RAILA ODINGA: An enigma in Kenyan politics
Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Babafemi A. Badejo
(ISBN: 978-37208-9-9; Yintab Books, Lagos and Nairobi; 2006, pp 354; Price, $22)
Available at: www.yintab.com and www.amazom.com
Badejo writes with the ease of an academic and the verve of an African minstrel versed in traditional storytelling.
Conventional wisdom has it that an apple never falls too far for its tree. So, too, is the fate of those who enjoy great renown and historical pedigrees by virtue of their lineage and heritage. Raila Amolo Odinga, the veritable subject of Babafemi Babdejo’s book, Raila Odinga: An enigma in Kenyan politics is no less the proverbial apple.
Raila is the son of Honorable Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, a Kenyan nationalist, political icon, and its first Vice president on attaining independence. Like father like son, it is hardly surprising that Raila followed his father’s footsteps by immersing himself fully into the rabble-rousing and sometimes, raucous Kenyan partisan politics.
In this biography of a modern Kenyan politician, Badejo has illuminated vagaries that drive partisan politics in Africa by tying together, the unique life of one man, that of the Kenyan nation and the diverse lives of his varied interlocutors and compatriots. Raila is compulsively human, but in the context of his political undertakings and career, of which we may not have seen the denouement, his adjectival qualification as an enigma has intense and unquestionable merit and validity. Indeed, an insight into his persona and politics, qualifies anyone to cast him in those immortal words of Sir Winston Churchill: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Another confirmation of Raila’s enigmatic bona fides can be drawn from those enlightening words of Franz Kafka, that “there are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness.” In this autobiography, one fact that comes across clearly, is that Raila Odinga is in every sense of the word an impatient man. On the converse, he is extremely far from being lazy.
Beyond the subject’s persona, Raila Odinga: An enigma in Kenyan politics is a book of introspection into critical facets of Kenyan politics and therefore, an introductory verse and great psychological insight to Kenyan ethnic groups, lore and traditional idiosyncrasies, all of which Raila personifies in different ways.
In order to present Raila Odinga creditably to his readers, Babafemi Badejo goes to his roots, x-raying and dissecting not just his persona and political credentials, but how these juxtapose with his tribal antecedents and heritage. As a scion of a key, but not politically dominant Luo tribe, the author presents in Raila Odinga, a picture of how tribalism drives partisan politics in Kenya – a phenomenon that is commonplace in Africa. What the book also reveals, is that political dichotomy is not so often ethnicity driven as it is personality driven. The subjugation of one’s tribe, as was the case with Odinga’s Luo tribe, was more often than not meant to stymie the probable challenge to the ruling political elite as well as their control of national resources and power. Invariably, imported ideology had its place too in the orchestration of such differences.
Badejo offers us a broad portrait with intense minutia of Odinga as a man defined by his history, ethnicity, and politics. His life was in many ways an epilogue to Kenya and Africa’s decolonization struggle into which he was born and for which, his father was a well-known pan-Africanist. He grew up in a nation that mirrored other African countries in several ways. Kenyan politics offered a clear symmetry to those of other African countries. Just as Nigeria had its Lord Luggard, Kenya had his Lord Delamare. Just as many countries of Africa fought political wars to gain independence, Kenya had its maquis –the Mau Mau movement, which clashed with the aims of colonial masters. And like many African nations, Kenya and its people were not spared from the East-West ideological divide and their respective demands for unfettered loyalty.
