For a long time, Kenya’s political landscape was such that if Raila Odinga did not come out to lead the challenge against the status quo, then Kenyans would have to forever endure the pain being inflicted on them by the government of the day, no matter how unbearable.
Unfortunately, Raila Odinga has time and again expended this premium in the most callous manner, as his tramp card on the negotiating table whenever he wanted to join the government of the day after losing in a General election.
A Government of National Unity has always been on the cards for Mr. Odinga since President Ruto crashed his street protests after the controversial 2022 General Election. It was the opportunity that he laid back in waiting for.
The Gen Z protests that have, for the first time, held the President by the scrotum were a fertile ground for him to seize the opportunity, or so he thought. His recent attempted masquerading as the spokesperson for the young people would have definitely ended up with him and a few of his cronies joining Ruto’s government. Luckily, that is not the end game for the young people whose unity knows neither tribe nor political party and whose only common denominator is an economy that is not working for them.
Raila Amolo Odinga has unsuccessfully run in five presidential elections from 1997 when he came third behind Democratic Party’s Mwai Kibaki and the incumbent and the winner, President Daniel Arap Moi.
There emerges a pattern through all the five times he has offered his candidacy for the office of President where he has always found his way into the government of the day after losing, at great expense of his followers.
After losing in the 1997 General Election, Raila found a working relationship with President Moi, culminating in a merger of his National Development Paty (NDP) with President Moi’s and Kenya’s independence party, Kenya African National Union (KANU) in March 2002.
This merger was premised on a commitment that President Moi, serving his last term as per the newly introduced constitutional clause on presidential term limits, would endorse Raila Odinga, now Minister for Energy, and Secretary General of KANU for the party’s presidential ticket in the impeding General Election of 2002.
When Moi, typically, reneged in favour of Uhuru Kenyatta, a political greenhorn at the time, Raila’s NDP disembarked and together with him a group of disgruntled former KANU stalwarts including Moi’s long time serving Vice President, Prof. George Saitoti, KANU’s diehard Secretary General, Joseph Kamotho, and the blue-eyed boy of the independence party, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka. They formed the Rainbow Alliance, and later, the Liberal Development Party (LDP) which went on to join an already existing Opposition coalition, National Alliance of Kenya (NAK).
NAK had been formed majorly by merging Mwai Kibaki’s Democratic Party of Kenya and Kijana Wamalwa’s Ford Kenya. With LDP joining, they formed a formidable National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) that, with Kibaki as the presidential candidate, went on to not only beat Moi’s preferred candidate, Uhuru Kenyatta, but also dislodged the independence party from power for the first time since independence in 1963.
LDP was to soon run into headwinds in NARC shortly after winning the 2002 General Election and forming Government. Kibaki reneged on numerous pre-merger pact agreements with LDP, prominent among them, the power sharing covenant. After President Kibaki’s side of government that voted yes symbolized by a banana lost in the 2005 constitutional referendum to Raila’s side that voted no symbolized by an orange by about 42% to 58%, Kibaki dissolved his Cabinet. The aim was to purge Raila’s allies from the Cabinet.
That was the curtain raiser for the botched 2007 Presidential Election pitying friends turned foe in Kibaki, the incumbent and Raila, and the bloody post-election violence that ensued thereafter.
Interventions; local, regional and international rejoined Kibaki and Raila in a Government of National Unity where, ostensibly, the two shared power 50/50 with Kibaki as President and Raila as Prime Minister.
In 2012, Raila, again, lost his presidential bid. This time round to Uhuru Kenyatta. He contested the presidential vote in the Supreme Court and lost too. He lost to President Kenyatta again in 2017. This time however, the Supreme Court agreed with him in his presidential petition and nullified the election. He however boycotted the repeat presidential election as ordered by the Court. Uhuru was declared winner after the exercise and formed his second-term Government.
He again found a way into a partnership of some kind with Uhuru Kenyatta after the 2017 elections. By close of President Kenyatta’s tenure in office, Raila had become his greatest advisor on governance. Heading into the 2022 elections, Raila had the President’s endorsement. In fact, Raila was the status quo candidate.
He still lost to William Ruto in the August 2022 General Election. Hardly two years of President Ruto’s rule and Raila has, again, found his way into a working relationship with President Ruto.
Raila Amolo Odinga is one of the few politicians on the African Continent that have maintained a fanatical grip on their supporters throughout their political lives. Their political bases do not dwindle but rather grow and expand.
For as much as Raila’s opponents have tried to portray him as a tribal chief, he is the only politician whose political support has consistently grown beyond his Luo tribe.
His Orange Democratic Movement Party is the only political outfit in modern Kenya that has followers and representation in almost every corner of the country. He has formed formidable coalitions with likeminded political leaders that have given incumbents a run for their money in presidential elections.
He is charismatic, an astute political organizer and indefatigable campaigner. Since 2002 after the ‘Kibaki Tosha’ declaration at Uhuru Park that saw his political base, to a man, support Mwai Kibaki and secure a first political win for an Opposition formation in Kenya, he has organized well oiled, energized election campaigns that have always almost propelled him to power.
Raila’s near-win loses in the 2007, 2013, 2017 and 2022 presidential elections have fanatically galvanized this country. Indeed, no one, not even the declared winners of the same elections and their supporters have believed, beyond reasonable doubt, that Raila lost those elections fairly.
