Raila Odinga the political bulldozer

Soon after his famous handshake with former President Uhuru Kenyatta, there was hue and cry within some quarters of the Jubilee Party that Raila Odinga had come to rock the ruling party. His detractors in Jubilee said he had come to destroy their party. They feared he would leave their party in tatters, with its leaders badly divided among themselves.

Whether it was his intent or not, one thing is not in doubt. The ODM leader rocked the Jubilee boat and threatened to take it down the precipice of political wreckage.

Behind the scenes

The handshake caused a rift between Mr Kenyatta and his then-deputy, William Ruto. The emerging dynamics would incubate  future political alliances with Mr Odinga as a key player and beneficiary.

The handshake birthed the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) with Raila as the undisputed field marshal and Uhuru, the invisible commander-in-chief, who silently called the shots from behind the scenes.

This was Raila Odinga, the political operative in his element. In the past, he rocked the Kanu boat in 2002. Over two decades later, Kenya’s independence party is still writhing in pain. Kanu is still staggering from the political blow that Raila dealt it in the wake of the Uhuru project. It was difficult – almost impossible – to know what was going on in Raila’s political mind at any one time. When you thought that you were with him, he was miles ahead of you. You only knew where he was when he pulled his next action.

This man knew his mind. Regardless of the risks, he would take them if he must. Apart from clear knowledge of what he wanted, he had the determination and courage to do it. This was regardless of who else will support or him not. Time and again, he was been ready to walk alone, if need be. In 1998, he disappointed the Opposition when his National Development Party (NDP) voted with Kanu to defeat a no-confidence motion against President Moi.

The no confidence motion was sponsored by James Orengo, then of the Ford Kenya party. Except for two NDP members – Shem Ochuodho of Rangwe and Oloo Oringo of Alego-Usonga – all NDP MPs stood with Moi and Kanu. The motion was defeated on a vote of 137 for Moi, against 67. The Opposition accused Raila and NDP of betrayal. Yet Raila had begun walking the independent path in 1994, when he resigned from Ford-K and from his Langata Parliamentary seat, in the wake of the chaotic Ford-K party elections in Thika. It was a daring move that saw him win the seat. For the next three years, he was the only NDP MP.

A rising Raila

Things changed dramatically during the 1997 General Election. While Raila came third in the presidential election (behind Moi and Mwai Kibaki), NDP won a significant number of seats in Luo Nyanza. With the exception of Mr Orengo and Achieng Oneko (Rarieda), all other Luo MPs resigned from Ford-K ahead of this election to join Raila in NDP. It was the only way to secure their seats against a rising Raila. Some of them went on to lose, regardless. Orengo ran on the Charity Ngilu-led Social Democratic Party, while Oneko remained in Ford-K. They both lost, paving way for Raila as the undisputed Luo political kingpin after his father’s demise in 1994.

Raila’s gamble with NDP paid off. He would go on to take more risks. His dalliance with Moi and Kanu (1998-2002) was one such a gamble. He ignored the noise in the Opposition and moved from opposition to co-operation to merger with Kanu. Much of the time, he did not consult anybody. Once he made the decision, he moved into action. He left everyone else to either catch up with him, or find their own alternative paths. Few dared to take the second option.

The pattern would repeat itself in October 2002. Dissatisfied with the Uhuru project, he walked out of Kanu and got virtually every Kanu MP, with the exception of the Kalenjin Rift Valley, in tow. The only other three MPs of note to remain in Kanu were Musalia Mudavadi (Sabatia), Cyrus Jirongo (Lugari) and Katana Ngala (Ganze). They all lost their seats in the subsequent poll in December. Raila’s decisive gamble paid off once again.

It would pay off again when, without consulting anybody, he proclaimed at a public rally in October 2002 that Mr Kibaki was the right person for the new united Narc Opposition to field for the presidency. And when he fell out with Kibaki, he technically walked out of Narc and led fellow rebels to defeat Kibaki’s team in the 2005 constitutional referendum.

