[UAH] It pays to treat political rivals with civility - Opinion - nation.co.ke

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/It-pays-to-treat-political-rivals-with-civility/-/440808/1884044/-/m2g8ap/-/index.html

Uhuru Kenyatta has a choice of only two ways in which to rule us. The one is to wield the 'kirungu' with which Daniel arap Moi once bludgeoned Kenya into submission. The other is to try – 'kuga na guika' – to convince all of us to rally happily round his banner.

The second, I submit, is the one in which all Kenyans – including the President himself – are objectively interested.

But good government is not a one-way thoroughfare. Successful pursuit of the second path poses two questions. There is, on the one hand, the President's own initiatives, namely, what he is doing to popularise himself nationwide.

There is, also what you – who claim to be supporters and aides – are doing to promote the President's programme to unite the country and set it upon the road to Mugo Kibati's 2030 destination.

For, as a concept, support is always double-edged. It can be marvellously objective and it can be horrendously subjective.

It always raises the question: Does it really help the President to unite the country, thus ruling it with ease and gaining national popularity, when his own immediate aides deliberately say or do things in the President's name which can only anger large masses of ethnic citizens around the country?

A supporter who holds a responsible position in Uhuru Kenyatta's government or party or just tribe – if he or she is also educated well enough, socially, to be conscious of Kenya's larger and longer-term national interests – will know much better than to utter statements or perpetrate actions which can only provoke the Mijikenda, Kamba, Luhya, Luo and other ethnic communities into withdrawing their support from the President.

Many aides of whoever for the time being occupies State House who come from the President's ethnic community think that they are promoting the President's cause by doing things intended to embarrass the leaders of such major communities, especially if the leader of a certain community happens to have given the President quite a run for his money in a presidential contest in which neither side was very good-mannered and polished with its words.

It doesn't cost the victorious party even a single 'ndururu' to be polite and even generous to its losing rivals. Indeed – like all other moral injunctions in the larger society – politeness is not an end in itself.

In a volatile tribal situation, a hardnosed victor knows the political benefits to be bagged by treating with civility and respect the leaders of the communities that voted against him and offering them tangible material goodies after the polls.

I know many thinking individuals in my community who, although they supported Raila Odinga in the polls, took Uhuru Kenyatta's victory with educated resignation and were preparing to work with him or for him or under him or in any other capacity as good citizens – but whose empathy with the system has been seriously eroded by the manner in which certain flibbertigibbets in Uhuru's outfit have treated Raila Odinga in the new President's name.

If Uhuru Kenyatta allows them to go on with this tyrannical philistinism, he will have estranged whole communities all over the country and made it difficult for those communities to support his government full-heartedly or at all. He will have made the task of governing Kenya increasingly more difficult.

If you want Uhuru to rule smoothly, peacefully and for a long time, then please try to sell him to all Kenyans through exemplary conduct.

Every statesman, politician and bureaucrat should by now be deeply embarrassed by the horrors that African states have done to their oppositions ever since independence.

Often it is a result merely of unfounded fears and a beastly urge, when in power, to reduce political opponents to ciphers.

But what it has done to our continent in terms of resources and prestige is too ghastly to recall.