A man who delights and upsets many in equal measure

There is a poignant disconnect between Raila Odinga on the one hand and the millions of Kenyans on both sides of the political divide, many of whom are now engaged in a blazing civil war on social media, on the other. To them, it is personal. To him, it is just ideological.

Mr Odinga is seamlessly able to separate his person from the cause he leads. His supporters and his opponents, at least many of them, cannot. His supporters love him to the point where some committed suicide when he lost the election. His opponents loathe him to a point where discussing him is a no-go territory.

Because to him President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto are not personal enemies but ideological opponents, he was able to enjoy laughs with them at State House just a few days after his devastating defeat.

As he did this, his supporters and opponents were evicting each other from rental houses, sacking each other from jobs and engaging in some of the most incendiary hate speech since the invention of electronic media.

For them, it is personal; for him, it is just business.

The late Michael Kijana Wamalwa, once Kenya’s vice-president and political competitor of Mr Odinga’s, said many things in his life. But if one stands out, it is the quip he made that Kenyans are equally divided between those suffering from Railamania and Railaphobia.

In the first in-depth interview since his loss in the March 4 General Election and its confirmation by the Supreme Court, he spoke with equanimity – and even charity – towards the Jubilee duo and repeated two things he had said before: that he wishes President Kenyatta well in executing his agenda and that he will not oppose for the sake of opposing; he will do it constructively.

He looked drawn, and it is obvious that the marathon campaign and its tumultuous aftermath has exacted its physical toll. Still, he is comfortable in his skin and continues to run a tight schedule. Our interview was wedged between engagements, and time was of the essence.

For him, no questions were off-limits, and he didn’t request to see them beforehand. He went into considerable detail on each, and it was time that caught up with us. He is most alive when discussing ideological issues and most reserved when talking about personal ones.

He constantly, and rather painstakingly, establishes a distance between his cause and himself, saying it will triumph with or without him some day and that he has not even declared a presidential run for 2017. It is a world away from that lived by his compatriots for whom the cause and the person are one and the same.

Unlike some of his colleagues in the Cord coalition who have been dismissed as intellectual flyweights, he oozes gravitas, and maybe, just maybe you think, they should also add university teaching among the many options being thrown his way. The overriding question was what this colossus of Kenyan politics, who has shaped the national political conversation for more than 30 years, has on his mind after the failure of his third stab at the presidency. He has a local and international constituency that wants to know.

Starting from the late 1970s and culminating in 2002, he was a general leading troops fighting Kanu’s dictatorship. His base, civil society activist John Githongo believes, has been the infantry of Kenya’s democratisation process. His entire early political career was spent wrestling with Kanu, and he became Kenya’s most detained politician – nine years in jail under his belt.

As he matured politically, he started seeking the presidency, beginning in 1997. Like a gladiator who understands that failure means death, he threw everything into this effort, especially in 2007 and 2013. But he has failed in his objective. State House now seems farther from his sights than at any time in his eventful life.

Interviews with his supporters on the street reveal a dispirited and dazed lot. Some have slowly and agonisingly come to accept his defeat. Many are in denial; it hasn’t happened. Yet others, like Prof Makau Mutua, once one of his most virulent critics before he underwent a “Road to Damascus” experience and became a loud and provocative supporter, have aggressively dismissed the election outcome.

After President Kenyatta was sworn in, Prof Mutua tweeted: “As a matter of freedom of conscience and thought, I can’t accept Uhuru Kenyatta as President of Kenya. I can’t, and I won’t.”

Such has been the despair and pity for him that Mr Odinga felt compelled to address the issue directly: “I do not need any sympathy because I am not dead,” he told a funeral gathering in western Kenya last month.

There are those who have lost the faith completely. They have concluded the game is up and that he will never become President under whatever circumstances.

For this kind, it is time to back another horse. As soon as the election result was announced, and even before the petition was filed and dismissed by the Supreme Court, one said:

“I have voted for him twice and both times I have lost. I have always been his supporter because I believe he represents something good. I also think he has always got a raw deal when he deserved better. Unfortunately, I am beginning to feel the cause is lost forever. I fear that he has the curse of Sisyphus.”

