Oburu's blunders as President Ruto barks wrong tree in Raila's ODM

Oburu Oginga is holding a tiger by the tail. Ever since he was made the ODM Party Leader following the death of his younger brother, Raila Odinga, it has always been a question of who would blink first between him and the party’s Secretary General Edwin Sifuna. Clearly, someone misadvised Dr Oburu. 

In thinking that he was taking decisive action, Oburu blinked. He touched off a tight powder keg with far-reaching political and legal implications. He set off the proverbial rat trap that will take out both the immediately concerned, and the non-involved.  Sifuna will be drawing around him one set of political and legal rings after another. It could go on all the way to next year’s general elections, and possibly beyond.

There was little legal prudence in Oburu’s drastic move, even if the assumption is that he has the backing of the State. Indeed, Oburu is one individual who believes in the magic of what he calls the system. In the lead-up to the 2022 presidential election, he boasted in public that they now had “the system and the deep state,” and that these two would deliver victory to his brother, Raila.

It did not materialise, and, having failed, Oburu has lately made public accusations against Uhuru for “doing nothing when he had the power to hand victory over to Raila and ODM.

Clearly, here is one individual who believes in the draconian hand of the State in solving the legal and political questions of the day. It is not beyond doubt, therefore, that in the precipitate action to remove Sifuna, the possibility of the hidden hand was contemplated.

Critical question

So much the worse for Oburu, for his tactical move has the character of self-trapping in a legal cage. The courts have already served him his first setback by staying the Sifuna removal. The chessboard has been altered. Worse awaits Oburu. Party removal from office, especially from an office like that of secretary general, is not kids’ play. It has tricky internal and external procedures that must be undertaken with painstaking procedural attention to detail, fact and process.

It begins with following both the party’s constitution and the Political Parties Act. The Constitution of Kenya (2010), too, is critical. Simply put, there are legal internal mechanisms that must be exhausted. That done, the rest of the processes could see the disputed matters go to the Political Parties Dispute Tribunal, the High Court, Court of Appeal, and eventually the Supreme Court.

If Oburu has politically won through a draconian party organ, he is temporarily going to be held back in the nation’s legal and justice system. Away from what Sifuna’s sins against ODM may be perceived to be, the critical question is not going to be whether he has sinned or not. It is, instead, about the fair administration of the action against him.

The starting point is the Constitution, where Article 47 (1) says, “Every person has the right to administrative action that is expeditious, efficient, lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair.”

Then, there is, of course, a detailed exposé of this in the Fair Administration of Justice Act No.4 of 2015, and the Fair Administration of Action Rules (2024). Just this one thing, fair administration, could keep Oburu busy in court corridors, beyond next year’s election date. If this happens, as it is most likely to happen, Sifuna will remain the de facto and de jure Secretary General of ODM. This throws into a spin Oburu’s political dialogue with President William Ruto on future partnerships between ODM and UDA.

Was Oburu misadvised? The political space often acts on pure emotion, without proper attention to the landscape, for waterfalls and cataracts. Oburu’s wing of ODM careered itself into a sticky legal corner. It touched off a litigious matter without guarantees of organizational and methodical consolidation. It will be interesting to follow what promises to be a back-and-forth political and legal ping-pong between the octogenarian Oburu, and the millennial Sifuna, and their teams. What energies, wisdoms, and excitements do they bring to the duel? And whom is the Kairos of time going to favour?

In the interplay between political authority and legitimacy, other publics come into the picture. Oburu, as the party leader, holds the baton of authority. The political endgame, however, is going to be hugely influenced in the courtyard of both the urban and rural youth, the Nairobi political base, the reformist ODM bloc, and social media. The indices, for now, are that Sifuna has all the four aces. Can Oburu wrestle them from him?

While he ponders that, Oburu and his caucus have the delicate subtext of the Odinga family to contend with. There has been public dissent from Ida Odinga, Raila’s widow, who is technically still in mourning. Then there is Raila’s sister Ruth, and his daughter, Winnie. Dissension by these three women of power is not trivial. In the symbolic architecture and design of ODM, the Odinga family is more than an ordinary family. It is the totem of the party, the axis around which critical decisions gravitate. That these influential women are unhappy suggests that Oburu failed the test of consultation.