Badejo also highlights the ethnic imperative of partisan politics in Kenya, using various individuals as reference points. Similarities and differences among key pro-dependence politicians like Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboyo and Oginga Odinga, Raila’s father, seemed to have shaped, if not destined, the enigmatic persona that Raila assumed from childhood. The Catch-22 nature of Kenyan politics, the cross-carpeting, the making and unmaking of alliances and near absence of political loyalty were clearly fleshed out and captured in a nutshell by the observation that. “the assertion of ideological difference and personal leadership ambitions, accentuated the struggle between Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga”
Whilst ethnicity did not always play itself out as tribalism, the undertones were always there and in many instances were made manifest. Raila, it seemed, was from the outset committed to setting such negative values aside. Nevertheless, he was a Luo, and “being a Luo was and still is, to have an identity”. As a person with pedigree and as a Luo, Raila’s personality “was an identity shaped by shared values born of a rich range of cultural practices and activities”. These salutary values also made him a markedly different and resilient politician – someone who “protested without fear”.
As one traverses this book, it becomes intensely obvious that the personality of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, especially his leadership traits and stubborn doggedness had impacted on the son. True to his Luo heritage, Raila mimicked his father in many respects. But he was also savvy in politics, inclined more towards what Nigeria’s elder statesman and politician Waziri Ibrahim, referred to as “politics without bitterness”. This trait was typically uncommon in African politics with its zero-sum-game tendencies. But it is even more revealing of the Raila enigma, when one considers that for all his father did towards Kenyan independence, which led to his becoming President Jomo Kenyatta‘s deputy, he was in the end sidelined, never to become President. This reality presents another symmetry albeit, one not presented in the book. Oginga Odinga’s nationalist role and eventually missing out on the big post closely resembles the fate that befell Chief Obafemi Awolowo of Nigeria. So far, the same fate seems to have befallen Raila.
Beyond elucidating how ethnicity compelled or impeded individuals that were politically inclined, this book also shed light on the negative influence of ethnicity by illustrating its insidious nature when employed as a tool of intimidation and subjugation. Invariably, those who are in the minority politically or demographically bear the brunt. But more than anything else, the book laid bare the divisiveness of ethnicity in African politics where the concept of being in the opposition is tantamount to enmity. But there is also a salutary side to this: it was a combination of Kenyan political, cultural and ethnic realities that molded Raila into the enigma that he has become. But his family upbringing played a part too.
His tutelage under his father and others, meant that he was schooled early in life on the “tremendous organizing and mobilizing capacity of an astute politician.” He grew up to be assertive and courageous and particularly “impatient” like his father. From his mother, Mary Odinga, he drew certain strengths including his strong personality and gravitas. But what set him out as an enigma was that he seemed to be a bunch of contradictions given that he was very accommodating, but also an avowed non-conformist. This would explain why he would be very respectful and kind at home, but took exception to thanking his teachers for doing a job they were paid for.
Like most African countries, Kenya’s post-colonial and post-independence political environment was at best perfidious. Navigating it safely required deft abilities and adroitness. Raila has proven his mettles in this regard. Raila Odinga, for instance, is cast as being fixated on being a different brand of politician. This may be attributed to his having been sent off at the tender age of 16 to study in socialist East Germany, while in reality, having among his role models, the likes of Sir Winston Church, to whom he frequently compared himself, in a bid to validate some of his confounding and non-conformist political actions. Another fact that comes across clearly, is that as a child, Raila was positioned to learn from the successes and failings of older Kenyan politicians, his father included.
Hence, though Raila may not have set out to attain the personal objective of being an enigma, his claim to that distinction (which some see as dubious) has arisen from his political nimbleness and ability to dine with the proverbial devil and proactively engage his adversaries, even to the extent of forming alliances with them. Whether he did this for Raila or in the Luo or national interest remains open to study.
Raila Odinga’s critics readily contend that every one of his political acts is premised on Machiavellianism - and the end justifying the means doctrine. Many have noted how in 1992 he won a seat in parliament for the Lang’ata Constituency in Nairobi, as a candidate for FORD, only to abandon FORD in 1994 after his father’s death to assume a prominent leadership role in the National Development Party. Despite the political shift, he retained the Lang’ata Constituency seat and in the 1997 election, came in third in the presidential race. His critics find such deft political shiftiness rankling.
