A magistrate in Rukwa, Tanzania, in March 1998, sentenced a dog to death and ordered it "to hang until it dies". The crime was that this dog had appropriated the name "Immigration", hence impersonifying a "highly respected and law-abiding" government department.

According to press reports, the dog owner, 25-year-old Kachele Chizu, had been frustrated by the incompetence of the Immigration officials in his location and had decided to name his dog "Immigration". He took his dog with him whenever he went to the Immigration Department, and made a point of calling it in the presence of Immigration officials. One of the officials, Mr Stanley Anyitike, could not take it any more and so he decided to take Mr Chizu to court. 

Mr Anyitike argued that it was an insult and against Section 89 (1) of the Penal Code for Mr Chizu to give his dog a government department’s name. He explained how this had irritated and annoyed his department. And after considering all ‘the facts’ of the case, the magistrate found Chizu guilty and sentenced him to a six-month jail term. He also ordered the dog to be killed. But since the Tanzanian police were unwilling to spare a bullet, they clubbed the dog to death with a huge cudgel made available by the Immigration Department. 

The magistrate in this case reminds me of the ‘new’ Raila Odinga, operating as Kanu Secretary-General. I am sure that this magistrate had ambitions when he left law school. He did not imagine himself sentencing dogs to death as part of his future in the justice department. But even the men of best intentions get convoluted in their actions when they get involved with certain institutions.

And this is what is happening to the ‘new’ Odinga; the man is quickly losing it. Those who watched him dismiss the National Alliance for Change (NAC) on television this week will tell you he is scoring high on loyalty, but losing fast on balance. At this rate, I would not be surprised if he acquired himself a ‘nyayo rungu’ as a symbol of oneness with the President and Kanu. 

But Mr Odinga is similar to the Rukwa Magistrate in another way. To this magistrate, the dog was the problem. Hence, if you sort out the dog, you will fix the ‘irritation’ to the department. On this score, he was right. However, the issue of incompetence remained unresolved. And like this magistrate, Mr Odinga is more concerned with the ‘irritation’ caused by the NAC and what he calls the ‘left over’ coalition under Mr Simeon Nyachae. What he is telling Kenyans is that the Opposition has acquired an irritating dog. But, he is not addressing the reasons why. 

My hypothesis is that Kanu is irritated because the Alliance is currently using what Sun-Tzu called the Warrior’s Mirror in his book The Art of War. The use of mirror images to mimic your opponent’s actions is probably one of the oldest and most effective ways of doing politics. Even in child play, the game where someone repeated your every word was known to bring out the rawest of emotions. In fact, whenever someone mimicked you in childhood games, you always ended up punching or biting him or her. This is how Mr Odinga's emotions are towards the Alliance.

If they could bite it and reap it apart in rage, they would. This is so because since Kanu announced it would merge with the NDP, the Opposition has done nothing but mimic them. To most of us, this is lack of originality. The Alliance probably did it because they suffer from a ‘poverty of ideas’. But in strategy-making, their mimicking was inspired by some form of genius. When you do exactly what your opponent does, you do not only irritate them, but you also shield your own strategy with the mirror image. 

The Alliance should perfect the ‘mirror effect’. In fact, they should now declare that their parties are going to merge the way Kanu did. This might sound funny and unserious, more so because if the Alliance has used the mirror effect, they have done it unknowingly. But they can translate this accident into a strategy. And in so doing, they should retreat to some of the childhood fables and convince themselves that Kanu is like the Gorgon Medusa, a monster in Greek Mythology.

The Medusa was one of the most destructive forces in Greek mythology. Her hair was made of slimy malicious snakes, her tongue was large, scaly and protruding, and her face was so ugly that anyone who saw her turned into a stone because of horror. But the hero who killed the monster, warrior Perseus, had to use the mirror effect to slay her. 

He polished his brass shield to look like a mirror and then approached her with his face covered by the shield. All the Medusa could see was her ugly image with snakes slithering around her face. And the more she looked at this image, the more irate she became. At the height of her rage and confusion, Perseus destroyed her. 

The point here, therefore, is to mirror the actions of Kanu, but to also have a strategy behind the mirror. It is not enough to irritate Mr Odinga and Kanu with the mimics. The Alliance must also have a strategy to destroy the Medusa. And this is probably what is missing at the Alliance.

One of the things they could do is to abandon their puritanical view on constitutional review and go for minimum reforms within Parliament. They should do away with their fascination for "Wanjiku, Nafula and Muthoni" and get practical. What the ordinary people want are workable solutions, not mock participation in a process that is going nowhere. And since the Prof Yash Pal Ghai Commission has now declared that it cannot give us a new Constitution before the coming election, it is obvious that we shall either have a transition constitution or minimum reforms. 

The Alliance should take the initiative and push for minimum reforms as a form of ‘mirror effect’. They should in fact ‘mirror’ the Odinga proposal of creating a Prime Minister shamelessly. But in their strategy, the Prime Minister would be modelled along the Tanzanian or Rwandese constitutions. Such a Prime Minister is non-executive, but runs the affairs of government.

In both Tanzania, and Rwanda, this has worked very well as a mechanism for balancing competing forces. In the case of the Alliance, this would create three seats for the three prospecting ‘heads’. Given that politics is perception, this would also sort out the problem of ethnic balance in that the Kamba, Luhya and Kikuyu communities would be substantially represented in such an arrangement. 

What about Mr Nyachae and his ‘left over’ coalition? Why is Mr Odinga and Kanu irritated by them? Let us go back to the childhood stories borrowed from Greek mythology. The relationship between Kanu and the alliance under Mr Nyachae can be compared to the story of the Greek youth known as Narcissus. This young man would spend hours gazing at his image in a water pond until he finally fell in love with it. But when he discovered that the image was actually his own reflection and that he could not consummate his love with it, he decided to end his useless life by drowning himself in the pond. 

What Mr Nyachae has on Kanu is the ‘Narcissus Effect’. When the Kanu operatives look at the Nyachae ‘machine’, it speaks to them. It reflects back their inmost feelings, their tastes, values and their aspirations. Unlike the Alliance, which is mimicking the actions of Kanu, Mr Nyachae seems to have a deep understanding of their psychology. And what he mirrors back to them are their fears and unfulfilled aspirations.

Although they occasionally tell him off, they envy where he is. Because he understands the depth of their ‘repression’ having been there not too long ago, they probably even have a tinge of love for the man. This is annoying and irritating. And since the newcomers from the NDP have taken upon themselves to fight all conceivable battles for the ‘new Kanu’, Mr Odinga and Mr Otieno Kajwang have become the expressions of this condition. Like the classical fanatic, they will not change their minds, and will not change the subject. 

Mr Nyachae should treat these men with contempt and use his mirror effects on the original Kanu politicians by showing them empathy. Like the young Narcissus, he should seduce them with their own reflection from the Ford-People pond. And if he decides to do this, he might want to think twice about the ‘left overs’ he has collected. He must remain wary of the ‘heroic failures’ collected from the original Ford and Ford-Kenya. 

Back to the Rukwa Magistrate in Tanzania, we can draw out one last lesson for Mr Odinga. The fact is that the Rukwa Magistrate made history when he sentenced a pregnant dog to death. Similarly, Mr Odinga can make history by becoming the vanguard of Kanu trivia. And we will still grant him a place in history the same way we remember the late Kariuki Chotara. In the alternative, he can focus on what took him to Kanu in the first place. What was that again?

• The writer is a political scientist with Consult-Afrika, a continental research and consulting firm.