Raila Odinga, the hero who keeps coming within inches of victory and glory
Former Prime Minister of Kenya Raila Odinga.
Raila Odinga’s pursuit of Kenya’s presidency has been a Sisyphean task. He is the great hero who keeps coming within inches of victory and glory.
Yet he has always shed premium tears, one defeat after the other. The Supreme Court’s upholding of Dr William Ruto’s election as the fifth President has dashed Raila’s hopes in the ended 2022 presidential race.
During the campaigns, the staunchest of his supporters referred to him as ‘the Fifth.’ This signified their hope that he would become the country’s fifth President. It has instead ended up as his fifth defeat.
Raila, one of Kenya’s most colourful and mercurial politicians over two-and-a-half decades, has been dogged by a geometric jinx. Like geometric asymptotic lines, he has run parallel and very close to victory without touching it.
His introductory attempt in 1997 saw him return a distant third. He scored 665,000 votes behind Mwai Kibaki (1.9 Million) and president Daniel arap Moi (2.45 million). He was then a relatively youthful 52 year-old. The future lay before him.
The expectation was that he would live to fight some other day. In the intervening years, he has risen head and shoulder above the average politician.
He has kept alive the hope that he could ascend to the highest office in the land through the ballot.
Come to nought
Four efforts later, it has come to nought. Raila has instead been a king-maker, who delivers others to their desired political destinations.
A Raila endorsement has particularly been a direct ticket to victory in Luo Nyanza, his solid home base where the Odingas have reigned supreme since the 1940s when his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, joined national politics.
In the political environments that he commands, he is treated with great reverence, coming close enough to an enigmatic demigod.
He rules that environment with a genial smile and talks in soft tones that tell a different story from the robust political podium operative who works up crowds to frenzies.
Insiders speak of an almost shy leader, often timorously casting his eyes on the table, even as he puts his point across.
This avuncular style has won him the father image. He is endeared with the patronymic of Baba, “our father”.
Yet, not even this benign style has delivered Kenya’s most coveted political prize— the presidency. Just what goes wrong?
Apocryphal narratives speak of an old altercation with Jaramogi, in the lead up to the 1992 election, after the restoration of multi-party politics the previous year. The story goes that the two argued over who between them should run for the presidency.
The son thought that the father was too old to run, while the father thought that the son was too young. Cut to the quick by the challenge, Jaramogi is said to have promised his son that he would run for that office in the future, but it would remain a mirage.
Rocky assignment
Such narratives, however, could be dismissed as the substance of myth, superstition and allied heresy.
Regardless, it has been a rocky assignment. The year 2007 was easily his best chance. Then, he put together a well-oiled political machine, in the name of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), against President Mwai Kibaki’s hurriedly assembled Party of National Unity (PNU).
It was an election that many believe Raila won. This, despite the cloud of violence that rendered the election so chaotic that a commission set up to establish what really happened determined that it was impossible to tell who had won and who had lost.
Three subsequent elections have borne no fruit. Some say it is poor internal organisation.
Ahead of the Supreme Court judgement that upheld Dr Ruto’s election, leakages from the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party began indicating divisions within the camp.
Internal competitions that had simmered under the surface began coming into the open. A former insider, writing for the Nairobi Law Monthly after the 2013 defeat, spoke of poor internal organisation and misplaced sibling competitions.
There have been those who begin imagining, in the camp, that the election has already been won, and in the process drop the ball.
They begin focusing on themselves at the expense of the presidential candidate. Some jostle for office and undermine their colleagues and, in the process, the campaign effort.
Culpable hubris
Indeed, the imagination that victory has already been taken comes with a measure of culpable hubris.
In the ended election, for example, election campaign billboards in Luo Nyanza screamed with the words, “Gini wasekao.” In Raila’s mother tongue, dominant in this region, the words translate as, “We have already taken this thing.”
The confidence led to the dropping of the ball. Everywhere he went, Raila was received by massive crowds that sang to the Luhya campaign theme tune of “Today is the day, whoever says tomorrow is a liar.”
The organisers of the campaigns, however, did not devise methods of converting the huge crowds into votes. The result was a low voter turnout, even in strongholds like Luo Nyanza, where turnout hardly exceeded 70 per cent.
Previous Raila campaigns have had the same challenge. Not much has usually been done to coordinate the effort, so that ahead of polling day they could talk pointedly of the numbers they expect to rake in from different electoral areas.
They have banked on voter euphoria, believing that the charged crowds at their rallies will show up to vote for them. There is no focused effort to reach out to targeted voters by campaign volunteers, to solicit votes.
Azimio quarrels
Beyond this, there have been open Azimio quarrels over mismanagement of the polling agents function.
A post by lawyer Donald Kipkorir, one of Raila’s most ardent supporters, decried people whom he accused of “betraying Baba” by failing to ensure that there were agents in polling stations, protecting his votes.
Kipkorir wondered why, having fielded candidates at all other electoral levels, such as parliamentary candidates among others, these people only protected their votes and not Raila’s.
This was a major operational flaw that the Raila campaign has repeatedly made at each election. It was alleged, this time, that the campaign had no agents in Rift Valley and in the Mt. Kenya region – two of the most critical zones in the Ruto vote catchment.
Simply put, this was suicidal. But, apart from not having presidential campaign teams and agents in parts of the country, the Raila camp has also been accused of failing to pay agents where they had some.
A senior ODM party official has been accused in social media of pocketing the funds that should have gone to the agents. Experience has shown that if agents have not received an agreed down payment on the eve of the voting day, they will usually not turn up to keep watch over the polling exercise.
This makes the exercise vulnerable to mischief and manipulation, especially in hostile zones. Once again, Raila’s past campaign efforts have faced this challenge.
The 2022 Raila candidacy had another setback in the support that it enjoyed from President Uhuru Kenyatta. While this should have been a blessing, it ended up as a curse. The president had previously demonized Raila in his native Mt. Kenya region to the extent that the Mountain would not listen to him after he changed tune, to attempt to market him as a good man and his choice for successor.
Heavy mobilization of state functionaries and resources only added fuel to fire, making it very difficult for Raila to penetrate the region. As if they could not read the signs right, the Raila team spent inordinate lengths of time and other resources in this hardcore area, at the expense of galvanizing votes from low-lying fruit zones.
But the state support also came with the tag of incumbency and the burdens that go with incumbency. Raila has been seen as the incumbent candidate in a strained political economy.
It has not helped matters that his campaign talked of continuing with what President Uhuru was doing. Worse still was the promise to bring back the Building Bridges Initiative that the courts had thrown out. All these and more burdens born out of incumbency worked against him.
The loss of trusted allies in this election and in previous ones, too, worked against him. When Moses Wetang’ula and Musalia Mudavadi abandoned him at the start of the year, he dismissed them as inconsequential.
The thin margin of defeat by Ruto indicates that no opinion leader was small enough to be ignored. Ignoring of such leaders has had its cost.
Unfortunately, this has been a recurrent pattern that has over the years seen Raila lose one partner after the other, while those he has brought on board have not been sufficiently strong to bridge the gap and win even more votes.
Dr Galava teaches journalism and researches media and sustainable development [email protected]