Sisyphus was the founder of the city of Corinth in Greek mythology. He was made to roll a huge stone from the bottom to the top of a hill by the gods. His ordeal would end only if he heaved it over the top. Each time Sisyphus was about to roll the stone over the summit, it pushed him back to the bottom of the hill and he had to start all over again. This went on eternally.

Stanley Mbagathi is a Kenyan economist working for Comesa in Lusaka. At 63, he belongs to the same age group as Raila. He was in East Germany for his university education at the same time as Mr Odinga was studying mechanical engineering there.

Shaped by the political and social convulsions sweeping the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the Prague Spring, the American Civil Rights Movement, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, African decolonisation, the hippie generation – he has been enamoured of Mr Odinga and his politics of the Left for decades. But he, too, now sees the presidency as a bridge too far.

“As a child growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, his early life was shaped by Kenya’s war of liberation of which his father was a champion. He was a Mau Mau supporter,” said Mr Mbagathi. “The Civil Rights Movement in America and Third World decolonisation of the 1960s shaped his political ideology. It was a time of idealism and you can still see too much of that in him.

“I think his entire education set him up to fail as a campaigner. It duped him to believe that goodness and idealism by themselves could appeal to the masses and win. I’ve always voted for him, but it is over now. Raila has matured as a politician when so much change has taken place in Kenya and the world. These changes have overtaken him. The era of Leftist idealism is dead; it was defeated when the Berlin Wall collapsed.”

Nothing gets Mr Odinga more agitated than such a view. Suddenly, his clasped hands open on the table, he waves his arms in the air, and his tired face suddenly bursts life. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says and proceeds to make a detailed exposition of the evolution of the Left and the Right in Western democracies to make the case of the enduring relevance of political leanings.

On the day after they cleaned up the mess made by horses and pigs at the gates of Parliament, I went there to seek out some MPs. I was interested more in those who had stuck with him for decades. This is because the Cord leader has gained an unenviable reputation of making political friends easily but seems unable to keep them for long. As the journalist David Margolick once wrote of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he “picks people poorly, goes through them fast”.

Mr Mpuru Aburi, the first- time MP for Tigania East, is a dramatic character. It is impossible to lose him because he keeps tapping your arm to emphasise his points. “I don’t support a pay increase for MPs,” Mr Aburi, who won his seat on an ODM ticket, said as soon as we had secured a quiet corner with some difficulty. What had happened the previous day was inescapable. “Raila never taught me to make money; he taught me public service. I first met him in 1991, and I am going to stick with him until I die.”

Mr Aburi is sure that if it were not for Mr Odinga’s intervention, he would be a dead man, thanks to the Kanu state. Mr Odinga wasn’t there when he got himself into trouble; in fact, he didn’t know him at that time. He would surface afterwards.

He said: “It started like this – I was attending a harambee meeting in Meru when the priest invited me to make the closing prayer. I stood up and started praying. I prayed like this – ‘Oh Almighty God! God of power which is beyond any man on this earth, God of mercy! Our country is full of darkness because of an evil regime! God of great power! We are suffering! Come to our rescue, oh God! That aeroplane that Moi bought using our money, bring it down so that Kenya can have a new leader ...”

He didn’t finish. He opened his eyes to see handcuffs being clasped on his wrists. He was then hustled into a police van. From there, it was a stop from one police or prison cell to another after every few days. He was locked up variously in Isiolo, Nyeri, Meru and Machakos over a period of three months.

One day, locked up in Meru, he heard a large commotion outside his cell. It turned out it was Mr Odinga leading protesters and demanding his release.

How he had learned of his predicament, he couldn’t tell. Why he had decided to act was still more mysterious. But Mr Aburi was tremendously moved. At that time, he feared that he wasn’t going to leave those cells alive. He instantly became famous. Thus began his lifelong association with Mr Odinga.

Today he is adamant that the Cord leader must not return to Parliament. “He is too big for Parliament,” says Mr Aburi. “I can’t imagine him coming here to argue with Duale.” Mr Aden Duale is the House Majority Leader.

