Political transition within the Luo community should not be confused with transition within the ODM Party. The Luo community can stay with Raila Odinga as the community’s supreme political leader but ODM should have an organized transition to the NEXT LEADER.
We cannot claim ODM is a national party but when its national assumptions are about to be tested, we run to funerals in Siaya to Luonize the party. This is hypocrisy.
Let us learn from Uhuru Kenyatta’s failure to organize a proper transition both within the Kikuyu community and his party, Jubilee. Uhuru wanted to remain both the ultimate Kikuyu political leader and the Jubilee leader. He still passes himself as both.
What younger Kikuyu community leaders did was to leave his party, and then the whole edifice as ‘leader of the Kikuyu community’ came tumbling down. Luo politicians cannot do this, though.
Kenya is a constitutional democracy. Political
Parties are creations of our constitutional order. Our politics may be “tribe based” but power is constitutionally regulated. The ODM Party is a constitutional creation. Some think it is the property of Raila Odinga which may very well be the case but in a larger sense, ODM registration instruments are deposited with the Registrar of Political Parties and the party is audited by OAG. In this respect, the Party is a Public entity.
I am not one of those people interested in Luo kingpin politics. I don’t care who becomes the next Luo kingpin just as I din’t care who was the last. Ooh and I don’t care either who is the present. These are things that excite the unschooled.
What I do know is that in a properly functioning democracy, ODM’s next Party Leader can only be sourced from the delegates of the party, in a properly constituted electoral college. The next Party Leader, when he/she finally takes the reins of the party, must move quick to re-establish the party as a truly MASS MOVEMENT.
Only then will the party survive as a behemoth it is today.
