It’s a tired cliché – old hat – that Azimio la Umoja leader Raila Odinga has for over two decades been the centre of gravity of Kenya’s byzantine politics. He’s bestrodden East Africa’s most prosperous country like a colossus.
Except for brief periods when he was a minister in the Kanu-Moi state and Prime Minister in the Government of National Unity with President Mwai Kibaki, he’s dominated our politics without formal state power.
This golden era of Kenya’s politics will likely conclude in February next year when Kenya gifts her precious son to the continent to serve as the Chairperson of the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa. Today, I want to talk about Mr Odinga, the indomitable intellectual.
To most Kenyans under 40 years, and even grizzled ones, Mr Odinga is the quintessential politician. They don’t have the foggiest about his rich and varied life as a thinker, technocrat, and public intellectual.
They have no idea Mr Odinga had an inspirational and successful life as a world-class professional before the fortunes and heartbreaks of Kenya’s political tides turned him into a household name and an international statesman.
There isn’t but a very tiny number of people on Earth who have had the fortune to lead such an incredible life. He has seen it all. There’s no one better prepared to lead Africa through its current challenges and opportunities.
The man from Bondo’s political biography is well known. Indefatigable champion of good governance and functioning institutions. The genius behind Kenya’s democratic experiment. Political detainee for almost a decade. The key catalyst for Kenya’s 2010 Constitution.
The model African. I’ve travelled with Mr Odinga to many African countries. His name is on the lips of Africans everywhere. Common citizens and leaders alike venerate him and recognise him as a true pan-Africanist.
He is in a word Africa’s father into which Africans pour their hopes. This reality was vindicated when he served as the High Representative on Infrastructure for the African Union Commission. The man fluently, excitedly, and with erudition effortlessly talks about Africa’s stubborn challenges and its huge potential to overcome them.
But I digress. Today, I want to slay one dragon: that Mr Odinga is only a politician. Because politics is a “dirty game” folks who want to reduce Mr Odinga to only a politician mean to deny him the full complement of his life’s achievements.
I stipulate here without equivocation that Mr Odinga is one of the most educated Kenyans and in a field that is both complex and rare. Not to mention that he was one of the earliest Kenyans to be so educated, and to become a true leading professional and technocrat in the field.
First, Mr Odinga had a solid primary education at Kisumu Union School, Maranda High School, and at Herder Institut in Leipzig, Germany.
It was, however, at the Magdeburg Technical School, Otto-von-Guericke University, where Mr Odinga graduated with a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1969, that completed his formal education. In 1970, he returned to Kenya and was snapped up as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi.
There, he joined a faculty of mostly Europeans and Asians with only two Black Africans. He taught mechanical engineering, specifically production technology and materials science.
Nairobi was then part of the University of East Africa and the sciences were domiciled here, law in Dar-es-Salaam, and medicine at Makerere. I state categorically that Mr Odinga was a pioneer educator and early model in the field of the physical sciences.
Early in his career as a professional upon his return to Kenya, Mr Odinga did two absolutely remarkable and historic things in Kenya for which he has never been recognised. Mr Odinga is the founder and owner of East Africa Spectre Ltd, the first company in Kenya to manufacture gas cylinders.
Before then, the technology was unknown in the country. But with little cash, most of it borrowed on a wing and prayer from well-wishers, he strung together a makeshift factory in the Industrial Area with mostly skilled metalworkers and welders who had left Uganda to return home. It is this group under Mr Odinga’s tutelage that started the first ever production of gas cylinders here and turned into what we know as Spectre Ltd today.
The state tried to stop Mr Odinga from manufacturing cylinders because there was no standards agency in Kenya. Inspectors had to come from the UK. That’s how Mr Odinga did the second astounding thing.
He singlehandedly started from scratch the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBs). He established standards for weights, time, temperature, volume, and length at KEBs after training in Germany, UK, and US. He selected and trained lab technicians for KEBs.
Read Mr Odinga’s 2013 autobiography – The Flame of Freedom — to know the man behind the myth.
For scholars like me, Mr Odinga is king.
- Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. @makaumutua.
