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Kenya in the eyes of a Nigerian
scholar
By ADINOYI OJO ONUKABA
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The success of the Raila-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) in
last year elections was as a result of the decision of six
political leaders to subordinate their individual ambitions and
work together as a team. The ODM won in six of Kenya’s eight
provinces and also won a majority of the parliamentary seats, and
it was cruising to victory in the presidential election before the
fraudulent declaration of Kibaki as winner.
The controversy over that presidential election result provoked
the one-month old orgy of bloodletting, arson and inter-ethnic
hatred that has left nearly 1000 people dead and half a million
people displaced. The crisis has shattered the image of Kenya as a
stable and peaceful democracy and tested Raila Odinga’s ability to
play the statesman in search of peace and reconciliation rather
than the genuinely aggrieved warlord fighting to recover his
stolen mandate.
Babafemi A. Badejo, a Nigerian scholar, lawyer and international
civil servant, says in a recently published biography titled Raila
Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics that any attempt to
understand contemporary political history of Kenya will be
incomplete without examining the contributions of individuals like
Raila Odinga. Badejo, who spent over a decade in Kenya covering
and analyzing the political situation in the failed state of
Somalia for the United Nations, has given the world a rich and
comprehensive biography of this courageous, flamboyant and
soft-spoken leader.
The 367-page book provides a rare insight into both the past and
contemporary Kenyan politics and the roles played by
post-independence leaders such as Kenya’s first president Jomo
Kenyatta, his deputy Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the assassinated
leading star of the successor generation Tom Mboya, the nation’s
second ruler, the ruthless Daniel arap Moi, and the intrepid
populist politician and great mobilizer, Raila Amolo Odinga. It is
at once the stories of Raila and these other Kenyan leaders as
well as an important study of the vile and vicious post-colonial
power politics in one of East Africa’s most important countries.
Motivated chiefly by a personal desire to understand the nature of
Kenyan politics and the forces that have continued to shape it,
Badejo zero-ed in on the one individual he considered to be the
most important catalyst for change in Kenya. Few Kenyans will
disagree with Badejo’s decision to build his story around Raila.
In the book, Raila sees himself as liberal democrat committed to
political and economic reforms and social justice, individual
freedom, popular sovereignty, and to the “building of strong
communities as cornerstone of our national unity”. And as for
those who see his quest for power for power sake, Raila, naturally,
believes that they have been unkind to him. When he started
campaigning for the 2007 presidential election, political rivals
dismissed him as unelectable.
But he quickly emerged as the front-runner, leading consistently
in all opinion polls conducted since last September, and when his
opponents realized he was poised to win the election they became
desperate to stop him. His triumph in the election has once again
proved the enigma that is Raila Odinga, a man who is not easily
defined or pigeonholed, a man of many dimensions, and a riddle.
Badejo’s book celebrates this riddle. As hard as the author tried,
there is still a sense of unsolved mystery about the Raila that
comes out of the pages of this impressive work.
Born on January 7, 1945 as the second son of Oginga and Mary
Odinga. Raila (the name means “nettle sting” in Luo) attended
primary and secondary schools in Kenya before going to the former
East Germany to study mechanical engineering and graduated in 1969
with a Masters degree. Like every young man in the 1960s, Raila
admired the leftist icons of that era, such as Fidel Castro of
Cuba and his Bolivian comrade Che Guevara. He was interested in
the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. He was active in the
African students union politics in Europe. He also helped his
father to open liaison offices of his Kenyan People’s Union (KPU)
in Europe. He returned to Kenya in 1970 and started his working
life as a lecturer at the engineering department of the University
of Nairobi. He met and married his wife, Ida, a graduate and
school-teacher, in 1972. The first of their four children, a son
born in 1973, is named Fidel Castro after the Cuban leader.
Raila grew up to witness “ the tremendous organizing and
mobilizing capacity of an astute politician, and the emergence of
his father as a pre-eminent Luo leader ” He saw first hand the
passion and dedication with which his father fought against social
injustice. He also witnessed the tribulations and persecution of
his father by the very people he helped to install in power. Raila
was greatly influenced by his father’s experiences. They ingrained
in him a deep distrust or suspicion of the existing power
structure in the country and the conviction that the marginalized
would have to come together to seize power from a self-serving and
rapacious elite.
From his father, he learnt principled opposition to injustice and
the skills to organize and forge alliances with like minds across
the political spectrum. Through his father, he met and interacted
with ordinary people who flooded their house every day as well as
with prominent people and world leaders who came to visit. Raila
did not become the most influential politician in Kenya today
because he happened to be the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. He
earned his place at the table. Badejo does not say in the book if
Raila would have opted for a quiet life as a university teacher
instead of being the inheritor of the burdensome mantle of
leadership from his father had the attempted military coup of 1982
not thrown him into the vortex of political activism. It cannot be
disputed that the events of 1982 marked the turning point in
Raila’s life.
