Ol Kalou fallout reveals protocol cracks, bruises presidency image

Ol Kalou last Wednesday was a powder keg. The lesson was clear. Kenya is going through a monumental political crisis, way beyond mere presidential politics. And it could crescendo in a monumental crash, animated by poor judgment in the State House and absence of manners in the political class. 

You don’t lecture the President in public; certainly not with the abandon, disdain, and hasty bluster that was witnessed in Nyandarua, at the funeral service for the MP for Ol Kalou, David Njuguna Kiaraho. National security was never so endangered, and the situation so precarious, since October 1969. Then, President Jomo Kenyatta was sucked into a catastrophic verbal exchange with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. 

The Kisumu occasion was the official opening of the New Nyanza Provincial Hospital, today the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University Teaching Hospital. Like Rigathi Gachagua today, Jaramogi, was then a former deputy to the President, following a bitter fallout. He had his own political party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), much the same way Gachagua has his Democratic Citizens’ Party (DCP) today. 

Seated in the front rows, Jaramogi took on Mzee in a verbal blow-by-blow free-for-all. The incident left dozens dead, following a police shootout that secured President Kenyatta from the hostile surging crowd and gave him safe passage from Kisumu. History records that random shooting went on even as the presidential motorcade hastily left Kisumu.

Wrong judgement

They shot in the air, and at times at people, as stone throwers carried on with the missile assault against the President. It was a tragic day that should never have been. Wrong political judgment and the collapse of protocol in a hostile civic season were to blame.

Fifty-seven years later, Kenyan leaders demonstrate that they have learned nothing from their country’s history. Or, maybe, history does not matter? There was failure all around. Protocol failed, as did message discipline and dignitary protection. Crowd temperature management failed.  

National intelligence appeared to have slept on the job or had been ignored. Reckless personal bravado, anger, and performing to the gallery overwhelmed wisdom and common sense. “I respect you, but I am not afraid of you!” Senator John Methu of Nyandarua screamed at President Ruto, looking him in the face, to wild cheers from the charged crowd. Picking up the cue from the multitudes, the senator challenged the Kikuyu MP Kimani Ichung’wa to a verbal duel if he was man enough.

Ichung’wa is in the habit of hurling political slurs at Gachagua, Methu said. He dared him to repeat that now and see what would follow. It is never the done thing. Nor was the 28-minute lecture Gachagua gave the President in order. Two things are not in doubt. Leadership ethics are at an all-time low. State organizational competence is in a free fall.   

The top brass is at once casual, insensitive, and irresponsible. The need for the political top to reorganize itself speaks for itself, with President Ruto in the lead. If not for his own good, but for the nation, the President could pause his pre-2027 cross-country activities to ask himself a few useful questions, or risk sinking the country into Armageddon.  

A public event that involves the President is always scripted to avoid escalations of the kind that took place in Ol Kalou. Protocol is not a cosmetic affair on such occasions. It is a risk control system. Accordingly, the order of precedence is critical. Who sits where? Who speaks? When, and for how long? What is the messaging discipline? 

 If possible, messages must be validated upfront. This is not censorship. It is not done so much because no one wants the President to be told home-truths. Told, he must be. Yet, it is rather because of the sense of occasion and type of gathering.  

Dignitary protection is not just physical. It is also reputational and symbolic. When Methu strips President Ruto naked in public, the dignity of the presidency collapses. It is no longer Ruto who is naked. It is the institution itself. The symbolism that the man brings to the occasion is thoroughly wounded. Hence, the President could still be told the things that were said at that very event, but the messenger must be a lot more sophisticated and conscious of the oxygen of discourse.  

Crowd temperature is especially critical. When an ex-deputy president lectures a sitting president, and a senator declares defiance, anarchy is not too far off. The drama speaks to either deliberate political theatre, with a bigger agenda, or to total collapse in the enforcement of authority. History teaches us that such moments are volatile.  

The charged gallery in Ol Kalou came close enough to a re-enactment of the 1969 Kisumu drama. Now, Ol Kalou was not just a lapse in manners. It was the absence of political discipline, all around, but especially an indictment against State protocol and State intelligence services, or at the very minimum, failure to integrate State intelligence in presidential outings. Whatever sins Gachagua and Co committed, the State must ultimately blame itself.  

Traditionally, the office of the Comptroller of the State House will be sufficiently apprised beforehand of the structure of the programme and its control. He will discuss the programme with key stakeholders, in this case the bereaved family and the Church, and agree on the speakers and the order of precedence. There can be no surprises. In Ol Kalou, Gachagua gleefully chose when to come in and how long his speech was going to be. He was at home, exercising power. It is never done that way. 

