An ode to a fallen general

By Peter Wanyonyi

A favourite dictum of Kenyan politics is that a week is a long time in politics. It follows, then, that 30 years is virtually an eternity.

This is how long Engineer Raila Amollo Odinga has been at the forefront of the Kenyan political scene, mucking in the scrimmages, throwing and taking punches, getting smeared in political mud, and doing some smearing of his own and generally making the whole political scene worth watching and listening to.

We cheered him on when we agreed with him, even going so far as to brand him cross-tribal. This was so, considering in Kenya, a politician has not arrived until he is baptised with a name from a tribe not his own. In this sense, Arap Mibei, or Njamba as he was known in Central Kenya, arrived a long time ago.

We also lambasted him when we thought he was going astray, though typically this was whenever he defied ethnic stereotypes to reach across this or that tribal divide. But that means nothing in Kenya, where a person can be a darling one minute — because he backs your tribesman for high office — and an enemy the next, because he has the temerity to run against another of your tribesmen. That’s just who we are.

Raila — we universally refer to him using his first name — has lasted a lifetime at the business end of our political spectrum. But it is now time for him to go.

In recent times, young politicians and some Kenyans crawling on social media barely out of their napkins have taken Raila’s defeat in the recent elections as an opportunity to hurl insults at him.

They conveniently forget that the very structures over which they lord, the very country that they now bestride with noisy tweets and Facebook posts and many of the freedoms they enjoy, would never have been possible without the sacrifice of Raila Odinga and his contemporaries.

DEMOCRACY

These men and women endured years behind bars, banged up in detention without trial, to birth the openness and the democracy that we now take for granted, and in whose free air the new political class now hold forth with their salt-in-the-wound rubbing. In so doing, they come to resemble Chinua Achebe’s unwise little bird eneke-nti-oba, who so far forgot himself after a heavy meal that he challenged his personal god to a fight.

Raila is a yardstick against which to measure the performances of our new crop of politicians. He made mistakes — like everyone else — but his virtues far outweighed these. It is this very standard against which we will now judge the fortitude, the fitness-for-purpose, of our new leaders.

They have not begun on a good footing, letting their followers humiliate Raila in ways that are decidedly un-African.

Like Achebe said, those who mock Raila should remember that he whose palm nuts have been cracked for them by benevolent spirits, should not forget to be humble.

Thank the man for his selflessness and service, and let him be.