Kenyan politics is a theatre in which yesterday’s scandals become tomorrow’s memoirs, yesterday’s rivals become tomorrow’s running mates, and a Sunday-night television interview can double as an application letter for the highest offices in the land. On Sunday, Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru arrived on Citizen TV’s Sunday Live, hosted by Jeff Koinange, with an assortment of political ambitions, historical grievances and some pointed advice for the opposition. The menu was distinctly Kenyan: a little succession politics, a serving of Edwin Sifuna, and NYS reheated for the benefit of an audience that apparently refuses to forget.
Waiguru’s principal announcement was hardly a whisper. She wants to be Deputy President. Having served under three administrations, and having twice secured the governorship of Kirinyaga, she evidently considers herself qualified to ascend from the county executive to the national executive. In Kenya, political ambition is rarely a private affair. It must be declared, preferably before the cameras, lest the nation mistake silence for contentment.
President William Ruto, meanwhile, received a testimonial from his prospective deputy. Waiguru described him as the hardest-working president she had encountered among the three administrations she had served under. This is the sort of endorsement that ought to be framed and hung somewhere in State House, preferably within sight of the presidential appointment book.
But the deputy presidency is a crowded waiting room. There is no shortage of politicians who believe they possess the requisite experience, regional arithmetic, loyalty and constitutional entitlement. Waiguru has entered the conversation; whether the conversation ends with her name on the ballot is another matter entirely.
Her assessment of Edwin Sifuna was less generous. The Nairobi senator, who has declared his presidential ambitions, was told, in effect, that the presidency might be a destination for another day. Waiguru questioned whether established opposition figures, including Kalonzo Musyoka and Fred Matiang’i, would subordinate their own ambitions to support Sifuna.
It was a reasonable observation about the opposition’s perennial difficulty: everyone wants unity, provided unity means everyone else rallying behind them. The opposition has long treated the selection of a presidential candidate like a family meeting at which every uncle arrives expecting to chair.
Then came NYS, the ghost that has proved remarkably resistant to political exorcism.
Waiguru rejected the continued use of the scandal against her, insisting that those involved had been prosecuted and that her critics were merely throwing mud. “Everybody has got a stain,” she said.
There is something distinctly Kenyan about the metaphor. Public life becomes a laundry in which every politician insists that their stains are either ancient, misunderstood, somebody else’s handiwork or insufficiently washed by the electorate. Waiguru has consistently denied wrongdoing in the scandal, and her electoral victories are part of the record she invokes in defending her leadership. Yet winning elections and answering historical questions are not mutually exclusive obligations.
Her frustration with the persistence of NYS is understandable as a political calculation: no aspiring deputy wants to spend an interview discussing a controversy from a previous administration when there is a future office to discuss. But public memory is not obliged to observe campaign timetables.
And so Jeff Koinange’s studio became, for an evening, a miniature of Kenya’s approaching succession contest: ambition presented as readiness, loyalty presented as qualification, and old controversies presented as matters that ought to have expired.
Waiguru has made her application. Sifuna has his ambitions. Kalonzo and Matiang’i have theirs. Ruto has a re-election campaign to consider.
The only people yet to receive their invitations are the voters, who will eventually be expected to approve the arrangements.