Raila’s suffering and courage endeared him to many Kenyans,
especially the Luo. He was seen as someone who was ready to risk
his life to confront oppression. His family was harassed, his
businesses suffered and his health deteriorated.
His wife was sacked from her job, the children were jeered at in
school and his mother died because of the cumulative effect of her
son’s detention, her husband’s house arrest and other untold
difficulties the family faced in the hands of the repressive Moi
government.
In October 1991, Raila fled into exile in Norway via Uganda when
he learnt that the government had given orders for his elimination
because of his involvement in the pro-democracy movement, the
Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), which had been
formed by his father, Matiba and others. In exile, Raila traveled
around Europe raising awareness and opening offices for FORD.
Pressure from the international community, donor nations, and
internal resistance to tyranny led by FORD, eventually led to the
removal of the one party clause from the Kenyan constitution.
A new leadership tussle ensued in FORD Kenya following Jaramogi’s
death. Raila pulled out to set up the National Development Party
(NDP). Raila contested the 1997 presidential election and came
third. Again, Moi had taken advantage of a divided opposition to
cling to power with an even slimmer margin. Raila joined other
leaders in condemning the irregularities in the election, but his
fellow contestants including Kibaki who came second in the
election refused to show up as planned for disruption of Moi’s
inauguration. Raila was disappointed. He realized that he could
not count on them and that he needed to take his fate in his hand.
He decided to go into an alliance with KANU so that his supporters
would not remain perpetually in opposition.
The NDP merged with KANU and Raila became KANU Secretary-General
and Energy Minister in 2001. NARC fielded Kibaki for the
presidency at the instance of Raila. He went on to campaign
vigorously for him, putting in a lot of personal resources and
time. When Kibaki was badly injured in an accident during the
campaign and Wamalwa, Kibaki’s running mate, was also in a London
hospital recovering from an illness, Raila took over the campaign,
criss-crossing the country to drum up support for NARC. His
willingness to subordinate his own presidential ambition for the
country’s good won the admiration of many Kenyans.
NARC won the election by a landslide. But Kibaki immediately
surrounded himself with Kikuyu cronies who advised him to ignore
the MOU that NARC leaders had signed in 2002 on power sharing and
constitutional reforms, including the creation of the position of
prime minister that Raila had been promised. Rather, he was given
the Roads, Public Works and Housing Ministry. Even as he settled
down quietly to do his job, the government became obsessed with
clipping Raila’s wings. By mid 2004, Housing was taken from his
portfolio.
The crisis in NARC reached a boiling point in 2005 when the
government substituted a draft constitution already agreed upon at
the Bomas conference with its own version and insisted on a
referendum on it. Raila mobilized Kenyans against it and the
government was defeated. Kibaki then sacked Raila and others who
had opposed the draft. During the referendum, those opposed to the
draft were assigned an orange is their symbol while those for it
had a banana. That was how the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)
came to be. It transformed itself into a party for the 2007
election. Disagreement between Raila and Kalonzo Musyoka over who
should lead the party led to the breakaway “orange” faction known
as ODM-Kenya led by Musyoka.
The party came a distant third in the last presidential election.
As Badejo has revealed, Raila is not all about politics. He is
also a successful businessman. This is the story of Raila Odinga,
a man whose quest for power is solidly anchored on the belief that
Kenya will be a great country if led by a genuinely pro-people
leadership and a welfare-enhancing private sector. He belongs to a
group of people who see themselves as outsiders in Kenya and who
have used their victimhood to unite under the leadership of the
Odinga family. But Raila does not want to be seen as just a Luo
leader.
He wants to be seen as a national leader who can integrate not
only the Luo but all other marginalized groups as well as their
perceived oppressors in Kenya into one large, happy, democratic
and prosperous family. This is Raila’s dream, a dream he came
close to realizing last December before the old clique chose to
throw Kenya into chaos rather than relinquish power to the forces
of change.
Badejo’s book is sometimes tedious to read. It reads at times like
a textbook. It could have also benefited a great deal from serious
editing to get rid of a few spelling and grammatical errors. Some
events are not exhaustively discussed.
For example, while being interrogated in connection with the 1982
coup, Raila suddenly accused the then powerful Attorney General
Charles Njonjo of planning to overthrow Moi’s government with aid
of Kenyan security forces, Israeli and South African mercenaries.
Njonjo was suspended and inquiry set up to probe the allegation.
The inquiry was said to have confirmed Raila’s allegation, leading
to the fall of Njonjo, the man who had helped Moi into power. But
the book did not say how Raila came about the information and if
the Moi administration simply cashed in on a wild allegation to
get rid of one of the carryovers from Kenyatta. Did Raila make the
allegation simply to save his skin?
Despite these few lapses, Badejo has done a commendable work on a
towering political figure in a once promising African democracy
that is now hobbled by a serious post-election crisis. Any one
interested in knowing the genesis of the present crisis should
read Badejo’s book.
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