We all would love the so-called Grand Coalition to work. And I assume so do President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. This makes it imperative for the two to think hard and long about making this arrangement succeed.

None of us needs to be reminded that the two men are radically different personalities. Still, experience from elsewhere shows it is not impossible for such opposites to work amicably if they put their minds to it. Look at India where we have Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a tentative reformer who is not unlike President Kibaki in his plodding style.

Political realities have forced him to cohabit with an unruly coalition whose shades range from state separatists to hardcore economic protectionists to perhaps the last remaining believers in Marxist purity in the world. And India's economy happens to be growing at a brisk nine percent.

IN SUCH SITUATIONS, THE TRICK IS for each partner to resist playing on the differences and instead concentrate on complimenting the other's strengths. President Kibaki has spent his entire adult life being at the centre of Kenya's public policy apparatus. His experience in this area is frankly above the rest of the active political class.

Mr Odinga on his part has demonstrated a creative energy which can work magic if employed positively for the benefit of the country as opposed to his career. President Kibaki would need to resist playing silent mind games with his partner and instead seek to tap the resourcefulness he can mine from him.

Mr Odinga on his part should avoid seeking to take advantage of the president's laid-back nature to score cheap, short-term populist points.

I have overheard enough parallels with the early 60s when a President and a Vice-President bitterly disagreed over what has euphemistically come to be referred to as ideological differences. Enough archival material is available to show that the real problem arose as a result of a misunderstanding of executive prerogatives.

This need not happen again if the current partners understand their roles properly. President Kibaki was there at the time and he knows it all. Mr Odinga would do well also to go back to that history and read it carefully.

All things considered, it will probably come as less of a surprise if this political relationship unfortunately collapses than if it works like clockwork, which is what most of us want it to.

No matter what they say, I am not wholly convinced the two gentlemen mean business. I fear that each of them, deep down, is still angling to knock down the other at the opportune moment. What will hold them back and prolong the cohabitation is that each of them acutely knows it is not in his interest to be seen as the culprit.

The bigger problem, in my estimation, will come from the two men's respective aides and, no less, the restive supporters. Each of them, in varying degrees, has a body of troublesome cheerleaders whose desires are not about nuanced power-sharing but the capture or retention of State power by their favoured man.

For this thing to work, both the President and Prime Minister must strongly resist being held captive by their respective crowds. A State is always a complex entity.

There are competing power centres, interests and factions. If the two leaders remain too obsessed with their personal rivalry to the exclusion of everything else, the whole purpose of why they got together will have been lost. In the end, they could both find themselves rendered expendable.

PERSONALLY, I DON'T THINK THERE is anything superlative about either man such as to make him imagine that the whole purpose of our lives is to remain fixated with the drama of their political competition. There is the more important business of fixing the numerous problems in our country.

There is one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Cotu boss Francis Atwoli. Mr John Michuki deserves to be brought back to the Transport Ministry or wherever else his hands-on approach will make a difference.

We have a serious transport problem in Nairobi, for instance. The traffic jams are driving everybody mad. It is no longer a problem of regulating matatu operations; but rather something urgent needs to be done to the entire commuter sector.

It is ironical that Mr Atwoli is the one crying out for Mr Michuki to be re-deployed. The latter is famous for working effectively with minimum of words.

The Cotu man, on the other hand, is an extravagant motormouth, as he proved on Labour Day when he rambled on for one and a half hours. What is the point of having a chief guest if you end up hogging all the attention yourself?