The handshake is an honoured custom of Kenyan politics. It signifies the approaching collectively of seemingly intractable enemies into an settlement to share the spoils slightly than combat over them. It has at all times been negotiated in secret between a celebration with state energy and a rival claiming well-liked legitimacy and has at all times functioned as a ploy by the political elite to dent well-liked momentum in the direction of any change that threatens to upend the nation’s inflexible political caste system.
It’s a legacy of British colonialism. The primary handshakes have been doled out on the daybreak of colonial rule because the British co-opted native potentates and pretenders as colonial officers, giving them the chance to “eat” as they offered out their folks. Simply previous to granting Kenya independence in 1963, the British executed one other handshake, this time with the particular person they’d scurrilously accused of main the Mau Mau insurrection and jailed for seven years, Jomo Kenyatta. Regardless of labelling him a “chief unto darkness and demise”, they nonetheless minimize a cope with him to clean his approach into energy in return for a promise to let them keep the land they stole.
Within the years following independence, the handshake grew to become the go-to tactic for managing elite contestation for energy in addition to well-liked dissent. Its cynical practicality – as veteran journalist Charles Obbo put it: “each politician has an opportunity to eat. Each deal is feasible. No betrayal is unthinkable” – has paradoxically been chargeable for stopping Kenya’s success in addition to stopping the nation from sliding into violence and anarchy. The handshake that ended the post-election violence in 2008 is a superb instance. It stopped a conflagration sparked by a dispute over the presidential election that had taken greater than 1,300 lives and displaced tons of of others. Nonetheless, it additionally saddled the nation with a regime whose first order of enterprise was to institute a fake maize subsidy scheme that lined the pockets of politicians of all stripes and left a 3rd of the nation ravenous.
One of many two protagonists in that individual episode was Raila Odinga, most likely probably the most prolific practitioner of handshake politics. A everlasting opposition doyen who has by no means formally gained a presidential election – he was a controversial shedding candidate in 5 of the final six elections, a few of which have been stolen from him – he has nonetheless succeeded in executing a power-sharing settlement with every of Kenya’s final 4 presidents.
These agreements have at all times been claimed to be within the nationwide curiosity, however in actuality have allowed him to leverage his recognition to entry the trough. In 2000, he shook hands with former dictator Daniel Arap Moi in what many within the reform motion that was pushing for a brand new structure noticed as a betrayal. His 2008 handshake was with Moi’s successor, Mwai Kibaki. A decade later, in 2018, within the wake of extra violence following one more disputed election, he was at it once more with then-incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Two weeks in the past got here information of one more handshake, this time within the form of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Raila’s Orange Democratic Motion (ODM) social gathering and present President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA). There are some fascinating features to this specific deal.
First, Ruto, then deputy president, was the primary casualty of the 2018 deal. On the time, it was broadly perceived that Kenyatta was paving the way in which for the state to put in Raila as his successor as president in return for quiet in his second time period. Within the course of, he was sacrificing Ruto’s ambitions, regardless of having promised to help him since they bought collectively in 2013 (that’s one more handshake story – the 2 have been indicted by the Worldwide Prison Court docket for being on reverse sides of the 2007 violence). Nonetheless, Kenyatta finally did not ship his finish of the cut price.
Secondly, identical to Kenyatta earlier than him, Ruto had in 2023 dominated out a handshake with Raila, who had, following the 2022 election, been main weekly protests to push a slightly doubtful case for the election having but once more been stolen from him. Regardless of initially gaining little traction, these protests have been supercharged by the cost-of-living crisis, however nonetheless Ruto held agency.
It was not till final 12 months’s youth-led protests, which fully sidelined the political elites, that Ruto relented, bringing members of ODM into his expanded authorities while backing Raila’s bid for the chairmanship of the African Union Fee. Following the failure of the latter effort, the MoU has now formalised the handshake.
As soon as once more, the settlement is being framed as a response to nationwide challenges slightly than as a self-preservation measure. Odinga has claimed {that a} navy coup was imminent if he didn’t signal on – hotly denied by the Ministry of Defence – in addition to intimating that it was a possibility to implement the report of the Nationwide Dialogue Committee.
That report, which was compiled within the aftermath of the Gen Z protests, itself illustrates simply how politicians use handshakes to pad their pockets whereas undermining well-liked causes. It largely failed to engage with the issues advocated by the protesters and as an alternative, just like the Nationwide Accord and Constructing Bridges Initiative studies that adopted the 2008 and 2018 handshakes respectively, it proposed a raft of latest well-paid public positions for politicians – together with prime minister and chief of opposition as a panacea to the nation’s political issues.
It’s unlikely that this handshake will purchase Ruto the legitimacy he craves, nevertheless. Raila’s credibility as opposition chief has been eviscerated by these repeated lodging, none doing extra harm than the 2018 one. In the present day, he appears much less just like the political powerhouse of outdated and extra like an outdated man determined to money in a single final time. The true political energy has shifted to a brand new technology that has loudly rejected the politics of handshakes, and they’re gearing up for an additional combat.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