The comptroller, the Ministry of Interior, and the Presidential security escort all slept on the job. It is not about democracy and freedom of expression; it is about state security. And state security is not just about the President. Ultimately, it is about the citizens. A chaotic rumpus in Ol Kalou could have easily led to loss of more lives in the bereaved family, as well as among the dignitaries on the stage and among the rest of those present, as 1969 reminds us.  

Kenyans have learnt to be mannerless in public forums. Everyone speaks and shouts. Nobody knows what anybody is going to say. Enforcement of speaking limits is not a luxury. It is about the sense of occasion and avoiding escalation. Pre-clearing speeches for message and tone, as well as on-site command, is of the essence.  

Protocol dictates that nobody will re-order the proceedings or take away microphones, as was done when Methu was on the floor. But the understanding is also that Methu will perform in an orderly manner, which is to say he will stay on his funerary message, that remains both grave and relevant to condoling with the bereaved.  

The worst failure, however, was in intelligence gathering and the use of feedback from the ground. President Ruto will have known upfront about what awaited him, and especially about political hostility. The vibes from the Mountain these past few months have been decidedly against him.  

If intel have not told President Ruto that the Mountain has rejected him, then they are a liability to him. On this particular occasion, they will be expected to have briefed the President on the stormy headwinds he was going to run into. Their work is to make pre-event threat assessment, to profile local actors and their likely conduct, and to get early signals of elite dissent and crowd agitation.  

They will have advised the President against the wisdom of making the trip. The deceased was not known to be close to him, nor was any other member of that family. It can only be concluded that Ruto came to the funeral purely for vote hunting and political goal scoring. Did he end up scoring in his own goal? Intel will have told him that this was what he was going to do. He engaged in lowly replies to comparative political minnows, addressing each accusation made against him, blow-by-blow, and pouring out as much venom as had been spewed against him.  

Did the President ignore intelligence reports? If not so, are those who are supposed to brief the President afraid of him? Do they walk on eggshells and give him inaccurate pictures? It is instructive that the President reminded the gathering that he is the President. He does not need to ask for permission from anybody in order for him to visit any part of the country. 

Constitutionally, the President is a national figure. It is true, accordingly, that he goes wherever he wants in the country. Yet, the visits will be selectively prioritised. After October 1969, Mzee Kenyatta never returned to Kisumu, and to Nyanza as a whole, up to the very end of his life, in August 1978. It was a full nine-year absence by the head of state and government from a whole region of his country. It was not because Mzee Kenyatta did not consider his presidency to extend to Luo Nyanza.  

Basic wisdom

Nor did Kenyatta believe that someone should first clear him for a visit. It was basic wisdom. He had all the guns and other paraphernalia of crowd management and control. Yet, President Kenyatta had taken lessons from the ugly scenes at Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica during the Tom Mboya requiem mass in July of that year.  

Lives had been lost when protests against the Mboya assassination went ballistic, outside the basilica. Nairobi was placed under curfew. Then came the ugly happenings of October. Kenyatta did not surrender the ground to his adversaries; he only appreciated the futility of escalating volatile situations, even when one has the capacity to put down a protest. 

Indeed, in July, Kenyatta had stayed away from the Mboya funeral on Rusinga Island for the same considerations. Together with him was the entire political class from the Mt. Kenya region, except J.M. Kariuki, who received a hero’s welcome on the island as he laid a wreath on Mboya’s grave. Six years later, President Kenyatta skipped another significant burial due to heightened tensions, this time that of J.M. Kariuki himself, in March 1975.  

Wisdom guides leaders that way, regardless of whether it is their own wisdom or wisdom they receive from the notables around them. President Mwai Kibaki stayed away from Nyanza after the unfortunate happenings of 2007/2008, when close to 1,300 Kenyans died in post-election violence. He did not stay away because of a lack of courage or out of disdainful dismissiveness. It was the prudent thing to do in heightened tensions. Kibaki did not stop exercising presidential jurisdiction over Nyanza. 

Then came the bad blood season between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, in the tension-packed competitions of 2010-2018. Both in 2013 and 2017, Uhuru kept his election campaigns out of Nyanza. Once again, it was not out of dismissiveness nor cowardice. A judicious leader knows when not to risk the lives of his people, just because he wants to prove a point.  

Away from the political class, Ol Kalou is an indictment of the clergy. It has reminded us, once again, of failure by the Church. It is a paradox that Church leaders habitually surrender their shrines to abuse by the political class, but will go on to blame them the following day. Like politicians, Church leaders, including those in mainstream churches, have become performative.   

Every discerning Church leader understands that any space in which two or three Christians assemble in the name of Christ becomes a shrine, instantly. The funeral service is a sacrosanct ecclesiastical forum, governed by liturgical rules.  Whether it is the Catholic Missal, the Lectionary, or the Breviary, there is no room for surrender to the political class to pollute a Church function with mannerlessness. For this laxity, the Kenyan nation often totters on the brink of collapse.