Those who have been singing and dancing to the 2022 tune have been of late falling by the wayside one after another having instead to rally calls for national unity and support for Building Bridges Initiative.
And this last Friday, it was the turn of ODM’s National Executive Committee to expel the hitherto coast renegade MPs Aisha Jumwa from Malindi and Suleiman Dori of Msambweni from the Party and de-whipping them from all the House committees.
ODM argued that their support for 2022 was a misbehaviour because the handshake never gave any of them the mandate to campaign for anyone else but only for ODM. Previously Jumwa and Dori argued that the spirit of the handshake meant they could campaign for any one for 2022.
But last Friday they appeared to make a hasty retreat when they employed the same spirit of the handshake to ask for forgiveness from their Party, saying that under the handshake, nothing under the sun is unforgivable. Whether as Likoni MP this is another hand of the Mombasa governor fighting his critics, one thing is sure, namely that their goose is cooked.
Let’s call a spade a spade, in Kenya political parties have their owners. Anyone who wants to succeed would be better off being in their own party. Whoever said that a week is a long time in politics, must have been right. Nothing is permanent except political ambition. No permanent enemies and no permanent friends. Just like in war, troops may be ordered to retreat for tactful purposes, which in itself may never mean a truce.
Politicians know better that eating one’s own words has never choked an individual. This is why Aisha Jumwa and the like may have reckoned that by taking back their word that they would die for their 2022 candidate, could just be a stalk realization that the Kenyan political landscape is so slippery a ground that whoever has no steady feet of his own may easily lose his political footing.
To sing and dance to a political tune which is not one’s own is a risky game. Dancing to another’s tune must be accompanied by constant reading the movements of the lips and the feet of the owner of the dancing tune, since as a matter of political rule..
Aisha Jumwa and Dori should have known better that the issue of 2022 had been purely a Jubilee internal affair and not one for ODM.