The angry reaction from a section of suspect readers of this blog illustrates the current mood in State House perfectly.
Why do I call the readers of a blog suspect? For the simple reason that their behaviour is bizarre to say the least. Their comments clearly suggest that they abhor and strongly disagree with the content in this blog. Ordinarily when you do not like something that you see on the web, you move on. Time is precious. And yet this group of readers have stayed on, saying everything they know how to discredit every story published here. They have refused to leave. Make your own conclusions as to who they really are and what their real objective is.
When I re-introduced comment moderation yesterday, this group was extremely angry. Threats poured in as I moderated and I deleted most of them. It was easy to sense the frustration at the fact that things did not go their way. The carefully and well thought out damage they had planned for the most popular Kenyan blog had been thwarted.
The mood is the same inside Mwai Kibaki’s State house as handlers scramble to find a way to keep the Kibaki administration going for another couple of months. Their plan to enforce the daylight vote theft has met with much stronger resistance than they had imagined. Despite the largest deployment of security forces countrywide in the history of the country, the situation is much worse than it was on 30th December, the ill-fated day when a few individuals inside State House decided to bite the bullet and execute a broad day light robbery of the presidential elections.
Still Kibaki hopes against all hope that the whole crisis will somehow blow over and Kenyans and the international community will come to that place where they accept him as their president for the next 5 years. But the Kibaki think tank is up against enormous odds and it is probably dawning on them just how expensive stealing an election can be.
On the political front there is a problem that scares Mwai Kibaki, the economics professor, more than anything else. In fact much more than Raila Odinga and 6 months of mass action. That thing is members of the Kikuyu tribe driven out of their land. Many of our readers here have no interest of history but the colonial government did many things to Africans which they got away with. Things went badly wrong for them when they drove Kikuyus out of their land. You just don’t do that.
This time around the Kikuyu have been driven from their land by members of the Kalenjin tribe. Information reaching this blogger is to the effect that already the reverberations of this land issue are starting to be felt amongst Members of parliament from Kikuyu areas. Chances are high that they will soon start to break ranks with the rest of the community. Kenyans are about to find out just how close and devoted to the land those from the house of Mumbi are. The minute the Kikuyu unity fails, the Kibaki administration will hardly survive a few weeks.
But even if the Kikuyu unity somehow holds, the entire world community has rejected the presidential results. In other words nobody who matters in the world believes that Mwai Kibaki won the presidential vote. What everybody does not seem to agree on is the way forward from this truth. Some say the country is not ready for a re-run. Others say that nothing else can solve this crisis short of another presidential election. Despite the tensions I tend to believe that only this second alternative will work to get the nation out of its’ current crisis.
Meanwhile Raila Odinga and ODM have announced that they have now halted their mass action protest and will now seek other means. Apparently those other means have been leaked out and now most people know that it is going to be some form of economic boycott where ODM will ask its’ supporters to boycott certain products and companies who support the illegal government of Mwai Kibaki. Will this new strategy work? Actually everything depends on execution, but if this plan is carried out well, then it could end up being much more effective than the street protests.
But even as the government has to deal with all these immediate emergencies there is parliament looming ever closer and there is no guarantee that the huge “cash incentives” currently being thrown around will work as was proved by the election of the speaker which the government side lost narrowly despite heavy investment.
Incidentally parliament requires a simple majority to pass a vote of no confidence against the Kibaki government and send the country back to the polls`. Some analysts think that this is unlikely because the sitting MPs would not like to face another expensive campaign where they are not sure of winning. This time, this is not quite true because every member who votes for such a motion will be a hero of the people and will have no problem retaining their seats in the ODM strongholds in such a snap election.
The truth of the matter is that President Kibaki and PNU have lost quite a bit of support after the events of December 30th and ODM and Raila have just been gaining support by the day.
Now concerning money, what many analysts have failed to realize is the huge expenditure that has been used to retain law and order since December 30th. And yet the traditional cash cow of tourism is no more with tourist hotels in Mombasa virtually empty. Tax collection has been at a very low ebb because there are numerous businesses which have not earned any income since before the ill-fated elections. The expenses related to maintaining the peace remain very high.
Experts believe that the government will soon launch instruments of borrowing from the public to get the cash to keep the country going. But one wonders how investors will view a government T-Bill issue in Kenya shillings when it looks like Kenya may end up being another Zimbabwe with hyper inflation in just a few months.
Don’t even mention the expensive exercise of propping up the Kenya shilling that the Central Bank has been busy with in recent times. Predictably when they run out of their forex reserves, the Kenya shilling could well fall like a stone.
So as the pressure mounts, the question is no longer whether this government will make it to 2012, it is simply this; how much longer can Mwai Kibaki survive?
