Of History and lessons

Nov 16, 2008 Ravi Dev

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When Senator Barack Obama first announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States back in 2006, it had immediate reverberations in Kenya. One took the form of a humorous quip that asserted it would be easier for a Luo to become President of the U.S. than of Kenya. The wags were referring, of course, to the fact that Obama’s father had been from the Luo tribe of Kenya, second largest to the Kikuyu, but which had been historically ostracised from power in their ethnically polarised politics. The senior Obama, in fact, had even been related to Obinga Odinga, the Luo leader who had fought for independence alongside Jomo Kenyatta, but was sidelined as Kenyatta consolidated power around his Kikuyu confederates.
Well, Obama has become the next President of the U.S. but Raila Odinga the Luo leader, and son of Obinga Odinga, who won the last general elections of December 2007 in Kenya, has still not achieved the top rung in his country. Only after intense violence was unleashed following the elections was Odinga appointed to the newly-created post of Prime Minister, by President Kibaki, a Kikuyu, in a power-sharing cabinet. For those who have been searching for lessons for our local politics from the U.S. elections, it would be salutary to also keep an eye on the situation in Kenya.
However, this does not mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from the charismatic Mr. Obama. One quality that I have been stressing for some time to our opposition politicians is his pragmatism about the nature of electoral politics. Electoral politics is all about amassing a majority of votes. In our case the mathematical imperative is even smaller: a simple plurality of votes – being the party with the largest number of votes at the end of the day – is all that is required.
During the primaries, the utterances of Mr Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright, on the nature of race relations in the USA, became an issue that refused to disappear in the white community – even after a most nuanced speech by Mr Obama. Mr Obama realised that even though he was receiving the vast majority of African-American votes, he would need the votes of whites to prevail, both in the Primaries and even more so in the general elections afterwards. He made a clean break with the Reverend.
While totally in understanding and appreciation of the plight of African-Americans, he placed responsibility on them for putting their shoulders to the wheel in the struggle for their overall progress. He reached out to whites by placing an increasing stress on his own white heritage.
The US financial meltdown was precipitated after the rug was pulled out from under poor, primarily first-time African American homeowners, who had been suckered into “ninja” mortgages by the wheeler-dealer financial institutions of both Main Street and Wall Street who pocketed billions. Mr Obama studiously avoided stressing the class and race issues of the financial imbroglio as a trillion dollars of taxpayer money is being committed to bail out primarily white businesses even as they excoriate “Black Welfare Queens”.
The point I made was that Mr Obama realised that if he could even hope for white voters, including those who had traditionally voted Democratic in the past, to move past the old divisive stereotypes and destroy established shibboleths, he had to address their concerns – using a vocabulary that they could resonate with. I stressed that this was not “pandering” but simply “realism” in democratic voting. I pointed out that in even the “advanced” democracies, most voters utilised heuristics or “shorthand quick takes” that summarised their overall political orientation and influenced their votes. Politicians who ignore this truism will be decimated.
And this brings us back to societies like Kenya and Guyana that are even more qualitatively divided than the older democracies like the U.S. In the latter, there is always a pool of “swing” voters who will be swayed one way or the other depending on the several parties’ position on issues they consider important. In the U.S., these are the “independents”. In ethnically polarised societies like Kenya and ours, this pool, always small to begin with, is placed under extraordinary strain along the seemingly magnet axis of “identity” during the political campaigns. It becomes even more critical therefore for politicians in such societies, especially those from “minority” sections, to explicitly address the concerns of the “majority” sections, in language that they can appreciate, so as to allay their fears. In our societies, unfortunately, our history has taught us that we practice the politics of “over and under” rather than the politics of “in and out”.
This sensitivity to the heuristics of the Indian plurality in Guyana, labelled the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma, has been sorely lacking in the opposition parties that hope to displace the PPP government from office. In all their public pronouncements, it’s always a case of one step forward, two steps backwards. In my considered opinion, under such a scenario, those in Guyana who believe that they can achieve what Obama did in the U.S., under less contrarian conditions, without even emulating his strategy, are doomed to repeat our old history.
And this is very disappointing because they are going against even the example of Raila Odinga in Kenya, who we pointed out in the beginning, won his country’s last election – even though he is from the minority Luo grouping. Odinga’s route to his majority lay in his willingness to speak up for the majority, which he championed against the old non-Kikuyu dictator, Moi. Only when he was betrayed by the Kikuyu he made president – Kibaki, did he strike out on his own, as did his father before him, with Kenyatta. As Prime Minister, under President Kibaki, Mr Odinga had remained very positive – to Kenya’s stability and prosperity.
If we cannot have an Obama in Guyana, let us at least nurture an Odinga.

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