Mr Chris Bichage, MP for Nyaribari Chache, was racing to the airport and running late. “I wish I knew in advance what you wanted,” he said on the phone after our meeting failed. “I would have reorganised my priorities and given you a six-hour interview. There is so much I can tell you ... Even now as I think about that, inside me, I am trembling.”

These are some of the troops who won’t hear of surrender. They have worthy opposites inside and outside Parliament who won’t countenance a Raila recovery from his present predicament come sun or hail.

Once in 1989 or 1990, a close relative of GG Kariuki, the senator for Laikipia, and a man who once called the shots in the early years of President Moi’s administration, recalled a dinner for the President in GG’s Rumuruti home. The President seemed pre-occupied.

After every few bites, he would shake his head and mutter: “Raila! Raila!” At that time, Kenyans didn’t know much about Mr Odinga beyond his penchant for getting jailed without a court process. But clearly, President Moi knew something, and it was interfering with his appetite.

Last month, when the Supreme Court handed down its fateful verdict, social media was awash with claims that Mr Moi was very pleased with the verdict. Maybe he was, but nobody asked him.

How potent a player does Raila Odinga still remain? Dr Joyce Nyairo, a former lecturer at the University of Nairobi and leading commentator on cultural issues, offered this searing appraisal of Mr Odinga: “To know the true worth of Raila Odinga’s brazen courage and audacious mouth, you need to have lived under Moi’s dictatorship. For it is only in a time of acute and widespread fear, in a world of one state-run TV station; one national radio broadcaster; a world of no fax, no Internet and of land line phones said to be regularly run by state eavesdroppers that the compelling charm and mobilising power of a man unfazed by handcuffs and filled with the audacity to dream-up an alternative leadership that the heroism of Raila Odinga shines on high.

“Against the expansive freedoms of the Kibaki state – in a world where every teenager with a cell phone is a formidable reporter, broadcaster, opinion-shaper, and crowdsourcer, the lustre of loud, shrill naysayers dims against the din of countless others. There is no longer any value in shrill voices; no novelty in speaking, in writing, in arguing and in demanding.

“Everybody has the space to say, to gossip, to be aired and to be recorded. So what does it matter that Raila Odinga is a fiery presidential candidate promising implementation of a Constitution?

“Was Raila a victim of his past? Did he fail to edit his message to update his status and change his grammar? Was his 30-year-old reputation of brave protest and cunning sabotage of a repressive state too old and jaded for the 18-year-old voter who has never known a world of one TV station and detention without trial?

“Simply put: had Raila Odinga lost his relevance and grown too complacent about his assured place in our songs of protest?”

That is a question, not an answer. To which Mr Odinga’s fellow former detainee and veteran of the democratisation trenches, constitutional lawyer and senior counsel Gibson Kamau Kuria, adds yet more questions: “Opposition politics in the 1980s and 1990s required sound command of democratic theory and constant practice of democratic ideals and principles. These were attributes that were significant in their absence amongst the country’s political leadership of the time.

“Following the March 4 General Election, these attributes are now badly required because the Opposition must re-invent itself as the country implements the Constitution in its entirety. The questions are: Does Cord manifest a thorough grasp of that democratic theory and practice? Do the records of the Cord leaders manifest a consistency in upholding or practising of democratic principles and ideals? What is their capacity?”

Only a person of Raila Odinga’s political stature can get the nation’s heaviest intellectual artillery this engaged. In a portrait penned in 2007, one writer remarked that a trait of Mr Odinga’s is the ability to dine in the king’s palace one moment and to disappear in the crowd the next. He thrives in both. There is an unmistakable authenticity to his assertion that it doesn’t have to be him, that despite all the appearances, he doesn’t have to be president.

But he has a street, a village and the academy, and these just won’t let him go. And they drive him. He says he is their servant, but more appropriately, he is their slave – when they call, he responds. For this reason, and despite his crashing loss on March 4, Raila Odinga will be around for a while. He cannot help it. But it is not personal – just political business.

Roy Gachuhi is a former Nation Media Group reporter. He writes for The Content House (@contenthouseKE).