Why I won't applaud Ndakwa, Mudavadi for winning Malava

I live in a world of concentric circles. I occupy the innermost circle, alone with my God. The rest of the world is defined in subsequent circles, beginning with persons I consider to be my soulmates.

The rest of society follows, in due course. But the innermost core is my Yasnaya Polyana – my inaccessible stronghold in life, the one I came with; the one I will go with.

Like Leo Tolstoy, I am unable to imagine the world, or my relationship with the world, without my Yasnaya. It is my source of tranquility and inspiration, my fortress. Hence, even when nothing else seems to work, my centre holds.

From here, I observe the world. I observe myself, too. My own foibles and vices. The strengths, the weaknesses, the contradictions, the justifications; me. And this vessel goes on, with me on board, a citizen of my own space and a member of other spaces.  

As I stray out of this space today, I wish I could say, “Congratulations” to my good friend David Athman Ndakwa of Malava, as well as to Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi, for clinching the Malava parliamentary seat in the ended by-election.

Yet I cannot. The central hardcore refuses to recognise the process that has led my two friends to this victory, if victory it is.  

You see, in a previous life, I was the secretary general of a now defunct political party, called Amani National Congress (ANC). Mudavadi was my party leader, and Ndakwa was one of our MCAs in Kakamega County. He was our minority leader in the assembly in very troubled times. We had to fend off truant MCAs.

They had turned rogue, at the behest of our competitors, who wished to bring us down. Ndakwa worked diligently and faithfully to help us reign them in.

But beyond that, he was a solid, focused, and mature leader. Everything showed that he was cut for greater things, than the county assembly.  

They spoke in ancient Greece of something they called Kairos. We also use it in communications. It is about timing. The kind of thing the wise man talks of in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. And Shakespeare often talked about it, too. Most remarkably in Hamlet, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” 

Like me, Hamlet was a situated individual. He lived in a world that was both outside him, and inside him. In his case, both worlds were in a mess at this juncture in the eponymous play titled Hamlet. His father was dead, murdered. His mother had hastily remarried the man believed to have killed his father.  

The task before Hamlet was to kill the murderer, who was also his uncle, his mother’s new husband, and the king on his father’s (previous) throne. So Hamlet should kill his mom’s husband and take over the throne. But, he should be king, while also remaining a youth and dabbling in the affairs of youth; like romance, with happy-go-lucky indulgences of youth. Could he set the time right again? How could Hamlet reinvent his world, to be both things at the same time?  

These are the difficult intersections in the circles that constitute our lives. Musalia Mudavadi and David Ndakwa must remain my friends. But I must deny them my congratulations, on account of the blood, the deceit, the violent destruction, the baseness, and the illegalities and irregularities that informed the by-election.

I hold my head in vicarious shame, when I recall that a political tourist has had to camp in Malava for the past six months, conducting the choir whose music they danced to.  

My friend Musalia Mudavadi danced to the music of a political tourist in Malava. The tourist inspected our women’s anatomy in public and invited us to imagine horizontal joys with them.

He invited elected leaders to dance, this strange government inspector from Petersburg. And after all the mayhem in Malava and beyond, all the way to Kabuchai, it was this tourist who called the election in Malava for Ndakwa. 

So, like Hamlet, how do I reset the music of time? How do I reinvent the world, to be the man in the innermost circle where I live with God, and in the subsequent circles where I meet my friends Ndakwa and Mudavadi?

When my child brings home a stolen brand new state-of-the-art car, do I feel happy for him, or do I reprimand him? Tell me, our people.