Lang'ata MP can't protect democracy

Story by A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
(sent by Diana)
Publication Date: 2007/04/28

Race to state house

The other day, Lang’ata MP Raila Odinga launched what sounded like an impassioned plea for understanding. His pitch was that he was a forgiving person, harboured no hatred or ill-will, and would not seek revenge or retribution if elected president.

Mr Odinga: “That’s self-defence; any human-being faced with such a problem will use whatever weapon he has to defend himself.”The occasion was at the St John Everlasting Gospel Church at Nairobi’s Imara Daima residential area at the beginning of this month where Bishop Joseph Ogutu blessed his presidential quest.

Addressing the worshippers, Mr Odinga recalled the suffering he had undergone, particularly the three stints totalling eight years of detention without trial. “I know there are some people who fear that if Raila Odinga becomes president, he will look for them because of the things they did to him in the past? I would like to be seen as conciliatory,” he said. “They should not think Raila is going to arrest them and take them to jail.”

The fact that the former Roads minister gave this reassurance serves as confirmation that he knows well the traits in him that generate deep suspicion, mistrust and fear.

The statement was vintage Raila who has perfected the art of political doublespeak. Depending on the occasion, he can be a reasonable, conciliatory statesman. On another platform he will be the angry inciter and rabble-rouser. He will speak eloquently about human rights and democracy, yet in his own backyard violate those basic tenets to a degree unseen in modern Kenya.

It is true that Mr Odinga is today the only politician who commands the unswerving loyalty of a strong ethnic base. Yet building that kind of loyal, nay, fanatical following has come at a great price to the principle he claims to uphold but flouts with impunity.

The fact is that if there is a place in Kenya where the fruits of multipartyism and democracy — freedom of speech, thought, association and conscience — have not been realised, it is in Mr Odinga’s political backyard.

He has turned his political fiefdom into a cross between some absolute feudal monarchy and the last redoubt of primitive totalitarianism akin to North Korea’s so-called Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.

This is a state in which all wealth and influence must be directly controlled by one person and his family, because an impoverished populace makes for a pliable people.

Dissent, to put it mildly, is not allowed. And anyone who strays from the straight and narrow path of Odingaism and mind control will suffer the consequences.

Mr Odinga, of course, does not have to personally hurl stones or take up the whip against dissenters. There are many violent mobs who will enthusiastically do so, and he will not restrain them despite the magnetic hold he commands. Such violent mobs do not come in some spontaneous action, they must be assembled, organised, primed and compensated.

A person who has ensured the abortion of democracy and human rights in his own fiefdom surely cannot suddenly transform into the social democrat he claims to be once elected president. Once in office, he will simply have more power to effectively have the entire populace cowering under his might.

In speeches at high-society gatherings, he will sound like the reasonable, accommodative leader working to entrench democracy and the rule of law for the benefit of all Kenyans. He will go out of his way to try and demonstrate that he is not the ogre his opponents try to project him to be.

But his history will never run away from him. Even as he tries to project himself as a person worth electing president, some careless public statements will slip that show he is still the same self-confessed plotter of the failed 1982 military coup attempt in which many innocent people died and which triggered the dictatorial tendencies in President Moi.

Mr Odinga, for one, has never apologised or expressed the slightest regret for the failed coup. If anything, he will today try to justify the bungled coup on the political conditions prevailing at the time. Neither has he shown any concern for the dozens of young Air Force soldiers who lost their lives after being misled to take part in the bungled and amateurish misadventure. They were all cannon fodder.

Around last Christmas, there was a confrontation at the Kibera slums in Mr Odinga’s Lang’ata constituency where four people died in a clash with police. Trouble broke out when a mob tried to block an illegal political rally called by former Mungiki sect leader Ndura Waruinge, a man who probably attended the Odinga school of politics and now wants to challenge him for the seat on the ground that he is the person who knows how to counter violence with violence.

Mr Odinga, true to his form, rushed to the scene to try and make some political capital of consoling the bereaved. He publicly likened his stone-throwing supporters who had clashed with police to fighters of the Palestinian Infitada.

He said the mobs acted in self-defence after being provoked by police, likening the action to the struggle in Palestine against Israeli military occupation and recalling that the Palestinians throw stones to armed Israeli troops.

“That is self-defence,” he said. “Any human-being faced with such a problem will use whatever weapon he has to defend himself.”

Mr Odinga’s constituency houses what is reputed to be the largest slum in Africa. Poverty, disease and crime are rampant. Yet he has openly incited the residents to resist efforts to improve the security situation by the building of a police station.

And during the time he served as a Cabinet minister in the dictatorial Moi regime, Mr Odinga was implicated in the rent strike at Kibera that threatened to spread to other slums in Nairobi. His position was that the landlords were parasites fleecing the poor by charging exorbitant rents.

But this was not just about tenants and landlords being encouraged to negotiate fair rents, but a brazen putsch against local entrepreneurs who had invested in rental houses, were becoming models of progress and development in the slums and were involved in efforts to bring water, electricity, roads and other services to areas previously not served.

There is something else about Mr Odinga. He rightfully points an accusing finger at ministers and other senior government officials who have grown fabulously wealthy. Not mentioned is the fact that the alleged wealth would pale in comparison to his own.

One reason why he has emerged as the most serious contender for the ODM Kenya presidential nomination is that he is the only one, with the exception of Kanu leader Uhuru Kenyatta, with the kind of money required for a well-oiled political machine.

The man who forever rails against his wealthy rivals, makes unsubstantiated claims that the investment Kenyans are putting into the stock exchange and real estate must be proceeds from drug trafficking, is himself one of the wealthiest men around.

If he seriously believes that the most visible signs of Kenya’s economic recovery are fuelled by drug money, it follows that once he becomes president, his first priority will be to deal with the country’s reputation as a drug-smugglers haven by confiscating what he believes are proceeds of crime, and, of course, jail people he believes have acquired wealth from narcotics. Another element about Mr Odinga is the growing number of once-loyal acolytes who have walked away after realising what he really stands for, and understanding that they will never attain their own ambitions if they remain under his thumb. Among key lieutenants he has lost in the last few years are Mr Peter Rateng Ogega, Kenya’s ambassador in Washington, and Mr Herbert Ojwang, a member of the Kenyatta National Hospital board and chairman of South Nyanza (Sony) Sugar Company.

The two served Mr Odinga faithfully for many years, but a time came when their loyal service and blind obedience meant a life of servitude and dependence on handouts.

Mr Ogega was a key member of the Odinga political strategy team and executive director of the Jaramogi Foundation. A former University of Nairobi student leader, he was jailed for 10 years after the 1982 coup attempts, a sentence enhanced from the original seven years after he defiantly refused to plead for mercy.

On release, he completed his education and then served as a non-salaried chief executive of the Jaramogi Foundation. He soon found that even after Mr Odinga became an influential member of, first, Moi’s and then Kibaki’s Cabinet, there would be nothing for him.

Then there is Mr David Odhiambo Dimba aka Jakobuya who served the Odinga family faithfully before being unceremoniously dumped without even a token of appreciation. Mr Dimba was the young man famously captured by press cameras standing as Jaramogi’s aide de camp during the famous first legal multi-party rally at the Kamukunji grounds in Nairobi in early 1992.

The lesson here is that a Raila Odinga presidency will at the end of the day mean no gain or recognition for people who sacrifice so much to help him to achieve his ambition. Everybody around him is an expendable foot soldier, and must remain so.

A man so obsessed with control and command can surely not run a modern government where civil servants and Cabinet ministers must be given the freedom and independence to do their work.

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