According to the East African Standard of Monday February 18th, 37 Mungiki suspects were caught red handed in the middle of an oath in Nairobi. According to the Report, the Mungiki terror gang was to be transported to Rift Valley by un-named people to engage in acts of murder as a solution is sought to the political crisis in Kenya. The paper estimated that 200 members of the gang who may have also taken the oath may have fled because police were too few to arrest them.
Obviously, it would be fool-hardy to think that members of Mungiki, who said that they had been transported from Muranga and Maragua, were in Nairobi taking oaths to support ODM. The capture of the youths is yet another confirmation that PNU bosses and their supporters are scheming for more violence because they might have reached a decision that they will never accept a deal that involves power sharing with ODM as has been proposed by Kofi Annan and his team.
If you listen carefully to repeated and elaborate rants by Moses Wetangula, one of the newly acquired and most aggressive PNU lapdogs, you get the impression that the rehearsed position within PNU inner circle is that the talks can continue but at the end of the day, it is PNU which will decide how to deal with the crisis.
ODM is in the rare situation of negotiating with a thief which has stolen a trophy, got caught in broad day light before being cornered to return the trophy. The oath taking by fresh Mungiki goons, the resistance of PNU to power sharing in the absence of a better alternative and the strong language of PNU hard liners should point to a “No deal” unless something dramatic happens.
In their recalcitrance, PNU is forgetting two issues – that ODM leadership has to deliver a deal that is not just acceptable to millions of Kenyans who voted for change but which also addresses the crisis in a convincing way. If this does not happen, ODM risks becoming irrelevant in the political situation while the future will remain rife with possible and new conflicts if the main issues are not sorted out now.
Secondly, the PNU strategy of “Rig elections, pour GSU in the streets to kill people and ask opponents to go to court” is dead. For PNU tacticians, this crisis was supposed to take three days or, at most, one week while the possibility of International mediation to resolve the crisis never appeared in PNU’s survival kit. Now that International attention is focused on Kenya, the best PNU hardliners could have done was to acknowledge the reality and respond proportionately. This is not happening because PNU wants to retain power “By all means” after rigging elections.
It is still too early to make further comments on the solution because the details have not yet been worked out. However, indications are that PNU will try to resist as much as possible to ensure that any deal leaves them with considerable control of both the State and the government. Since ODM will not accept such an arrangement (unless the leadership wants to carry the tag of betrayers like Kalonzo Musyoka), it is likely that a solution could still be far. The question is how long Kenyans will be able to wait as PNU dilly-dallies.
Okoth Osewe
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