Unease in ODM over handshake deal amid bid to oust Raila as Luo kingpin

Senior rank and file of the Orange Democratic Movement is increasingly getting jittery with the loose handshake arrangement it has with the ruling party, Jubilee, as the clock ticks towards the next General Election.

A number of unfavourable factors have forced the leadership of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s political vehicle to introspect in the last few days, especially on future engagements with the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta. Self-preservation, and not political optics, is the overriding consideration, multiple interviews with party insiders revealed.

Until last week, the restive handlers were expecting a direct endorsement by Mr Kenyatta of Mr Odinga’s nascent, if not furtive, presidential ambitions in 2022, but when the President held a syndicated interview with Kikuyu-language radio stations, he made it clear that he would not be backing any of the politicians to succeed him at the expiry of his term next year. For the ODM party brigade, that crucial presidential endorsement is now not on the cards. They must fend for themselves. In hostile territory infested with die-hard, loud and stubborn William Ruto backers.

The remarks have caused feelings of betrayal in the Orange party even though the duo has made it clear in the past that their rapprochement was never about 2022 elections.

Read: Handshake on the rocks as Raila takes on Jubilee

Among other things, being lumped together with Jubilee in what could also see him blamed for the failures of the regime to his disadvantage is a big headache for Mr Odinga. And, predictably, this is already the case as the Deputy President William Ruto says Mr Odinga must be ready to shoulder his share of mistakes of omission and commission caused by the current administration.

“You came and changed the government’s priorities from the Big Four Agenda to alternative ones like the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI). Now, after you have failed miserably, you want to run away,” the DP said on Thursday, in reference to Mr Odinga.

Equally, some of the supporters feel they have yet to fully reap the benefits of the handshake to be able to stick their necks out for the government side. They say they had expected a few ODM members to be appointed to the Cabinet but this was not to be. Their argument is that whereas their boss never staked any claim to plum positions in government, the President should have at least handed him a few to requite the good gesture.

Referendum

“I want to thank my brother Raila for not making any demands before agreeing to work with me. We did not talk about sharing government and, as we stand today, he is not in government. He never made any demands for a share of government,” Mr Kenyatta said in October last year.

In a previous interview, Mr Odinga told this writer that the handshake will end with the referendum in June, meaning that he may have already engaged the gear on his post-referendum future, which includes fashioning his own destiny without Mr Kenyatta.

Read: One year later, Raila explains how handshake changed Kenya

His handlers are hoping that the plebiscite vote goes their way so that they can hit the campaign trail at full throttle. With an expanded Executive, the new order will give the former premier as well as other presidential contenders the option of dangling plum government jobs such as prime minister to potential allies as they seek to galvanise support across the country.

In recent times Mr Odinga has sustained his attacks on the government, accusing it of failed campaign promises. But in so doing, he also finds himself in a dilemma as singling out the DP in his salvo may appear to some as sparing the President, who is actually responsible for the whole government and is expected to take full responsibility for its failures and successes.

Thus, Mr Odinga finds himself in the unfavourable position of keeping one leg in government to support Mr Kenyatta, and the other outside so that he can hit out at the DP.

That dilemma is putting his aides at a loss on how far he should push with this narrative, given that the President’s men are also following the developments. Anything that gives the slightest sign that he is now going for Mr Kenyatta would spell a death knell for the handshake and jeopardise chances of the BBI proposals being endorsed by voters at the referendum.

Still, he is not relenting on his attacks against the Deputy President, and this week told him that “the youngsters you promised laptops eight years ago are now old enough to see through your lies”.

“The youth you promised eight million jobs in eight years can see through the wheelbarrow lie you are now peddling,” Mr Odinga added on Thursday.

Read: Raila in dilemma as Uhuru makes new demands on Handshake deal

Observers, however, reckon that what may work for Mr Odinga, for now, is the fact that the political marriage between Mr Kenyatta and Dr Ruto appears to be beyond restoration, even though nothing stops them from making amends should they feel that their common interests are threatened by ODM.

Still, when Jubilee recently insisted that Mr Odinga’s party had to sign a formal cooperation deed if it wanted to be handed the deputy governor’s slot in Nairobi, ODM smelled a rat. This, senior members rationalised, was a way of making them inherit failures of the current regime, something that will be used against them in the next polls.

Already, Mr Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper Democratic Movement is warming up to the position at City Hall after Jubilee asked it to consider nominating a possible occupant in what will no doubt rattle ODM.

There is also concern that unless Mr Kenyatta will be directly backing the handshake ticket, personally campaigning and, where possible, “deploy the system to help the cause” -- as Mr Odinga’s elder brother Dr Oburu Oginga hopes he will -- associating with Jubilee administration until the last minute will dent ODM’s presidential campaigns.

Last Sunday, the ODM chief was in Soweto in the Eastlands district of Nairobi where he attended Mass, just a week after Dr Ruto attended church service there in what analysts say is meant to erase the inroads the second-in-command has been making in Nairobi.

