Hour of reckoning nigh as Raila dribbles himself off the political pitch

The existential contest in ODM is now in full cry. It must be waged to its conclusion, and there is no turning back for Raila Odinga or his numerous renegade challengers.

The first clue that some form of fateful ferment was underway was Odinga’s anomalous decision to advertise a most prosaic errand, the renewal of his passport, as though he had alighted upon the fifth dimension. 

He had anticipated the toxic ramifications that would ensue had rival propagandists got hold of pictures of his visit to government facilities “on the down low”.

The Handshake has proved politically radioactive for Odinga. He has been profiled as a venal opportunist by his most faithful followers.

They feel humiliated that he has repeatedly taken mean advantage of their unquestioning obedience to rally them into dangerous confrontations with the state in order to cultivate leverage for Handshakes that are immensely beneficial exclusively to Odinga and his narrow, innermost circle.

The last Handshake, in particular, spectacularly brought home the relentless cynicism in Odinga’s political calculation. 

After March 18, 2018, Dr Odhiambo Mbai, Baby Pendo and Chris Msando evaporated from his lips, and his partisans were haphazardly demobilised without any feedback regarding the success of their campaign, or any indication of the next strategic sequences.

As they struggled to generate a narrative to placate themselves and rationalise this absurd turn of events, Odinga transformed himself into a vehement apologist of his nemesis, former President Uhuru Kenyatta, and the administration whose rampant impunity had been understood to be the cause of Odinga’s blistering onslaught. Odinga was now a highly privileged, cake-eating permanent fixture in Kenyatta’s entourage.

Because ODM responds to discontent or protest through cruel, vindictive and violent reprisal, Odinga’s constituency has become extremely fluent in silent protest and acquired spectacular virtuosity in motionless defiance.

The first indication that insurrection was afoot was on August 9, 2022. On that day, nearly 700,000 voters in Odinga’s Nyanza stronghold did not vote. The subversive message of Dalmas Otieno, David Ouma Ochieng and Okoth Obado had found fertile ground and grown to a critical mass. 

Tolerance for betrayal ran low, and the outrages of shambolic nominations and direct tickets were now unacceptable. Odinga’s blithe entitlement, forcefully asserted from the lavishly indulgent lap of a frightfully intolerant regime, was the last straw.

Hollow sloganeering 

Odinga’s followers are tired of the unsustainable tissue of inexplicable contradictions in his inscrutable political calculus, and yearn for a message that radically departs from his mouldy staple of preoccupation with protest and hollow, progressive sloganeering. They want a “politics of development”, which is dependent on their elite mustering adequate social capital to plug into the national development planning bandwidth. 

Beyond approval of policy and oversight of its execution, the people’s representatives have to possess a certain dexterity in working institutional back channels to win visible indicators of development.

Smarting from the shameful failure of the Handshake to furnish him with any meaningful non-personal material benefit, Odinga wants nothing to do with the government. He also wants no one in his political galaxy to execute a micro-handshake in any shape or form.

Yet he cannot enforce this taboo without implicitly invoking uncomfortable suggestions of transparent hypocrisy, given that by election time, he had virtually garnered admittance into the First Family.

Make no mistake, however; the contest in ODM also entails a long-overdue inter-generational component. Odinga’s long decades of autocratic control of his constituency suppressed legitimate ambitions of younger cohorts, ostensibly seeing off the Otienos, Ochuodhos, Migunas and Wangas of this world.

These thwarted leaders did not die off; their experience is irrepressible fuel for a churning cauldron of explosive political steam, exponentially catalysed by the emergence of a new generation that is completely estranged from Odinga’s symbolic power.

It is now time for Odinga to give way, and the question is not one of if, or when, but how. His recent actions indicate that he is invested in prosecuting the if and when of it. He desperately wants to postpone the reckoning and has wagered his entire fortune on an epic confrontation with the state to buy time, rehabilitate his profile, restore his command and mobilise his followers again.

Desperate, because he is woefully encumbered by the Handshake, and his residual tenure as Uhuru Kenyatta’s designated advocate, for better and for worse. That puts the cost of living out of his reach as a possible mobilising agenda, while impunity and corruption are firmly out of bounds.

The magnitude of Odinga’s angst has spun him into political delirium, in which he recently invited the president to arrest him, and was curiously available on short notice for the Matiang’i debacle, expecting that the needful contest with the state was finally at hand.

Odinga, the legendary master of political brinkmanship, has dribbled himself off the pitch. He is exposed by his hypocrisy, and vulnerable because he lost an election to a man 23 years his junior. The old bull is weak, and the swaggering steers, charged with the rising sap of youthful vigour, are ready to banish him into the fallows.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.