Classified tips DP Ruto may get in former US ambassador’s memoirs

President Jomo Kenyatta receiving two cheques from the vice president, Mr Odinga for the famine relief at the statehouse 1965.

The major news item of the week is Deputy President William Ruto being barred from traveling to Uganda on Tuesday. Speaking on Inooro FM on Wednesday, the DP attributed the incident to his strained relationship with President Uhuru Kenyatta.

If that is true, maybe Ruto may learn a lesson or two from classified accounts on strained relationship between Independence President Jomo Kenyatta and his deputy Oginga Odinga, as recorded in memoirs of the US first ambassador to Kenya William Attwood.

The book The Reds and the Blacks published in 1967 when Ruto was only one year-old was banned in Kenya and Attwood, who has since died, declared a persona-non-grata. He had bought a 50-acre piece of land in Karen area where he intended to put up a retirement home.

Attwood reckons that like President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy Ruto, Jomo and Odinga had started off as best of friends but fell apart on getting to power.

He writes: “Mr Double–O (Oginga Odinga) was a prosperous businessman from the Lake Victoria area who drifted into politics during the fifties. He earned Kenyatta’s gratitude for lending him money during Emergency and demanding his release from detention. He also helped Kenyatta become prime minister (and later president) by working hard for a Kanu victory in the 1963 elections.”

But once in power, the ambassador wrote, Jomo and his deputy fell apart when the latter set up his own powerbase within the government and behaved as an equal to his boss.

“Kenyatta associates were alert to the Odinga challenge from the beginning, as I discovered soon after my arrival in Kenya. Some were already urging him to break with Odinga and drive him out of the party and the government before he could  build up his own subversive apparatus inside Kanu.”

Keeping Double-O under watch

But Kenyatta’s inclination, he wrote, was “to sit back and give Odinga more (political) rope to hang himself. He wanted the anti-Odinga forces to be brought together into a multi-tribal (national) coalition first. So he preferred to maintain a façade of harmony for the time being.”

However, security machinery was under instructions to keep an eye on Odinga and sabotage any intentions he had to undermine authority of his boss or threaten security of the State. He wrote: “Of course there was not much Odinga could do without Kenyatta knowing about it. The police and the Special Branch (the Intelligence) were directly responsible to Kenyatta. Their orders were to keep an eye on Double-O, and they did.”

Two days before Odinga resigned as Vice President on April 14, 1966, wrote the ambassador, Odinga had secretly – or so he thought – travelled to Isebania border town within Tanzania to meet a Zanzibari politician by name Abdulhman Babu. The later was a radical who had participated in an aborted military coup in Zanzibar island.

The Kenyan intelligence leaked to the media the incidence of Odinga secretly meeting the Zanzibari politician. When the Vice President denied it, Home Affairs minister Daniel Moi made public the exact time and venue of the meeting, as well as number plates of vehicles Odinga and his visitor had come in.

Attwood wrote that he learnt Kenyatta didn’t trust his deputy during a meeting not long after he was posted to Kenya. He wrote: “The first indication I had from Kenyatta that he didn’t trust Odinga was in mid June when he called me over to discuss outside financing of Kenya’s politicians. Kenyatta wanted to make certain such assistance stopped, and I agreed with him that all aid to independent Kenya should go through the government. Then he asked if the United States could provide (Kenya) police with some planes to increase their mobility in case of a Zanzibar kind of uprising. I promised to forward the request to Washington.”

The book quotes a report from British newspaper, Sunday Telegraph, of November 29, 1965, that alleged Odinga was plotting an uprising in Kenya, and reported Kenyan intelligence had seized crates of weapons that had mysteriously got to the country and addressed to a contact associated with Odinga.

The ambassador reckoned that Odinga had “ample resources for political action and that his supporters were well heeled, drove new cars and voted as a bloc.”

Attwood also wrote of a Uganda connection in Odinga activities. “On May 17, 1965, a convoy of trucks loaded with weapons was intercepted by Kenyan police after they crashed through a roadblock at night while in transit through Kenya from Tanzania to Uganda. The convoy and its cargo were impounded. President Kenyatta ordered the cargo not be released until Uganda President Milton Obote came to Kenya to explain and apologise for the breach on Kenyan security and sovereignty.”

The Kenyan intelligence also had on their radar foreign embassies that aided clandestine activities by the Vice President. He wrote: “The Chinese caused Odinga some more grief by throwing a party to which they invited Odinga and all the Kenyans with whom they had any contact directly or through Odinga. Police agents were interested in the identity of those who attended and number plates of the cars they came in. The Chinese embassy was put under close surveillance.”

Attwood further wrote: “Some of Kenyatta associates were urging him to break relations with China. But Kenyatta sensibly preferred to keep the Chinese above ground where they could be watched. Their embassy had moved to a new building enclosed by a high wall, to which Kenyatta archly referred to as Nairobi’s newest tourist attraction. We now have the Great Wall of China here in Africa. Our police will have to use helicopters to see what those people are doing behind it.”

The envoy noted that the Kenyan intelligence was also keeping close eye on senators and MPs in Vice President’s “payroll.” “Nobody was quite sure of Odinga’s strength in Parliament. Out of 140 MPs and 41 senators, Odinga could certainly count on 35 to 40 as being personally loyal to him. The big question was: how many others had been “bought”.  Odinga never seemed short of funds. Home Affairs minister Moi publicly declared that the Vice President had personally received more than $1 million from Communist sources for political action.”

Armed and dangerous

Attwood writes that Kenyan security were alert on possibility of Vice President Odinga securing weapons and training for a personal militia to cause chaos and seize power.

He writes: “On the night of eighth, troops surrounded the building where Odinga had office and impounded several dozen crates of small arms, grenades and machine-guns. One of the East European envoys alarmed by the raids informed the government that he also had several crates of weapons stored in his embassy and would like to get rid of them. The government demanded all embassies report whether Kenya students in their countries were receiving military training.”

Eventually, writes Attwood, Odinga had to decide whether to resign as deputy to Kenyatta and face the government as an outsider. “Odinga now had to decide whether to leave the government and the party. As Vice President, he still had some prestige; he attended Cabinet meetings and could pretend his title meant something. But he was too emotional a man to take any more humiliation in the hands of the Kenyatta coalition.” He resigned.