Dear Baba, your baby ODM is no longer the political giant

Dear Baba, 

Today you would have turned 81. It feels strange to mark the day without you here. There was something about this date that warmed the country, drawing celebrations and countless tributes from Kenyans of all walks to a man who lived fully among us.

This time however, one cannot help but think, maybe your absence has spared you the heartbreak of witnessing what has become of your political baby, the Orange Democratic Movement.

Barely months after you rested, the movement you laboured to build through sacrifice, humiliation, tears and great personal cost stands uncertain and largely unrecognisable. Even the structures you painstakingly put in place seem unable to hold together what was once a formidable party, as those entrusted with its stewardship seem to have moved on so fast, too soon, away from its founding spirit. 

You built ODM as a movement anchored in principle and moral clarity. It was often referred to as a resistance movement because you abhorred and fought injustice, exclusion, state excesses, abuse of power and disservice to people in all forms. To belong to ODM once meant accepting discomfort. It meant challenging authority and defending the well being of common man at whatever cost. ODM was founded to question power, not to manage it. That is how you built it.

Today, however, ODM is in the news for everything but those ideals. It has been unsettling for many to see how easily constitutional and moral concerns are explained away for political convenience. Even more troubling is seeing every value you stood for being watered down by phrases such as ‘political maturity’, ‘time to move on’ or the insistence that  ‘one cannot remain in opposition forever’. In so doing, they have made naught of your conviction, through the years, that power without principle is meaningless and not worth having.

Some say the party is experiencing an identity crisis following the loss of its founder, but that cannot be because your proteges, though few, remain steadfast in echoing your voice. You raised a generation of bold men and women who, without fear, continue to speak in the spirit you embodied. Even as they find themselves isolated, called traitors and labelled disloyal, they refuse to be silenced. It is unfortunate that the uncompromised voice, once the heartbeat of the movement, is now viewed as sabotage. 

Baba, in the wake of all this, most of your devoted supporters have grown weary. The squabbles have taken a toll. People who stood with you through decades of struggle, some at personal cost, have not been spared. They now find themselves questioning what sustained them for so long as their support is now spited. While you were known for reconciliation and for building bridges even with former adversaries, today, those bridges are burning  down with alarming ease.

In the vacuum left by your towering moral authority, self-preservation has found room where principle once stood. Where the movement once checked power, it now seems preoccupied with positioning within it. Instead of protecting the very ideologies that had ODM stand as the party to beat for years, those ideas now seem negotiable, compromising the very values that earned the party its stature. 

It is often said that great organisations need not fade away with their founders but clearly, some movements are so closely bound to their vision survival is almost impossible. One may be forgiven for believing ODM was you and you were ODM. What has remained, this calculating, elbowing shell, feels very unfamiliar. 

Watching ODM struggle in this way feels like losing you twice. Perhaps the most respectable thing to do at this point is to ask if the movement still recognises itself. Maybe, this book does not need an extra chapter. On your 81st birthday, Baba, we honour the man you were. We remember the warmth and hope you spread, your awkward dance but most importantly, the courage that fueled your convictions for decades. 

If there is a gift to be given today, I hope it is the courage to understand that your legacy was too precious to be watered down in this way. Happy Birthday, Baba!

-The writer is a development communication consultant