On other occasions, however, he has not been so lucky. He lost the 2007 election (and some say the 2013 one, too), out of failure to heed calls for the need to protect the vote. His confidence occasionally bordered on hubris, with devastating outcomes. Such was the case when he decided, in 2013, that he could make a direct appeal to the Kalenjin voter without the support of key players like William Ruto, who had been in his team in 2007. He courted bad blood and fondled defeat when he disowned Dr Ruto in his crisis with the International Criminal Court (ICC). He has never regained the support of that community. His thought, similarly, that he can manage the Luhya electorate without local kingpins also undermined his appeal to this constituency.

Be that as it may, Raila was a political operative after his own fashion. He knew how to strategically position himself to shape things in his preferred way. In the alphabet of politics, he was the quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dogs. The proverbial lazy dogs that wait for things to shape out must bide their time, while the quick and foxy Raila acts. They would thereafter react – either to echo him, or to shoot invective his way. There was hardly anybody in the country to make him react to anything. He often set the agenda. and others would follow passively.

More surprises

It was his quick brown fox attributes that led him both to the controversial extra-legal swearing-in of January 2018, and the handshake of March the same year. In both instances, he confounded friend and foe alike. In January, his three comrades-at-arms (running mate Kalonzo Musyoka, chief campaign manager Mr Mudavadi and teammate Moses Wetang’ula) were left flat-footed. They were duped into waiting as Raila took the oath that they all thought was off the cards. The stage was set for more surprises.

What observers did not know was that the Jubilee Party and the deputy president were set to be targets in the crosshairs of Raila’s subsequent moves. For this man never said what would do. In the public space, he’d appear to give away the strategy. In practice, however, he would do something completely different. In 2017, he seemed set to do something really big, following the announcement to boycott the repeat presidential election. He ‘announced’ that he would make a big announcement on October 25, 2017.

By their own admission, his NASA co-principals had no idea what the ‘big announcement’ was going to be. Until the very end, they waited, just like everybody else, for the ‘big announcement’. It turns out, from Mudavadi’s biography, Soaring Above the Storms of Passion, that there perhaps was no big announcement. They ended up workshopping an announcement about the stillborn National Resistance Movement (NRM).

After the October 2017 election boycott, the three co-principals went in one direction, not so sure what to do next. The NRM went in another direction, under the self-styled but clueless ‘General’ Miguna Miguna. They made vague announcements about boycotts against Jubilee-friendly enterprises and Raila’s imminent swearing-in. The Jubilee fraternity went in a third direction, agonising on what to do with a rogue political operative with a massive political support base. The support base, for its part, was stuck in one place, waiting for direction from the leader.

Then there was the fifth column, the solitary column occupied by Raila Odinga himself. And only he knew what was there. He knew that the battle was lost the moment the High Court admitted other presidential contestants from the August presidential race into the repeat poll of October.

He also knew that a head-on confrontation against Uhuru and Ruto would lead nowhere, at least in the short term. With the entire international community against his extra-legal swearing-in, he stood on very thin ice.

His political loneliness was, moreover, compounded by the fact that his NASA colleagues, the religious fraternity and the business community were all against his extra-legal swearing-in. He was an isolated political sitting duck. It was the time to sink completely, or to do a political somersault and reinvent himself. He chose the somersault. Trapped in the mid-air swing were the deputy president, the three NASA co-principals and their coalition, as well as the Jubilee Party.

At this point, Raila only needed to have on his side President Uhuru and the ODM party. Nothing more. In point of fact, the sooner everything else would be destroyed, the better for him. Hence, he allowed NASA to go into a deep Rip Van Winkle sleep.

The biggest danger to Raila’s schemes, moreover, would be if Ruto should survive the present onslaught against him. Matters would get to a head for Raila, the master craftsman, if the rest of the co-principals in the NASA family should suddenly get into their own handshake with Ruto. But to get here, they would all need to wake up to the reality that in politics, things do not just shape out. They are shaped out. They must never forget the political alphabet of the quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dogs.

This is an updated version of a story previously published by The Standard.