Opposition leader Raila Odinga’s way of life is falling into the sere, the yellow leaf. At 80, his life journey has shadowed the twists and turns of the Kenyan story.
Kenya’s story, just like Raila’s, is the story of dualities of life; hope and despair, conquests and losses, fear and courage, determination and defeat.
Both Raila and Kenya have seen it all. Born of an oligarch father who later turned into a successful politician, Raila cut his own teeth in politics by shadowing his old man’s activities.
For attempting to overthrow a dictator, Raila spent most of his 1980s imprisoned. In the 90s, he picked himself up, patched up with his tormentor and scraped through the rough and tumble of opposition politics to become the consequential politician of that decade.
When the world turned on a new millennium, Raila spent the first two decades winning and losing elections, and never quite being crowned a winner.
The country, as well as Raila himself, appear to have come to terms with the fact that his 2007 presidential election victory was brazenly stolen.
The painful circumstances of 2007 notwithstanding, the country was jolted into revisiting the matter of comprehensive reforms which had stalled since 2003.
Through the “grand coalition government” headed by Raila and Mwai Kibaki, the latter the beneficiary of electoral fraud, Kenyans gave themselves a new constitution.
In 2013, and by way of International Criminal Court trials, the gods conspired with the Kenyan people to deny him restitution of his 2007 electoral victory.
They instead opted to hoist in high office individuals indicted of crimes against humanity, sending Raila back to his Bondo village. A presidential election petition he launched at the country’s highest court “drank water”, in Nairobi’s street parlance.
A huge part of his evidence was locked out, and the court decreed that not all electoral infractions must lead to invalidation of the people’s will.
In 2017, the declared victory of his rival Uhuru Kenyatta was nullified upon his prodding, but he refused to vie in the repeat poll, handing Kenyatta an easy victory before later patching up with him.
Kenyans spent the remainder of Kenyatta II rule ruing the missed chances of using the 2010 constitutional momentum to build a new Kenya. His deputy William Ruto seized the moment, and deployed a mix of class politics, politics of grievance, victimhood and religion in the 2022 poll.
With the backing of state machinery, Raila on the other hand packaged his umpteenth stab at the presidency as the “last bullet”.
When the votes were finally collated at Bomas, Ruto turned the tables on him.
A state-instigated “boardroom rupture” within IEBC refused to pay, and a brazen attempt to stage an electoral coup in Bomas fizzled on live camera.
A presidential petition filed at the Supreme Court was dismissed as “hot air” and a “wild goose chase,” and Ruto was crowned the fifth President of Kenya. Once again, Raila saw dust.
In 2023, Raila suspended his involvement in Kenya’s politics in exchange for state backing to become the Africa Union Commission chair. Focused on AUC, he wasted the political moment granted by the Gen Z protests, but still lost the race to a nondescript diplomat.
For close to half a century now, Raila has serially been betrayed by the Kenyan political system, by way of imprisonment, electoral theft, judicial washouts and rejection by the gods.
Whenever he was on the cusp of power, something always came up to stop him. While the politician in him can easily countenance the losses, and embrace them as “postponed victories”, the ageing human in him can get weary.
The events of June last added a new twist to his story. The Gen Z tolled the bell on the conventional Kenyan politician, with a very clear writing on the wall; your best days may as well be behind! The unity of Raila and President Ruto is therefore not without context.
Kenyans should cut them – and especially Raila – some slack.
Senior Project Manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the position of FNF
