Courtesy Of Joe Adama
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| Raila Amolo Odinga: Former Prime Minister |
Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s first overseas
engagement, the Oxford Analytica /Times CEO Africa Summit in London, where he
delivered a keynote speech on Tuesday evening, was not initially very well covered by both the
Kenyan media and his own communications team.
Compared to Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama,
who also delivered a keynote speech to the same Summit the same day on the same
theme, the coverage and availability of the full text of Raila’s controversial
address were slow in coming.
In great contrast, President Mahama’s full speech
and the video of his address were mounted on the Internet within minutes of
delivery overnight on Tuesday/Wednesday on multiple Ghana-oriented websites,
both official and not.
By Wednesday lunchtime, only Raila’s Twitter and
Facebook accounts indicated that he had indeed also delivered his own speech
the previous evening, but the full text was nowhere to be found and there was
no video.
The Times of London, co-sponsors of the Summit
alongside prestigious and authoritative global research firm Oxford Analytica,
had a news report, the speech and video, but Kenyans had to subscribe to access
more than the first few paragraphs of the news and Summit reports.
Raila’s choice and timing of first intercontinental
engagement was a political class act like none other, in the wake of a
presidential election, including a transition poll, in Kenyan history.
FOREMOST RISK ANALYSTS
The CEO Africa Summit brings together the
chairpersons and chief executives of Africa’s biggest business and
international investors and prospective investors as well as some of the
foremost risk analysts.
No other declared loser of a presidential poll in
Kenya has latched on to such a high profile global forum so soon after being
outmanoeuvred at home.
In all likelihood, when they invited Raila, the
organizers of the CEO Africa Summit had little doubt that he would arrive in
London designated Fourth President of the Republic Kenya.
Indeed, much Oxford Analytica analysis of the
run-up to and prolonged immediate aftermath of the Kenyan general election
fancied Raila’s prospects over Uhuru Kenyatta’s, as did much of the rest of
Britain’s mainstream media.
For instance, the Independent newspaper of London,
an eminently liberal publication, carried an analysis a jump ahead of the
election candidly headlined, “If Raila Odinga wins Kenya's elections, Britain's
interests are secure, but if Uhuru Kenyatta wins...”. This feature had the preamble,
“A new leader in Nairobi could be bad news for the UK”, and was written by one
Kim Sengupta.
Across the Atlantic in America, the New York Times
greeted Uhuru’s election with an editorial headlined “Awkward Choice in Kenya”
and signed, remarkably, not by any one correspondent or bureau chief but by the
NYT Editorial Board.
When he mounted the podium on Tuesday evening,
which was bedecked with Times branding, Raila, like President Mahama in the
case of his own country, was expected to handle the theme of the realities of
doing business in Africa, profiling Kenya’s readiness for business and the
opportunities available for partnership with this country’s private sector. He
was also invited to make a few remarks on the March 4 General Election, its
aftermath and the way forward.
He dealt with the prescribed themes, speaking of
Kenya as an investment destination backed by its talented human resource base,
particularly the youth, and the stability prevalent in the region.
And then Raila embarked on a most remarkable
message to Kenya and the world from that very special time and place and
audience. He declared that this country could plunge into violence again if
President Uhuru Kenyatta favours his own ethnic group too much.
UHURUTO ‘UNAWARE OF DANGER’
And he said darkly: “The Supreme Court was
compromised and there is a lot of tension because people feel they have been
robbed. I fear it could turn into violence if the President takes a
winner-takes-all position. At the moment there is little sign they are aware of
the danger”.
Almost as if on cue on Thursday morning May 2,
Kenyans woke up to news on the BBC World Service Amka na BBC and News Day FM
radio programmes to the effect that the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation
Commission was finding it extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to
table its report with the President or his aides as required by law against a
very strict reporting deadline.
The TJRC was established by an Act of Parliament in
2008, when the fires of the post-election violence were still smouldering, and
tasked with interviewing witnesses, victim and victimizer survivors of historic
injustices, including assassinations, torture, displacements, land grabs and
grand corruption, from 1963 to 2008. It was scheduled to table its findings
with President Kenyatta on Friday last week.
Quoting authoritative sources inside Kenya, most
likely from within the Commission itself, the BBC claimed that as of Thursday
this week the TJRC report had exactly 48 hours to be tabled before the President
or his aides or it would become null and void.