In the 2007 General Election for instance, not even the Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) that oversaw the elections, Samuel Kivuitu, had conviction in the results he announced. He, a few days after declaring President Kibaki the winner, in a press conference admitted to having announced the results of the hotly contested presidential election under pressure. “I do not know whether Kibaki won the election,” he answered when he was asked if indeed Kibaki won fair and square.
Shortly after Kivuitu’s declaration of the Presidential vote, Kibaki was hurriedly sworn in at Statehouse at dusk. Raila lost that election by 231,728 having garnered 4,352,993 against Kibaki’s 4,584,721 with Kalonzo, playing the spoiler, coming in third with 879,903 votes.
In 2013, against the backdrop of the international war crime prosecutions against Raila’s opponents, Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate, William Ruto, Raila lost the presidential vote by garnering 43.7% against the declared winner’s 50.51. It was yet another controversial presidential election with the majority believing that Kenyatta did not fairly make the mandatory 50% + 1 vote threshold.
In the 2017 General Election, the Supreme Court of Kenya, in a historical judgement and a first one on the African Continent, nullified the presidential election in a petition presented by Raila Odinga. The Court ordered a new vote in 60 days after finding that the outcome in the presidential vote was tainted by irregularities.
In the 2022 presidential vote, Raila lost to Ruto by 233,211 votes having garnered 6,942,930 against Ruto’s 7,176,142 in an election that did not only unprecedentedly split the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) down the middle, but also the country.
All these losses are followed, almost predictably, with a handshake between Raila and the person he has lost to. If Raila has not walked into a handshake smiling, he has forced one.
This also comes with goodies for his close allies as well. He walked into one with Moi after the 1997 General Election that saw him become KANU’s Secretary General and Cabinet Minister for Energy. He forced one with Kibaki after the 2007 elections. He smiled into another with Uhuru Kenyatta after the 2017 elections and has forced the one that is in the offing with President Ruto after the 2022 elections.
Raila’s forced handshakes with those he has lost to fairly or otherwise in the presidential elections come at a great expense. This is so at individual level to his fanatical followers, especially the Luo and the Luhya that he calls out into the bloody street protests, and to the economy that the protracted street protests batter to its knees.
The 2008 post-election violence gave birth to the Government of National Unity in which Raila ended up as Prime Minister and his cronies in Cabinet and other plum government postings. The violence, however, affected his supporters who believed that he had won and only the protests would reverse the announcement of Kibaki as the winner.
By extension, it also affected other Kenyans in a manner that will take generations to recover. The police targeted and maimed and killed the Luo and the Luhya on the streets and slums of Nairobi and other towns.
The Kikuyu, the incumbent’s tribe, were targeted mainly for eviction in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and some parts of Western Kenya, which, unfortunately, ended up in most heinous murders especially in the Rift Valley. All that bloodletting ended up in vain. Raila Joined Government.
After the 2022 General Election, and after the presidential petition that affirmed Ruto’s win, Raila hit the streets again. This time it was under the guise of fighting the bad economic policies that the new government was churning out that were, and still are, ruining the masses.
People, especially the youth heeded the call. They hit the streets. The uncompromising new regime reacted, letting out the official instruments of violence on the people. The youth were maimed and killed in huge numbers. The ruin of the economy by the government was accelerated by the violent street protests. Nothing, predictably, came out of the protests.
With the bad economic policies of Ruto’s government worsening the wellbeing of the masses and with Raila’s grip on the disgruntled masses, he held the key to continued mass protests that threatened to penetrate even the President’s political bedrocks of Rift Valley and Mount Kenya region.
Negative international media focus on Kenya on the other hand wasn’t doing Ruto’s government any good. The President caved in. Not by yielding to the people’s demands of easing the cost of living, but by reaching out to Raila.
The 8% VAT, the controversial housing levy, the half-backed Social Health Insurance Fund were implemented. Cabinet Administrative Secretaries positions with its unbearable effect on the exchequer stayed in the pipeline.
Doctors went out on the streets for two months running for the implementation of their long-standing collective bargaining agreement to no avail. Nairobi City is degenerating into a slum. Public service corruption is at an all-time high.
Once again, the people were left on their own. Raila Odinga went mum. His quest for the Chairperson position of the African Union, now championed by Ruto’s Government, took centre stage for him. Government, with the false understanding that with Raila on their side, Kenyans would never stand up and seek justice, became arrogant against the people.
It is out of this that government stopped at nothing to shove down the throats of Kenyans a very punitive and unpopular Finance Bill, 2024 that was bound to tighten the noose around the hard-pressed masses.
During election campaigns, Raila’s manifesto differs in so many ways with those of his opponents. It is his manifesto, always, that seems to carry the people’s aspirations. How does he flip and join governments whose manifestos do not reflect his?
Why does Raila use the people in the manner he does? Doesn’t the blood of the young people that sacrifice their lives in street protests in the hope of a better future ever haunt him when he reaches out to his opponents in handshakes? Does he ever think of the destitution, of young widows, children and old dependent parents that those sacrifices leave behind after the street battles take away families’ breadwinners?
– BY OUMA OJANGO
Email your news TIPS to Editor@nairobilawmonthly.com, and to advertise with us, call +254715061658 anytime of the day