That the DP, who has been campaigning for about three years now and may have covered so much ground, is another source of jitters at a time Mr Odinga is channelling his energies into popularising BBI.

The loss in the Msambweni by-election, where ODM candidate Omar Boga was floored by the Ruto-backed Feisal Bader, has also rattled the party politburo, with some warning that unless something is urgently done, Dr Ruto will keep chipping away on their bastions.

More controversial, but still important, is the unspoken fear in ODM of the possibility of a secret pact between the President and his Deputy that may see the two join forces towards 2022. The theory, far-fetched as it might sound, is that the differences between the two are made up to save the DP from the curse of incumbency and also help him shed off the tag of a “project”.

The proponents of this school of thought hold that the handshake route only became convenient for Mr Kenyatta since the Opposition leader then would not let him govern in peace. That the President has confessed to getting some names of BBI team members from his DP, they say, confirms that theory.

Another worry for the Orange party is the incessant squabbling in the ruling party, and Senate Minority leader James Orengo has expressed frustrations over it.

“The Jubilee Party’s crisis is making our work difficult. One would have expected the President to do an overhaul, both in the party and government, to find it easy in driving his development agenda. They say a house divided against itself cannot stand. The President has some room to correct this if he wishes,” he said.

They fear that the President will become a lame duck in the dying days of his tenure, and thus may not be helpful to them as already politicians in his backyard are defying him openly.

Mr Odinga has been the face of BBI in rallies and the lukewarm support in Mr Kenyatta’s own backyard is also fuelling murmurs that he is paying lip service to the whole push to amend the Constitution.

“The BBI is being made to look like Raila’s burden alone. We cannot entertain a situation where we spend all our energies on the push at the expense of our 2022 campaigns,” a close Raila aide said yesterday, even as nominated MP Maina Kamanda defended the President, saying much as he is a benefactor of BBI, he too had a country to run.

“The President has a lot of issues competing for his attention. That is the reason he has tasked some of us to work with the former prime minister on the BBI project. We report to him periodically so you can’t really say that he is aloof,” Mr Kamanda said.

Mr Odinga also faces another warfront as some in his Nyanza backyard hold that it is time he hangs up his boots. The campaign to upstage Mr Odinga, sources told this newspaper, is coalescing around Migori governor Okoth Obado, former Nairobi governor Evans Kidero who is now eying the Homa Bay seat, former Cabinet Minister Dalmas Otieno, and a few current MPs and a host of former MPs.

Most of the former MPs in this push have had appointments to government positions and parastatal boards and the appointments are largely attributed to Deputy President William Ruto.

Some of the ex-legislators who have benefitted from the appointments include former Nyatike MP Omondi Anyanga, former Rangwe MP George Oner, former Rangwe MP Martin Ogindo, former Awendo MP Jared Kopiyo, and former Uriri MP John Kobado.

“We want the people of Nyanza to have alternative avenues of actualising their political dreams and implementing their visions,” Mr Ogindo said.

In the fresh scheme to upstage Mr Odinga as the regional political supremo, South Nyanza is the epicenter of this formation, but the planners are roping in allies across the region.

Governor Obado has played host to a number of the former MPs where the agenda has included formation and strengthening of other parties to rival ODM and to field candidates in the region.

“Governor Obado is working on fielding candidates on the Omingo Magara-led PDP ticket, which he used in 2013, while Dr Kidero is working on doing the same but on Mr Ogindo’s Green Congress of Kenya,” a source privy to the arrangements told the Sunday Nation.

Mr Obado declined to comment on the matter, while Dr Kidero insisted that he was a life member of ODM and had not attended any such meetings where discussions to succeed Mr Odinga were discussed.

“I’m an ODM life member number 1293. There has never been any meeting between me and any of those people and is I remember very well the last time I saw Dalmas was five-or-so years ago,” Dr Kidero told the Sunday Nation.

“Obado is my friend but we’ve not met, and so is Ogindo. The last time I saw Ogindo was when he was my economic adviser at City Hall and I haven’t seen him since he resigned to go into politics in Homa Bay.”

ODM National Chairman John Mbadi yesterday maintained that any plans to upstage Mr Odinga will flop.

“This is not the first time we’ve had some leaders from Nyanza region make these attempts. Between 2013 and 2017 there were such attempts that choreographed a fake narrative that Raila had impoverished Nyanza,” he said.

He pointed out that those scheming against Mr Odinga were just calling for their political waterloo.

“Culturally, Luos will never have two centres of power. That is not tenable. Our undisputed leader is Raila Odinga,” Mr Mbadi said.

This is not the first attempt to oust Mr Odinga as the regional supremo. After the 2013 General Election, there was the Kalausi (whirlwind) movement associated with Mr Otieno, the former Rongo MP and Dr Kidero which never took off.

In the end, Mr Odinga finds himself haunted by the decision to join ranks with the President, a mixed bag that has also accorded him an opportunity to take a break from hard-tackle politics and refuel.

Additional reporting by Justus Ochieng.  [email protected].