Reporting that the Office of the President had
refused to receive the report before being allowed to peruse an advance copy,
the BBC openly speculated that the problem probably lay in the massive charges
brought by multiple witnesses, victims and others against the administrations
and persons of Kenya’s first two presidents – Uhuru’s Dad Jomo and Uhuru’s
political benefactor Moi – as well as Mwai Kibaki.
As we went to press, it looked as if the TJRC Report,
identified in these columns last week as one of the baptism-of-fire factors for
the new administration, would go the way of the Kroll Report of 2006.
Global security and forensic audit experts Kroll
were commissioned by the Kibaki administration to inquire into grand corruption
and capital flight under the 24-year-long Moi administration, but when they
tabled their report, for which the government paid millions of shillings
upfront, it was promptly shelved.
Instead, copies of the sensational report were
leaked on the Internet but never certified by either Kroll or the Kibaki regime
as the original and genuine document, with both saying they were not in the
business of issuing such certifications.
As for the fact of both President Kenyatta and
Deputy President Ruto being crimes-against-humanity indictees of the
International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, Raila told his international
audience:
“It caused the other side to unite against the ICC.
They said the ICC is a Western institution and we have to unite against it to
protect our people”.
The timing of Raila’s international ambush on
President Kenyatta’s still-under-construction administration has far-reaching
implications, not the least of which is whether it is a one-off or the first in
a series that will likely go all the way to 2017 and the end of Uhuru’s first
term in office.
Raila has struck at a particularly vulnerable time
for the new President. The Foreign Secretary nominee, Ambassador Amina Mohamed,
a brilliant choice for the office, has yet to undergo a vetting process by both
the public and Parliament that is likely to last all this month.
Kenya’s entire complement of ambassadors around the
world (Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Oceania and multilateral
organizations) including the High Commissioner to Britain, was recently
recalled awaiting redeployments, firing and, or hiring and then told to stay in
place until further notice.
Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Mwangi Thuita
is in all likelihood outward bound, but the rapid response to the damage
wrought by Raila could well fall to him, or be sorted out by Amb Mohamed and
other strategists behind the scenes, and be delivered in Thuita’s name and
designation.
The construction site edifice of the Uhuru
administration is also labouring under the long shadow of the
crimes-against-humanity charges at the ICC brought three years ago, with one of
the cases, Ruto’s, scheduled to start later this month.
The Uhuru administration has struggled mightily in
a balancing act between the ICC indictments and the maintenance of cordial
relations with the United States, Britain and the European Union, all of whom
are major development and trading partners.
With his dire remarks at an investment risk global
conference, Raila has suddenly made Uhuru and Ruto’s tightrope act look like
they are frenetically balancing on a rope in flux – and he is the one flexing
the sisal.
Raila’s remarks in London, where he assured a rapt
audience of investors, prospective investors and the crème de la crème of the
academic and corporate risk research and analysis community that, as long ago
as the immediate aftermath of the presidential poll, “There would have been
violence if I had not stepped aside,” could not have come at a worse time.
The Times headlined their report on Raila’s Summit
address “Kenya President ‘must reach across the tribes’ to avert violence” on
Labour Day, May 1.
Far behind closed doors in the corridors of power
in Nairobi, Raila’s address has been received with something akin to road rage
– and a sense of betrayal.
RAILA CRAMPS MUTUNGA’S STYLE
And this is an observation that is true also of the
highest echelons of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Willy Mutunga has long
moved effortlessly and with maximum dignity in gatherings such as the Oxford
Analytica/Times CEO Africa Summit, rubbing shoulders with and contending with
the global elite of all sectors who are guests at such meetings. Following
Raila’s unsubstantiated charges at the Africa Summit, Dr Mutunga will doubtless
swim with a little less aplomb in such waters.
Interestingly, Mutunga’s tweet and press statement
denying that he had ever received a bribe in his life came just a jump ahead of
the Raila speech in London.
Another implication of Raila’s ambush is that it
signals the tenor and flavour of his relationship with Uhuru henceforth – the
Odinga/Kenyatta rivalry has just been rebooted for a new electoral cycle, and
it will be cutthroat adversarial all the way.This is underlined by the fact
that he chose the London event to confirm he was indeed headed back to
Parliament, where he would be nothing less than leader of the opposition, a
decision he indicated he would finalize over the next fortnight.