Even before stepping into the ring, Oburu needed first to put the Odinga house in order. Did he assume that they would flow along with his tide? Did he ignore the signals that Winnie had been sending out all along? Winnie has stated categorically that ODM is not for sale. She has wondered why Oburu is dragging ODM into what she considers an unholy alliance with UDA. Questioning his own ability to lead, Winnie has told Kenyans that they must be the ones to decide who will take the mantle from her late father. “You cannot copy-paste Raila Odinga,” she has said.

That alone should have sent Oburu’s political antennae up. But Oburu appears to have gone on without any visible consensus. Even as he begins parading his own sons into political space, complete with their loud support, he forgets that Raila’s son, Raila Odinga Jr, was installed as the new leader of the Raila Odinga family. Does Oburu appear to have ignored the need to consult Raila Jr? In any event, that he does not have Raila’s family support speaks to internal fracture. It weakens him as the unified overall steward of the Jaramogi clan and makes his elderhood in the clan a myth.

It would appear that there is need for Oburu to go back to the clan, to reset the dial of leadership before it gets out of hand. His progeny, who are now beginning to claim political space, will be looking at their cousins from the Raila family eyes askance. For there has always been the unstated consideration that their uncle, Raila, stole the family thunder from their father, the senior of the two Jaramogi sons. The political competition in the family is more dangerous for Oburu than the court stay of Sifuna’s removal. If the aura of his elderhood in the family collapses, everything else falls. He must redeem himself by providing acceptable leadership.

Meanwhile, Sifuna and his team are expected to put up a show of political might in Kitengela today. The Ruto-Oburu axis will be watching them with apprehension, for this may very well prove to be the most consequential tipping point in the insurgency in ODM. For a start, the turnout will be critical, and if Busia last weekend was anything to go by, it will be massive.

Liberation and reform

Busia was itself of fundamental importance. Yes, the mammoth crowd that was witnessed cannot be equated to scientific polling. Yet, the coalescing of Sifuna, Babu Owino, and Caleb Amisi represents the eloquent rhetorical combativeness that Kenyan youth have been longing for. What they began in Busia seems set to snowball into an unstoppable movement, reminiscent of the original ODM in the period 2005–2007. That was the movement that, for close to three years, captured the imagination of the nation, to climax into what many consider to be Raila’s “stolen election victory” of 2007.

Can Sifuna’s team hack it? Significantly, they have the open support and elder stewardship of Siaya governor James Orengo. Orengo symbolizes liberation and reform. He is the most visible and politically active of the Young Turks of the second liberation, with Martha Karua as the only other one. His current engagement with Sifuna and Co is at once an exercise in mentorship, taking over from where Raila left off, and a handing over of the liberation baton to millennials. This is a very important seal of legitimacy in the liberation struggle.

Sifuna’s team is speaking the grammar of grievance and liberation. This is music to youthful ears, and to President Ruto’s disillusioned hustlers of the last election. It is expected that the snowball factor of this is going to be massive and exciting; in a nation that is hugely unhappy with Ruto’s regime that is big on flaunting opulence, while essential sectors like health and education are on their knees. Defections from the Oburu camp in the coming days should not be surprising.

Sifuna’s team, however, will need to make recurrent reality checks. Foremost, they must recognize that youth excitement, indeed mass excitement, is not the same thing as the electoral machinery. This was always Raila’s Waterloo. He failed to recognize that crowds are not votes, and that the numbers at political rallies must be intentionally converted into votes. They must register as voters, turn out to vote, and protect the vote. If they do not do these three things, all the energy in rallies descends into hot air, and nothing more.

Second, Team Sifuna will want to recognize that even if they succeed in wrestling ODM from Ruto and Oburu, they will not go too far if they will not work with other opposition leaders. Yet, to run into the bosom of the United Opposition just at the moment is also suicidal. They must beat their own independent path for now, defining and popularising themselves and their movement.

