Three types of coups in Africa and the one Raila uses to grab power

Coups in Africa are of three types. First, what was common in the 1960s, one person forcefully replaced another in the presidency. Second, idealists grab power and evolve into “revolutionaries”, transforming society. These include Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nassir, Libya’s Muamar Qaddafi, and Ibrahim Traore in Burkina Faso. Third, in the hybrid coup, those behind it adopt a two-step strategy of delegitimising and sanitising the government so as to join the existing power structure. Kenya’s Raila Odinga symbolises the hybrid coup plotter. By de-legitimising and sanitising, he forces a president to accommodate him as co-president.

In generating fear in Kenya’s ruling circles, Raila repeatedly mounts hybrid coups that make him co-president. He currently is a virtual co-president in William Ruto’s government because Ruto’s counter-productive policies made him lose legitimacy. Ruto became so desperate and sought to regain lost legitimacy by caving into Raila’s demands.

On his part, Raila has seemingly put Ruto in his political pocket and thus feels at liberty to talk recklessly about having saved the President from an imminent military coup in 2024. This claim has rattled the Kenya Defence Forces so much that Defence Cabinet Secretary Soipan Tuya has dismissed the claim as baseless. Neither Raila nor Ruto, however, was moved by Tuya’s assertion as they went about playing co-president.

Raila was previously involved in coup attempts. In 1982, he argued that he attempted a coup against Daniel arap Moi in order to stop Charles Njonjo from conducting a coup. The claim, it appeared, helped Moi to fix the hitherto powerful Njonjo. Similarly in 2024, Raila and Ruto ganged up and the Raila military coup claim was seemingly to fix former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua who operates from his Wamunyoro village. Fixing Gachagua, however, boomeranged on Ruto who became politically so desperate that he needed Raila’s legitimation. Raila’s political clout in Ruto’s government increased to an extent that ministers, who had initially supported Ruto against Raila, found themselves under pressure to accommodate Raila and his co-presidential wishes. They felt the pain of what seemed like a Ruto betrayal.

Raila knew how to force his way into government by making governance difficult to a point that the President had to cave in. Western powers helped Raila in 2008, through Kofi Annan, to force Mwai Kibaki to accept Raila as 'Prime Minister' who reportedly had to be consulted on presidential decisions. The scenario seemed like an enactment of Naomi Kline’s 'Shock Doctrine and the Rise of Disaster Capitalism' in which Kibaki was pressured into compliance and to accept Raila as 'nusu-mkate' co-president. Another instance was after Uhuru’s re-election in 2018 in which Raila’s inability to comply with the law demobilised Uhuru Kenyatta as president.

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