Making the announcement at a global forum, instead
of at a caucus somewhere in Kenya of his Coalition for Reforms and Democracy
(Cord) Alliance, is a clear signal that Raila intends his leadership of the
opposition to the Jubilee government to be a very loud affair indeed, with the
decibels easily reaching the international community, including strategic
investors and development partners, via international media, as often as
possible.
The Kenyan blogosphere, Diaspora included, will be
on fire anew. How will the new administration react? The Jubilee government’s
true believers are already privately reacting by viewing Raila like the
proverbial fly in one’s soup and all sorts of epithets are filling the air,
including talk of treason, far-fetched in this day and age as that might sound.
WHEN ‘TIMES OF LONDON’ TARGETED JOMO
Raila’s London gambit is much more than merely
upping the ante internally in Kenya. Oxford Analytica and the Times of London
are not just another two British institutions.
Both can give a nation and country like Kenya a
seriously bad name and reputation where it really matters in the chancelleries
and state houses of the West. By the same token both can be crucial to a good
and proactive image in the West.
A bad press generated by the Times can be very bad
news indeed. Many London-based Kenyan envoys (like the envoys of many another
nation, including US ambassadors and assorted attaches) have had occasion to
write a letter to the Times and the outgoing Kenyan London envoy will doubtless
fire off a missive to the newspaper in the wake of the latest developments.
In the very early 1980s, Charles Mugane Njonjo,
Attorney General of Kenya since 1963 and eminence grise to two consecutive
presidents, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi, and, to this day, Kenya’s foremost
anglophile, at 93, made it his business to invite the then editor-in-chief of
the Times, William Rees-Mogg, to lunch at his Muthaiga, Nairobi, home.
Rees-Mogg, like Njonjo, wore dark pin-striped suits throughout his career (he
died Lord Rees-Mogg in 2012) and had a very conservative worldview.
This high-level invite was strategic; it came at a
time when the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Raila’s father) and one-time MP George
Anyona were making waves on an extended visit to London to the effect that they
would launch the first opposition party in Kenya since the Kenya People’s Union
(KPU), banned in November 1969, in the UK. This ruffled feathers a great deal
in the then de facto one-party state.
Not long after the Odinga/Anyona London outing and
Njonjo’s hosting of Rees-Mogg at Muthaiga, Moi and his AG engineered the
constitutional amendment known as Section 2(a), making Kenya a de jure
one-party state and ruling party Kanu the only legitimate political
organization within these borders.
The second President Kenyatta has entered office
without a Kenyan anglophile of Njonjo’s prestige, prescience, smarts and
networks getting his back on the former colonial masters and the extended West.
He has a first-class team of lawyers from Britain for his ICC predicament and
had British PR wizards BTP as international campaign consultants and
strategists, but he has no one within government or, just off-government, in
his kitchen Cabinet, who can engage the British establishment, including the
media establishment, the way Njonjo did for two presidents across two decades.
In the mid-1970s, following the JM Kariuki
assassination, the Sunday Times Insight Team of investigative journalists got
seriously on Mzee Kenyatta and First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta and their niece
Beth Mugo’s case, detailing their landholdings (complete with maps) and
assorted business deals in a series of articles that reportedly only stopped
when Njonjo intervened at the highest board levels of the media group’s
ownership.
But how times change. Paradoxically, if Njonjo
consults for any Kenyan nowadays, it’s for Raila, son of his 1960s and 1970s
most despised power prey the Jaramogi, not Uhuru, son of his great mentor Jomo.
Moi invited Uhuru to his Karbanet Gardens home in
March, while the latter was still President-elect. Moi and Njonjo have not
hobnobbed in public throughout the former president’s 11-year retirement.
Raila’s London ambush came the same week that the
British High Commissioner, Dr Christian Turner, paid a courtesy call on
President Kenyatta at State House, Nairobi, and expressed London’s commitment
to doubling investment in Kenya and transforming this country into the region’s
capital of financial services within Uhuru’s first term in office.
Above all, of course, Uhuru needs the ICC monkey
off his back. As long as President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto are ICC
indictees, a nifty Raila will seem to run rings around them in the still
crucial international arena of the world’s sole superpower and Western Europe.
