By Gab O
As part of his job, President Uhuru Kenyatta receives daily briefs from the National Intelligence Service (NIS). If there is a state outfit in this country that doesn’t deal in massaging egos, the NIS are the real deal.
The NIS reports never lie. They have no incentive to lie. Their work is to collect intelligence and pass it on, as raw as they get it, as fast as they get it. Everything happening in this country has someone high up the government food chain who is aware of it.
If the government knows things, it is because the NIS tells them. The government knows everyone you are sleeping with, the witchdoctor who gave you that alligator soup, and the money you buried in that shallow grave.
President Uhuru Kenyatta receives intel briefs every morning with regards to the August 8th general elections. He knows who is ahead in the presidential race, and by what margin.
y virtue of his position, as both Head of State and Commander-In-Chief of the Defense Forces, President Uhuru Kenyatta knows things even his Deputy isn’t privy to. Things that could help him govern better. Things that could help him win this election.
You do not need to be a non-verbal communications expert to know that President Uhuru Kenyatta’s NIS briefs makes for grim reading. Opinion polls may massage results for security and other man-made reasons, but the NIS presents them as they are.
You could tell Uhuru Kenyatta is not doing well; his tone has increasingly become unpresidential. You watched him in Baringo that day pacing up and down the podium like a pregnant toad, screaming at the Judiciary. On Tuesday, he stood in Nyeri and told the crowd that the media has never supported him and there was no need for him to return the favor. He has blamed everything there is to be blamed. The only excuse remaining is to blame the dog for eating his homework.
What Uhuru Kenyatta does not know is that Kenyans watch these things, and Kenyans are not stupid people. Whoever advised Uhuru Kenyatta to skip the debate has a brain as flat as a pancake.
Any candidate who opts out of debating his main rival is a cowardly loser. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter chose not to debate Ronald Reagan because independent candidate, John Anderson, was included. Ronald Reagan showed up, and won the subsequent election.
Nine years ago, in the height of the US financial crisis, Republican candidate John McCain said that he wanted to postpone the first debate asking his rival, Barack Obama, to accompany him, instead, to Washington to help with the financial crisis. Senator Barack Obama declined the offer, saying that he would be in the debate regardless, since it was going to be part of the president’s job to be able to deal with more than one thing at the same time. John McCain relented and came to the debate, his initial hesitation throwing his campaign off balance. He lost.
You could spin that no-show all you want, but any military adviser would tell you that Uhuru Kenyatta handed over his ammunition to Raila Odinga to kill him off. Military doctrine dictates that when your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened, as Raila Odinga and his NASA forces are, the first thing to do, to claw back lost ground, is to never give them breathing space.
Instead of spending time with advisors well versed with political war, Uhuru Kenyatta chose to listen to people whose only claim to fame is cloning social media accounts and tweeting bad English with them.
And the results are beginning to show.
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