In the end, it will not matter whether they grab and run away with ODM or not. Wherever they will be, no matter under what name, the spirit of ODM and Raila Odinga will be there, too, with them. They can then go out to negotiate with whomever in the Opposition. But if they are persuaded to turn coat and return to Ruto, they will lose the people and end up as another irrelevance on the Kenyan political landscape. Will they stay the course?

That is the spirit and legacy that Oburu and his team have lost in their dalliance with President Ruto. In cooperating with Ruto, Raila was, in a sense, like the biblical Old Testament liberational heroes who sojourned in the homes of oppressors before pulling the triggers of change. He was in the docket of Moses, Daniel, Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego, as well as the girl Esther, whom we read of in the Christian book.

Invited to feast on the captor’s meats, wines and spirits, Daniel and Co declined, choosing, instead, to live off vegetables and water. But Oburu, Gladys Wanga, and others have not understood this liberational grammar. When they saw Ruto’s tables awash with assorted meats, wines and spirits, Oburu and Co could not contain their omnivorous appetites. They are eating and asking for more, virtually in exchange for all their political birth rights. They are unhappy that Sifuna is challenging this.

Technically, Ruto could rescue Oburu from his self-inflicted woes. Yet, this is fraught with political risks. UDA’s visible alignment with Oburu is already validating Sifuna’s narrative. He is being punished for remaining faithful to ODM’s core ideology and visionary agenda. Oburu’s dalliance with Ruto can only, therefore, strengthen Sifuna’s anti-establishment and anti-Oburu public appeal. It at once deepens and validates the view that Oburu and Ruto are not interested in the nation’s welfare. That, ultimately, they are engaged in cartel political power deals, for their own selfish benefit.

In cartel democracies, major political parties agree that they will not compete for power. They instead collude to manage the State. They use public resources to secure the positions of individuals at the top of the hierarchy and to reduce competition from outsiders. Oburu’s ODM and UDA are in that space. They are behaving like a business cartel. Their strategic agenda now is to limit debate and democracy.

President Ruto is cutting across the country in efforts to appease the youth via funding, as part of this wider scheme of muzzling democracy. His World Bank-funded NYOTA scheme is framed to look like it is addressing liquidity constraints among youthful entrepreneurs. In effect, however, it is all about early electioneering and voter treatment. That is why money that can be disbursed throughout the 47 counties by one touch of the button must be doled out through expensive salami-slicing manoeuvres throughout the country, one piece at a time.

The bad news for President Ruto and Oburu is that GenZ political anger in Kenya is not just economic. It is anti-elite, anti-dynastic, and anti-patronage. Cash transfers cannot extinguish such rebellions. Oburu and Ruto must go back to the drawing boards and war rooms to think afresh.

The tiger whose tail Oburu and Ruto are holding is bigger than Edwin Sifuna. Indeed, it is not Sifuna. It is the anxiety of generational transition, party institutional fragility, public distrust, judicial unpredictability, and the drumbeat of election timelines. Oburu has now tugged the tiger’s tail. He could be mauled, not by Sifuna, but by an unhappy Kenyan nation.

If Oburu’s move was not necessarily irrational, it remains legally vulnerable and politically combustible. The optics of repressing new generational voices are bad for him and Ruto.

The effort to cast the contest as a “liberational moment of the Luhya” from perceived “Luo dominance” also falls flat. This is not about tribes. It is about the containment of democracy and the youth at a time when Kenya’s political legitimacy crisis is youth-driven.

So, Oburu was lured towards reasserting central control in ODM. He sought to subdue youthful dissent in the party and to pre-empt generational insurgency. Yet, did he underestimate legal counter-measures and the symbolic backlash? Has he pushed ODM to the deathbed? Perhaps not. For the ODM spirit lives on. ODM is the liberational spirit that has disturbed the Kenyan political elite since independence. It assumes different names and guises, with different players, but it never dies.