidding of/for Mumbi’s house (Alec Russell – Big Men, Little People: The Leaders Who Defined Africa).
The “pliant” “passing cloud”, as the Moi presidency was derisively referred to by Jomo Kenyatta’s inner circle, lasted over a quarter century!
Strike I
Along with never leaving “Nyumba ya Mumbi”, Kenya’s presidency was not supposed to cross the Chania River from Kiambu into Nyeri!
If my knowledge of Kenyan geography and politics is accurate, Kenya’s 3rd president Mwai Kibaki, is from Othaya in Nyeri – across the Chania River!
Strike II
The way I see it, a crucial piece of the puzzle re: the evolution of the democratization process fell into place on Sept 1, 2017. The construct of an independent and co-equal branch of government, in this case the Judiciary, that is not malleable to the whims of an overbearing and entitled Office of the President stood up and asserted its rightful place as outline by the country’s constitution.
So what is Strike III and final nail in the coffin of this sequence of events?
The election of someone outside the traditional duopoly that has been Kenya’s presidency?
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