However, his critics fail to clarify, for instance, why Raila, who was instrumental to the ousting of President Arap Moi and the election of President Kibaki in 2002 and had supported a military coup against Moi’s government in 1982, would stay back in Kenya rather than go safely into exile. In making the latter hard choice, he languished in jail for a decade. Such a choice, surely is not expedient, nor an act of a coward politician averse to self-deprivation or inclined to self-preservation. They fail to acknowledge the courage it took and the fact that it showed commitment to Kenya’s wellbeing. Similarly, they refuse to contemplate the possibility that Raila may indeed be unique enough to rise above the fray of partisan politics, his Luo heritage notwithstanding.
If Badejo had set out to discover Raila Odinga, whom did he find? And what is it that makes Raila Odinga a certified enigma? In the book’s epilogue titled, “Who is Raila?” the various commentaries about him by his family and interlocutors affirm his bona fides as an enigma. Let’s contemplate these comments on Odinga:
He is not a thinker but makes friends around the world importing what has been done in other places without justification for Kenya … other than it had been done in Nigeria and South Africa.. ;
[Raila is] at once a personification of his family and community.. a psychosis and psychology forged by the Luo conviction that they are outsiders in the Kenyan State..;
[He] is a misunderstood individual.. a patriot and nationalist.
Paradoxically, it is the latter categorization that places Raila Odinga on the same pedestal with many of the world’s great thinkers and leaders as well as some great politicians of our times, from Albert Einstein to Bertrand Russell and from Kwame Nkrumah to Bill Clinton. In summary, as Davinda Lamba noted, “Raila is not unusual in Kenya”, nor indeed, in Africa and our globalized world.
Although self-preservation is the strongest human instinct, Raila has without doubt engaged in measures that may suggest that he threw caution to the winds. But some of these have been strategic political moves, which to some makes him suspect. Raila remains cognizant of these criticisms, and indeed responds to them. Conscious of the criticisms about being an opportunist and a carpet-crossing carpetbagger, he rebuts the view thus: “Although I have been criticized for changing political parties, I have maintained that at no time have we compromised our principles”. His use of the royal we is hardly incidental. Also in making this point, he draws a parallel between himself and Churchill, who once said: “I am what I have always been – A Tory Democrat. Force of circumstances has compelled me to serve with another party.”
As if to affirm his place and stand in history, Raila also validate his modus operandi with the Churchillian escapism, that: “Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; other change their principles for the sake of their party.” As Badejo documents for posterity, all of Raila's political savvy has not made him immune to the vagaries of African and indeed Kenyan politics. Like his father, he too was stumped, when after helping President Kibaki come to office he was not rewarded commensurately, but dumped when Kibaki reneged on the quiet compact between them to assign him the Prime Minister portfolio. This reality was a harsh replay of what Jomo Kenyatta had done to Raila’s father, Oginga Odinga.
Badejo writes with the ease of an academic and the verve of an African minstrel versed in traditional storytelling. He captures with incisive precision, compassion and brutal candor, Raila’s whims, his near schizophrenic political persona and his human strengths, weaknesses and imperfections. In so doing he also unmasks character traits of the Kenyan political maquis. What Badejo also brings to the fore is that the bare-knuckle politics in which Raila has been immersed and has managed to survive, were by no means a measure of Kenya’s democratic credentials or its robustness. After all, former President Arap Moi had successfully reduced Kenya to a one-party state and as some would readily suggest, to being only a democracy in name.
This book is personal, historical, political -- and if I dare say – sociological and anthropological. It is an eye-opening account and a visage into the hidden world of Kenyan politics, ethnicity, and public personalities. Also, it offers an insight and a riveting account of a man that has been dubbed an “intrepid politician.” Raila Odinga”s life and politics is still very much a work in progress. For now, he bestrides Kenyan politics like a bridge over troubled waters. Well anchored, his payday at the political helm in Kenya may yet come.
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*Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby.