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The Nairobian

Raila risks soiling his legacy after deal with Kenya Kwanza

Opinion

By Mulang'o Baraza | Aug 06, 2024

**ODM leader Raila Odinga.** [File, Standard]

ODM leader Raila Odinga is on the cusp of becoming the African Union Commission (AUC) Chairperson. The position has previously been held by men and women from West Africa, Southern Africa and Central Africa. The Eastern African region is in good stead to produce its next holder.

Back home, though, he’s now the focus of odium, thanks to a deal he’s made with the William Ruto-led Kenya Kwanza regime that culminated in the appointment of ODM Party’s top honchos, Wycliffe Oparanya, Hassan Joho, John Mbadi and Opiyo Wandayi to the Cabinet amid youth-led calls for, among other things, accountability, an end to official corruption, incompetence in public service provision and tax hikes.

Reports say there’s long been positional dissonance among the co-principals on a number of things, including the issue-centred contents of the National Dialogue Committee (Nadco) report.

The report, a documentary culmination of talks between the opposition coalition and the ruling Kenya Kwanza alliance following the hotly contested presidential polls of August 9, 2022, is believed by some, including Azimio’s Uhuru Kenyatta, Martha Karua and Eugene Wamalwa, to have glossed over the ticklish cost-of-living question, a much-potent goad for the Azimio-led anti-government street protests that rocked the country last year.

Cracks within the Azimio coalition, and Raila's deal with Ruto, are bad for Kenya.

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Though formed to help along the shared aim of capturing power, Azimio was, and is, a coalition of mostly heroes and heroines of the second liberation movement that pin-upped the agitation, requited by the repeal of Section 2A of the Constitution in December 1991 for the restoration of multiparty democracy.

The movement, at the acclaimatory apogee of which is ODM leader Raila Odinga, Azimio’s presidential flag-bearer in the last elections, also had, as its leading lights, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenneth Matiba, Martin Shikuku, Charles Rubia, James Orengo, Koigi wa Wamwere, Paul Muite and Gitobu Imanyara, among others, and is credited with “mostly forcing” much of the constitutional and institutional reform that Kenya has witnessed in the last forty years.

Azimio itself has, as its relational forerunner and formative origins, the March 9, 2018 'Handshake' between Odinga and then-President Uhuru Kenyatta that later birthed the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), an attempt at forging greater national integration injudiciously nixed by the courts.

Raila made the August 2022 General Election an electoral focus on Kenya’s economic liberation and it was within Azimio’s policy plans to build at least one industry in each of the country’s 47 counties as a fillip to local manufacturing goals.

His selection of Martha Karua as his running mate in the August 2022 State House race marked a milestone in the longitudinal, shared empowerment of our country’s women and added significantly to the hope reposed by Kenyans— and our country’s friends and admirers abroad—in the joint ticket.

At a time when our religious leaders have fallen under the spell of lucre and left the task of agitation for good governance to Gen Z, the unfortunate backwash of Raila’s absence, and especially his perceived 'hijacking' of the youth’s cause, heralds and proclaims not only betrayal on his part but also a total moral and political shirking of obligation to Kenyans.

Mr Baraza is a historian