“The pursuit of power is a raw and practical matter which does not yield to Raila Odinga’s theoretical and abstract notions. The game of power is a primitive and primordial affair that does not fit well in Raila’s idealistic and utopian perspective.
When it comes to power, modern man is still at a rather elementary stage of development. It is survival of the fittest. Power is often a brutal game of instinct and intuition requiring speed, fluidity, and decisiveness.
In this fast-paced game of thrones, you can’t afford to take any chances — if you snooze you lose,” so writes Saitabao ole Kanchory in his new book, Why Baba is not the 5th, in which he details how former Prime Minister Raila Odinga (Baba) lost the 2022 presidential election.
The book is long on promise and short on delivery especially on hard evidence to back the often-sweeping claims made. Kanchory mostly writes in a rushed and almost breathless manner. From the onset, he is like a charging bull — dropping possible innuendos, hearsay, and facts.
He lobs a grenade at the Azimio campaign team for acting “as though the vicious game of power was some kind of child’s play”. He paints our politics as something darker — and despairing—when he writes: “Presidential elections in this part of the world are not won or lost; they are taken — power is for the strong not the weak.
To be president in Kenya, you must be ready and willing to outspend, outsmart and outdo your opponent at every level… as for Raila Odinga… he doesn’t seem to want power bad enough to be able to take the oft-unscrupulous measures necessary to get the job done”.
Whatever the critics say (and some have dismissed his book outright), Kanchory has contributed to literature with this work.
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town,” Leo Tolstoy once wrote. And Kanchory’s work is about a man (Mr Odinga) going on a journey but somehow not reaching the desired destination (State House) — somehow, always, falling short — seemingly perpetually so. There is something heart-breaking and sorrowfully wistful about a man who always suffers the same setback.
An Encounter
This search for an exotic destination in Kanchory’s book reminds one of the short story “An Encounter” in the anthology of short stories entitled Dubliners by the great Irish writer, James Joyce.
In “An Encounter”, an unnamed narrator tells of his adventure on the day he (with a friend) decides to skip school looking for adventure. Their destination is a place called the Pigeon House.
The narrator had invited two friends but only one named Mahony shows up. They start the journey but do not get to their destination. Instead, they have a strange, wild west encounter with a weird man who is a scary character, maybe even perverse.
Juxtaposing Joyce’s “An Encounter” with Kanchory’s book, Mr Odinga could symbolise the narrator and his friend (who shows up at least) could represent the Azimio team.
They set off for State House (the Pigeon House) but immediately after, plans go awry and their expectations are thwarted when they hit the turbulent frontier of Kenyan politics characterised by roughness and chaos. The Azimio team encountered the wild west of politics (like the strange man the narrator and Mahony encounter) and they fail to reach their destination.
The narrator, who comes up with the exotic dream, could symbolise Mr Odinga and Mahony who needs to take action for that dream to be fulfilled could symbolise the Azimio team.
The campaign journey as depicted by Kanchory is a tale of the dismemberment of the dreams of Mr Odinga — who is painted as somehow passive with other people deciding his destiny. Like Joyce’s narrator who cannot act, Raila is painted as immensely inactive — a character impotent to change the course of events of his own presidential campaign, with his opponents constantly outsmarting him.
Kanchory should be lauded for his effort because, like other writers, he must have grappled with the writer’s greatest struggle — desperately trying to capture moments that were disappearing and freezing into words the fluidity of the occurrences before they vanished, probably gnawed by a fear that he couldn’t quite capture the moments that were already fading.
There are many untold stories that need to be told and writers can borrow a leaf from Kanchory. If there are people who dispute the events as told in Why Baba is not the 5th, they should write their rebuttals. Kenyans talk too much and write very little, especially in books.
We need to write our stories down for posterity whether people will find them enjoyable or controversial. Chinua Achebe once said that: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”. If we don’t tell our stories, we’ll lose power over our own narratives and others will tell our stories from their own points of view.
