Encounters with 'Tinga', lasting impressions and race for last title

Raila Odinga addressing the FORD Kamukunji rally 1992. [File, Standard]

Nigerian biographer Babafemi Badejo has described opposition leader Raila Odinga as “an enigma in Kenyan politics” and written a book with that title. I don’t know what the Nigerian writer meant by “enigma”, but I can tell you the impressions I had of Raila on the four occasions I met him.

My first one-on-one meeting with Raila was in August 1992. I was working for a media consultancy firm called Pentaline Services, which had been contracted to work for presidential candidate Kenneth Matiba in the elections that year. Raila was deputy director of elections in Ford Kenya party on whose ticket his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was the presidential candidate.

We were working on a campaign booklet for candidate Matiba and my boss at the media firm, Harun Wachira, suggested I interview Raila in regard to their shared role with Matiba in the struggle for multi-party democracy. We thought Raila wouldn’t be keen talking to us given that Matiba was his father’s competitor. But we decided to give it a try. I called Ford Kenya offices then at Agip House on Haile Selassie Avenue and requested to speak to Raila.

He came on the line. “What can I do for you, Kamau?” he asked in such a relaxed and casual manner you would have thought we were old buddies. I told him what we were working on and why we wanted to interview him.

“When do you want the interview?” he asked.

“Even this afternoon if you are available. I can come to your office or any other place of your choice,” I replied.

He asked where our offices were so that we could meet somewhere near where I was.

“We are on Ngong Road opposite Ngong Hills Hotel.”

“Then let’s meet at the hotel at 2.30.”

He came. I was seated alone at the first table from the entrance and he easily picked me out. “You are Kamau, I suppose?” he said. I nodded in the affirmative as I rose to shake his hand.

“You want the interview here or we go to your offices?” he said.

“Office is better,” I replied.

“Then we go.”

My boss and colleagues were scared Raila had come to our offices. In those days he had the label of a “dangerous/wanted person”. But Raila appeared least bothered. He asked his two aides to remain in his car and entered our offices alone where he shook hands and cracked jokes. When the personal assistant to my boss, Evelyn Ndoti, asked him how many spoons of sugar he wanted in his tea, he replied: “Put two full ones. You know I have spent years in Moi hotels (detention) where they never put sugar in our porridge.”

In the interview, Raila was very candid. He started by saying it was regrettable Jaramogi and Matiba were not running on the same ticket. However, he told me, that wouldn’t be a good reason for him not to grant an interview and say what he knew of Matiba.

He told me he first met Matiba in the early 1970s, not in politics, but in football; a sport where they shared passionate interests. On that they got to the leadership of the national football management body of the day, Kenya Football Association, where Matiba was elected chairman and Raila organising secretary.

Years later they would meet to plot how to bring multi-party democracy to Kenya, and for which they were detained at Kamiti Maximum Prison in the first week of July 1990.

I got the impression that he respected history, which is why, much as his father and Matiba were competitors, he couldn’t ignore the long history he shared with Matiba.            

Hardball

My second eyeball-to-eyeball meeting with Raila was in 1996. It was over coffee at the Hotel Inter-Continental next to Parliament Buildings. His father had died two years earlier. I was working with the People Weekly newspaper owned by Matiba.

Raila had quit the party of his father, Ford Kenya, and come up with his own outfit called the National Development Party (NDP), whose symbol was a tractor (tinga in Kiswahili). For the younger generation, that is why, besides “Baba”, Raila’s other alias is “Tinga”. Where he comes from they also call him “Agwambo” and “Jakom”

Over coffee, I asked him why he had quit the party of his father. He gave me a very interesting account of how Ford-Kenya had been penetrated by then ruling party Kanu in a wider scheme to scuttle the opposition. He told me the machinations had already wrecked Matiba’s Ford Asili (a fact I knew). They also targeted Mwai Kibaki’s then-opposition Democratic Party.

I told him that I didn’t disagree with his overall analysis of the situation, but that I needed documents to support some of the things he had told me. Right away he fished from his jacket pocket a document, which I had no reason to doubt its authenticity.

Back in the office, I showed the document to the Managing Editor, George Mbugguss. He took a deep breath as he requested the newspaper lawyer, James Gathaiya, to come and advise whether to publish. The lawyer advised that much as Raila’s document looked valid, legal objections could be filed in court.

My third encounter was in 2000. Then I was a senior writer with the Nation newspaper. Raila was still NDP leader and Lang’ata MP, but was in a curious relationship with the ruling party Kanu. It was first christened “cooperation”, then upgraded to “alliance”, and finally “merger”.

My seniors asked me to speak to Raila about it. I got him at the Parliament Buildings.

Old buddies

Working with Kanu was a strategic move which is why, he said, unlike others in the Opposition who secretly met Kanu people at night, he had opted to work with the party openly and had clearly stated his objective; constitutional reform.

“Suppose Kanu backtracks on what you have agreed on?” I asked him.

“Then we deal with that if it comes,” he replied.

My fourth one-on-one meeting with Raila was in July 2013. I was Special Projects Editor at the People Daily.  Raila had narrowly been defeated in the presidential race by Uhuru Kenyatta. The Supreme Court ruled he had validly lost. But he didn’t have a problem talking to me much as I worked for a newspaper owned by the Uhuru Kenyatta family.

He told me his grudge with Uhuru, as was one with his father, Jaramogi, and Uhuru’s father, Jomo, had never been personal but political. Indeed shortly after, Raila was on the mend and among the first people to visit him at home to wish him quick recovery with a few goats for soup was President Kenyatta’s younger brother, Muhoho. In that last interview with Raila, I should have seen the ‘handshake’ coming. I didn’t.

Postscript: If Raila is elected president next year, perhaps the Nigerian who branded him “enigma of Kenyan politics” will revise that and call him “comeback-in-chief of Kenya” like Nigerians refer to President Mohamed Buhari. Buhari was democratically elected on his fourth attempt in 2015, at the age of 73. His first attempt was through a successful, but short-lived military takeover in 1984. He democratically made the first shot at it in 2003 but lost to Olusegun Obasanjo. His second and third attempts in 2007 and 2011 also failed.

Should Raila win, he will also be only four months short of 78 years, the age at which Joe Biden was elected 46th president of the US.

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