{UAH} What Raila's Return Means For Jubilee | The Star
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What Raila's Return Means For Jubilee
Raila Odinga has jetted back into the country at precisely the most vulnerable point for the ruling Jubilee alliance of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto.
This was the week that it became clear Ruto's Rift Valley grassroots are increasingly restive amidst a huge and well-orchestrated plan to discredit his leadership role in the power pact with the Kikuyu that put Jubilee in office.
The Tyranny of Numbers factor of 2012-13 is giving every indication of facing the danger of being rent asunder by the realities of power sharing and the pressures of the rest of a deeply-ethnicised country.
The Kiplimo Rugut episode, in which he was promoted and transferred from the National Youth Service (NYS) by Devolution and Planning Secretary Anne Waiguru, has produced such a schism inside Jubilee that outsiders looking in can barely believe what they are seeing and hearing.
Indeed, it was the week that anti-Kikuyu sentiment, always latent in the region, reached a new and worrisome peak with the return of hate- pamphleteering in an area of the Rift Valley for the first time since 2007.
What plans does a presumably rebooted Raila have for the Uhuru administration at such a moment of vulnerability? What has all his soul-searching and deep introspection in America added up to and what will be the effects of his most important decision points?
Raila has just been on that most rare of leadership opportunities in African politics – a statesmanship retreat in an environment of high learning and research.
His host, Ambassador Charles R. Stith, the founder-director of Boston University's African Presidential Centre, where Raila spent most of his break in America, will be watching him closely (and most likely include him in his memoirs) for signs of what he takes back home from APC.
A former US envoy to Tanzania, Stith went out of his way to answer Raila's more excitable critics in Jubilee, particularly Mt Kenyans, including an MP and a Diaspora Kenyan.
A Raila rebooted in America is a phenomenon that the Jubilee administration, particularly President Uhuru's handlers and inner circle, will watch unblinkingly. His choice of date and venue of homecoming have already caused considerable unease inside Jubilee.
He chose the last day of May, the eve of Madaraka Day – a national holiday. The rollicking crowd that welcomes Raila home today will be many times the size of the crowd that will attend the Madaraka Day fete at the much smaller Nyayo National Stadium, where a military and march-past parade, Air Force fly-past, choirs and traditional dancers will preface President Uhuru's address to the nation.
Analysts have been quick to point out that though the President will enjoy all the perks of power and incumbency, Raila will preside over the much bigger and more dramatic rally by far.
Uhuru will take the salute of the National Anthem by the massed bands of the military, the salute of the military march-past parade and the thunder of the KAF fighter jets and other aircraft rolling over the city, as well as the company of the Diplomatic Corps, all the dignity pomp and circumstance of a National Day fete, but Raila will preside over a rally of the political street.
Raila has exceptional abilities to energize his base and the body language, sense of drama and theatre to go with them. His homecoming speech is much awaited, and he has a whole raft of issues to address, some of them extremely contentious.
Kenyans could be forgiven for emerging on the far side of the holiday weekend (Monday is a public holiday) with the distinct impression that the presidential campaign never really ended.
Some of the stage for what happens and will be said today was set on social media as long ago as Wednesday, May 28, under the often hilarious #BabaWhileYouWereAway. One tweet read: "We paid the Anglo Leasing Sh1.4 billion through MPESA lakini wakasema tutume 3.4 billion ya kutoa". Another political wag tweeted: "A Chinese man came, they were calling him Premier…. Baba we know you are the only premier".
One of the most remarkable assassination conspiracy claims in a political culture that used to be transfixed by serial high-profile murders was made by Raila's own elder brother, ODM nominated MP Oburu Odinga, in his absence. Oburu alleged that a number of East African Community (EAC) heads of state were conspiring to kill his brother — and gave the impression that the plot was at an advanced stage.
What's more, he timed the incendiary allegations to coincide with the presence in Nairobi of visiting Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and EAC presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda. Keqiang was here to sign infrastructure and natural resources deals worth more than Sh350 billion, including the multinational single-gauge railway project.
There are those who read high political irony in Oburu's timing and the sheer scope of his allegations. Jubilee strategists viewed it with great suspicion as being designed to kill several birds with one stone.
First was that it rained on the Keqiang-Kenyatta parade. Secondly, dragging the EAC presidents into the alleged plot painted Uhuru's pan-Africanist foreign policy strategy of the past year as being misused for the most nefarious ends, an allegation that the ODM/Cord base could easily choose to swallow whole, so acute is the rivalry between them and Jubilee just now.
What the Chinese thought of such an allegation jostling for both local and international headlines with news of the biggest delegation and development partnership deals ever to land in the East, Central, Great Lakes and Horn of Africa region, is anyone's guess.
Five decades ago the original President Kenyatta was expelling Chinese diplomats while his VP, the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Raila and Oburu's Dad), was embracing what was then called Red China as tightly is of his very life depended on it – thereby lay one irony of the timing of the assassination claims.
Raila's own response was intriguing. He at once sought to demonstrate that he enjoyed excellent relations with Museveni and Kagame, two men who are widely regarded as pursuing their political foes to the ends of the earth, and to urge the Nairobi government to take the allegations seriously by probing them.
The matter is stuck in a tug-of-war between Oburu and CID Director Ndegwa Muhoro, with the top cop being adamant that the MP makes his statement to Bondo police and the older man saying he will only speak to CID HQ in Nairobi about it. How Raila breaks this extraordinary stalemate should provide a sign of whether there is a new Raila made in Boston APC.
What can Jubilee expect from the rebooted rebel – a ratcheting up of already stratospheric tensions, a statesmanlike calming of nerves on all sides, or a complex blend of both that leaves both friend and foe wondering? Today's rally is as good a place as any to begin to find out.
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