From: kjmwangi

This is the best analysis of Odingaism and Railism ever penned.....and a word to Musalia Mudavadi for branding Raila Odinga an Idi Amin.

---

Nelson Mandela or Idi Amin?

Story by MAKAU MUTUA
Publication Date: 5/6/2007

Raila Odinga, arguably the most electrifying politician in Kenya today, is a contradiction of blinding ambition, autocratic proclivities, and an admirable legacy in the early struggle for the reform of the Moi-Kanu State.

Mr Raila Odinga

Apart from Mr Kalonzo Musyoka and President Mwai Kibaki, no other traditional politician except Mr Odinga has a realistic shot at State House in December this year. But like the other two, Mr Odinga lacks a principled and comprehensive reformist vision for Kenya. Even so, Mr Odinga's history and politics suggest a complex character that is determined to leave its indelible imprint on Kenya. It is not the mind that primarily forges our identity. Rather, it is the conditions under which we live that fundamentally shape our moral and political outlooks. That is why we must appreciate Mr Odinga as a social being in order to understand him.

There are five important keys to Mr Odinga: he is the scion of the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya's most celebrated and frustrated Opposition politician; his citizenship in the Luo nation; his education in the former German Democratic Republic, a satellite State of the defunct Soviet Union; and his maturation in the treacherous political vortex of the Kenyan post-colonial State.

Independence struggle

The heroes of Kenya's independence struggle still occupy the most hallowed place in the nation's history. Dedan Kimathi, Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and Oginga Odinga were the most iconic. Except for Mr Kimathi who was murdered before independence, Mr Odinga was by far and away the most devoted democratic reformer of the post-independence period.

Quiet frequently fire begets ash, but occasionally it spawns more fires. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga bequeathed his son a legacy of political determination that few Kenyan politicians can match. In a culture that worships heredity, he bestowed upon his son an almost unassailable status.

This is not to say that Mr Odinga would have been nothing if his father had not been the great Jaramogi. He is obviously a gifted strategist, mobiliser, and organiser. The rebel Kanu Rainbow Alliance and the referendum-driven ODM-K, which brought together strange bedfellows, would not have been possible without Mr Odinga.

The Rainbow Alliance brought Kanu down while the ODM-K euphoria subjected President Kibaki to a humiliating defeat. But herein lies the difference between Mr Odinga and Mr Uhuru Kenyatta. Although both carry the two most famous names in Kenyan politics, only Mr Odinga has been able to capitalise on his legacy. But there is a psychological advantage that Mr Odinga enjoys, and which Mr Kenyatta lacks. Mr Odinga sees himself as an outsider trying to vindicate his father's quest for political power and supremacy. Mr Kenyatta, on the other hand, is a prince who lacks the fire in his belly and only wants power as a family entitlement.

Mr Odinga desperately seeks power while Mr Kenyatta only wants to retake what he sees as rightfully belonging to him. One is hungry while the other is not. There is unfinished business in the Odinga household. Simply put, Mr Odinga must take the State House that Jomo Kenyatta denied his father. This is a huge mental advantage that Mr Odinga possesses and which Mr Kenyatta cannot simply manufacture.

Mr Odinga would not have been who he is had he not been born into the Luo nation, one of the most populous and politically active in Kenya. For reasons of colonial cartography, the political centre of Kenya was located in the Kikuyu-Bantu dominated central-eastern parts of the country.

This meant that other nations, including the Luo, were outsiders to the centre of the country's political life. This geographic marginalisation truncated nation-building and created the sense that Kenya was a Kikuyu-Bantu State. President Kenyatta, the country's founding father, cast this mentality in stone when he forged a Kikuyu-dominated bureaucratic, political, and business elite. Nowhere was the marginalisation of the Luo more pronounced than in Mr Kenyatta's Cabinet. Although Jaramogi had fought for Mr Kenyatta's release — and even rejected independence until Mr Kenyatta was freed — Mr Kenyatta started sidelining him as soon as he assumed the reins of power. There is no doubt that the Kenyatta-Odinga schism was ideological, but it was also deeply tribal. Mr Kenyatta and his cohorts saw Jaramogi as the ideologue of a Luo-driven socialist insurgency within the State. The recent excellent political memoir by Mr Duncan Ndegwa, Kenya's first black head of the Civil Service, says as much. This is how the appalling narrative of Kenya as a Kikuyu-Luo only country was constructed.

Since the mid-1960s, Luo leaders have become increasingly alienated from the State. The exit of Jaramogi and other senior Luo leaders from Kanu, the formation of the Jaramogi-led left-leaning Kenya People's Union, the banning of the KPU and the detention of its key leaders, including Jaramogi following a bloody massacre of Luos in Kisumu during a visit by President Kenyatta, and the political assassination of Mr Tom Mboya in 1969 developed in the Luo a psychology of victimisation by the Kenyan State. The killing of Mr Mboya, in which the Kenyatta State was implicated, sealed this psychosis of victimisation. The assassination in 1990 of Dr Robert Ouko, the urbane Luo Foreign minister, in which President Moi and some of his senior officials were implicated, solidified a sense of siege in the Luo nation. These events have led the Luo to believe that the Kenyan State is anti-Luo and that only a Luo head of state can cure this problem.

In the minds of most Luos, the Odinga family is the embodiment of their victimisation. Mr Raila Odinga, who like his father has been repeatedly detained and persecuted by the State, now occupies the status of the messiah among Luos. They regard him as their proverbial Moses, the chosen one who will lead them out of evil Egypt. But whether other Kenyans are ready to so anoint him is entirely another matter.

Quest for power

Mr Odinga's quest for power is intrinsically bound up with Luo victimhood that drives his identity as an avenger. But just like Israelis and Palestinians need each other for their conflict, Luo victimhood is the other side of Kikuyu entitlement.

While the Kikuyu elite that now controls the State is defined by its arrogant entitlement as "natural" rulers, the Luo elite harbours deep wounds of exclusion. Anyone who thinks that Mr Odinga is not adept at exploiting these stereotypes does not understand the man. He has partially built a political career by preying on Luo powerlessness and posing as the saviour. Demonising the Kikuyu as dominant, arrogant, and unscrupulous — as he did in the referendum — portrays him as a victim and may serve to endear him to non-Kikuyus. However, it is precisely Mr Odinga's commanding position in Luo Nyanza that has exposed him as an autocrat. Nothing demonstrates this more than his stranglehold on the community's political choices.

Unconscionably, the Luo have been forced into whatever political party was Mr Odinga's fancy for the moment. When Mr Odinga left Ford-Kenya, the Luo left with him. When he took over the National Development Party, they rushed into it. They started cooperating with Kanu in 1998 and then went to Kanu with him in 2000 when he dissolved NDP to join the Moi government. Then in 2002, they left Kanu with him to join Narc. In 2005, they left Narc with him to join ODM-K. The Luo are simply putty in Mr Odinga's hands.

Even worse, Mr Odinga has either destroyed or emasculated virtually all Luo politicians who stand up to him. Prof Peter Anyang' Nyong'o learned this bitter lesson when he was ousted from his Kisumu Rural seat for supporting Mrs Charity Ngilu and the Social Democratic Party over Mr Odinga's NDP in 1997. In 2002, Prof Nyong'o was humbled enough to come back to Narc and win re-election under Mr Odinga's tutelage. Today, the good professor is a footsoldier in Mr Odinga's brigade in ODM-K. The two men distrust each other, but Prof Nyong'o has decided to swallow his enormous intellectual pride rather than remain in the political cold.

Mr Odinga has sidelined several other key Luo reformers. Principal among these is Mr James Orengo, the one bona fide threat to his supremacy in Luo Nyanza. Mr Odinga made sure that Mr Orengo lost his Ugenya parliamentary seat in 2002 when he refused to join the Narc bandwagon. Another casualty is the youthful and charismatic Shem Ochuodho. Mr Ochuodho was nixed at the Narc nominations in 2002 for his opposition to Mr Odinga's autocratic control of Luo politics. Mr Joe Donde, another important Luo legislator was booted out in 2002 for opposing Mr Odinga. Today, Mr Donde appears to be warming up to Mr Odinga in preparation for the 2007 elections.

It is an incontestable fact that Mr Odinga has retarded the development of democracy in Luo Nyanza. That is why Mr Raphael Tuju, the Narc-K Odinga naysayer, risks life and limb when he travels to certain parts of Luo Nyanza. It is not a stretch to say that the Luo nation is now under siege from Mr Odinga.

Luo Nyanza

For Kenyans to elect Mr Odinga as their President, he must demonstrate to them that he will not do unto Kenya what he has done unto Luo Nyanza. Kenyans do not want to be turned into spineless sycophants.

There is a certain Machiavellian style that Mr Odinga seems to have picked up during his formative student days in the German Democratic Republic. The East Germans, who provided "political education" to all students, talked about democracy but neither believed in it nor practised it. Instead, party apparatchiks, working at the behest of Moscow, ran a highly despotic police state under the guise of a workers' party. This populist, hypocritical style defines many of Mr Odinga's political moves. He says he is a social democrat but his actions and alliances belie that assertion. How could a democrat, let alone a social democrat, join the Moi-Kanu regime, as Mr Odinga did, at the height of its repressive rule? How can a social democrat join hands, as Mr Odinga has done, with known big-time perpetrators of human rights violations and economic crimes in ODM-K?

Corruption is one of the most deadly cancers of the African post-colonial African State. Like the leaders in Narc-K, Mr Odinga has shown a proclivity for embracing corrupt networks in ODM-K. In 2002, he betrayed this same tendency when as the leader of LDP he insisted that President Kibaki appoint known human rights violators and economic criminals into the Cabinet. He has played cynical politics with a new Constitution. As a Narc minister, he opposed the truth commission and has refused to push for it even in the Opposition. He has not articulated any credible policy positions on terrorism, foreign policy, and international trade. In sum, Mr Odinga has demonstrated that he lacks the vision and the political will to reform Kenya.

Mr Odinga has been trying to lead Kenya for a long time. His role in the aborted 1982 coup shows that he will do virtually anything to capture power. That is why even if ODM-K does not nominate him as its flag-bearer, Mr Odinga will be in the race to face President Kibaki. Although Mr Odinga's authorised biography — Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics — by Dr Babafemi Bajedo, the Nigerian bureaucrat-cum-scholar, is more sycophantic than analytical, it made clear Mr Odinga's determination to reside at State House. What Kenyans must ask themselves is whether Mr Odinga should be entrusted with power and the project that is Kenya.

It is true that Mr Odinga has suffered horribly under despotic Kenyan regimes. But does that make him a democrat? The totality of his life's work says otherwise.

In spite of Presidents Moi and Kibaki, Kenya has made some democratic gains because of the determination of the Kenyan people. Would Mr Odinga nurture those gains or retard them?

This is a question that cannot be answered in the abstract. Would his opponents, say President Kibaki and Mr Musyoka, do better? Or should Kenyans vote for a non-traditional candidate? These are the questions that we must ponder between now and Election Day.



Makau Mutua is distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and chair of the Kenya Human Rights Commission