Why Kenyans bake their bread in street battles

After a long and hard fought 20 years, Kenya seems to have its best chance of having a new constitution.

There is guarded excitement in the air — a familiar feeling to those who lived in Uganda 15 years ago.

Strange things happen when new constitutions are made.

Even those politicians who are unhappy on the whole, find they can’t quite criticise because, as it happens, there will always be something they can live it.

These days, most African constitutions improve women’s representation in politics, for example.

So you have to be careful about mouthing off against such a constitution, just because it did not establish a Senate as you had wished.

Female voters might think you don’t wish them well.

In Uganda in 1995, a government minister made the comment about the constitution that turned out to be the truest.

During a talk show, Maj-Gen Kahinda Otafiire, now Trade and Industry Minister, said the constitution wasn’t a magic wand that would solve the country’s problem because it was “only the butter with which the bread of politics is eaten. We still have to work at making the bread”.

Otafiire is one of the most controversial figures in Ugandan politics, and has perhaps East Africa’s sharpest political tongue.

When he was accused of grabbing a wetland for real estate development, he retorted that he wasn’t a frog to live in a swamp.

During Uganda’s occupation of eastern DR Congo, an international report accused him of being one of the key players in the looting there.

When he was asked if he feared he would be tried for war crimes in DRC, Otafiire typically replied: “I have nothing to worry about. Did you hear of me eating pygmies in Congo?”

Because of such colourful comments, his insightful remarks on the constitution are not remembered.

However, 15 years later, many celebrated features of the 1995 constitution have been overturned, including the presidential two-term limit.

So, will Kenyans keep their eye on the butter, or the bread?

The histories of the two countries might offer an answer.

In Uganda, when we are politically aggrieved, we go into the bush, raise an army and fight the government. In Kenya, people take to the streets.

When elections were stolen in Uganda in 2001 and 2006, all the news was about rebel armies being formed to fight President Yoweri Museveni’s “illegitimate” government.

The rebels were assembled somewhere in the north, and in the forests of the DRC, official reports claimed.

The thing about rebellion is that it is easy to ignore it.

After a few months, it pops up in the press once a month, and you hear nothing again. Meanwhile, life goes on in the cities and towns.

Street action, on the other hand, you can’t ignore, because it can shut down a capital for days (as it did Nairobi in Kenya’s post-election crisis) and all the eyes that matter — local and international press, diplomats — can see it.

Just as well, because street action is more dangerous.

A rebel movement has guns and can defend itself.

Street protestors have nothing, and are sitting ducks for trigger-happy police and soldiers.

Still, if Kenyans’ penchant for the street doesn’t wane, then they might actually not just have the butter to eat the new constitution with, but the bread too.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke