How Oburu is driving Raila's dying party to its grave

ODM leader Dr Oburu Oginga at Kamukunji grounds, Kibera where he was coroneted a Luo Elder and by spokeman of the Luo community by Luo elders in Nairobi. [Kanyiri Wahito, Standard]

Dr Oburu Oginga’s maiden political outing in Kibra as ODM’s new party leader was not just a rally. It was a diagnostic moment that spoke to what ODM is quietly becoming, and to who this man Oburu Oginga is. It also spoke to what he is not; and what in all probability, he can never be.

It was chaotic, comical, and disastrous. ODM’s new party leader drew little excitement from the insipid and often frigid crowd that assembled around him. At best, the crowd was hilarious, the leader verbose without focus, or message. The people had come, most possibly, for want of anything better to do.

The late Raila Odinga’s fanatic backyard was chaotic throughout his elder brother’s comedy of errors; with the most significant message being that Oburu proposes to rally around President William Ruto in next year’s election. He will take to Ruto whatever will be left of Raila’s dying party.

Whenever Raila was in a political crisis, Kibra was the place to storm. Here, he found his dose of catharsis. Buoyed up with fresh energy, Raila would then be ready to raid the rest of the country, to wild cheers by enthusiastic followers. When he visited this week, Oburu drew a blank. What did he not get right? Did he fail to prepare the Kamukunji crowds ahead of the visit, or was the visit just premature? Or, in the alternative, did the crowd already know what he had come to tell them; something that they were already averse to?

“Baba’s bedroom” only seemed to cheer up a little whenever the Raila name was invoked. Disruption by his concerned notables behind him were the order of the event. Every so often someone would materialize to whisper something into Oburu’s ear. And at some point, he was constrained to wonder loudly why the people at the back would not respond whenever he sent out the clarion call. Finally, when he was done, Oburu unenthusiastically passed on the microphone, and hurriedly left the podium.

Kenya’s Kibra is not just a geography, it is a political muscle and a lesson in civics. For the past three decades-and-going, Kibra has given Raila loyalists political direction. Whenever Kibra has coughed, Raila’s strongholds have caught the cold. In this place, Raila’s agitative political legitimacy was many a time recharged on demand. But now Oburu gets there in Raila’s heavy boots and he draws a blank. What is Kibra telling Kenya? 

Possibly three things. First, that political charisma is not inherited. Raila held Kibra together through his personal charm, bravado and force of spontaneity. Throughout Raila’s excursions into this space, Oburu would be nowhere to be seen. It was, accordingly, memory of absence in the hour of need that Oburu took to Kibra. If he thought that invoking Raila’s name was enough abracadabra to win him the same kind of raucous reception his brother used to get, Oburu was in for a shock. He left the place educated with the knowledge that invoking Raila is not symbolism, but dependency. 

Second, Oburu now knows that ODM’s emotional capital belonged to Raila and not to the party. But he will possibly recall that ODM politicians, himself at the fore-front, often reminded detractors that ODM was Raila, and Raila was the party. The mere taking of the baton has not converted Oburu into a new Raila. Some animal may be born in the stable where horses are born, but if it is not a horse, it will not become one, for the mere fact that it was born in the stable. Oburu is not the smart political horse that his brother was. He is not about to become one. Horses will be horses, and donkeys will remain donkeys, no matter who tries to convert them into horses. 

Oburu is not becoming a political tiger, despite the fact that there are those who are keen to package him as one, for their own reasons. There is President Ruto, who craves the Luo Nyanza vote and believes that Oburu and sundry shouting voices near him could deliver. But are they learning that Oburu commands little or no presence? His poor performance in Kibra was more than blundering into stylistic quirks. It speaks to an actor who was not in control of the theatre. Once the crowd sensed this, his authority and hold over them evaporated. 

The excursion into Kibra was worse than premature. It was an unnecessary exposure of the new party leader’s weaknesses. He arrived completely unprepared, and the crowd too. Before he could anywhere, Raila always prepared the ground to receive and listen to him, punctuating his every pause with, “Ndio, Baba (Yes, Daddy).” Ward mobilizers would be briefed, the youth would be marshalled and hecklers neutralized by his own set of superior hecklers. Oburu literally staggered into Kibra like a guest, some kind of hallowed son-in-law on a maiden visit. 

Earlier, in Kilifi, some of the people at the party’s Central Management Committee urged Oburu to “be firm with ODM leaders who are working at cross purposes” with the party leader and the party. The vocal George Peter Opondo Kaluma of Homa Bay directly addressed the dissenting Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna and like-minded “rebels” to toe the Oburu line, or quit. Oburu, for his part, was at once equivocating and prevaricating. He said that the party would not expel anyone, but asked dissenters to leave. 

Neither ODM, nor Oburu have the capacity to contain dissenters. The party, acting as an entity through internal organs and forums has lacked a history of containing dissent. When William Ruto, Musalia Mudavadi, Najib Balala, Omingo Magara, and Joe Nyagah were at loggerheads with the party, it did not contain them. They quit of their own volition. 

But those who did not quit were either made irrelevant, or frog-marched out of the party. Secretary-General Ababu Namwamba quit ODM in the intersection between voluntary quitting and irrelevance, while Executive Director Magarer Lagat was jettisoned unceremoniously.

He was literally kicked out of the party, as Raila watched, during one of the party’s assemblies in Nairobi. Oburu has neither the ability nor the proclivity to trigger any of these processes. Sifuna seems to grow in stature and influence with each fresh effort to contain or expel him from ODM. 

It is a veritable Catch 22 for Oburu. His party’s internal immunity system is compromised by the division between those who hold on to Raila’s old radical ideological orientation, on the one hand, and those supporting the broad-based government. The easier thing for Oburu to do is to convene the CMC and eject the dissenters. For, it increasingly gets clear that Raila, Oburu and Ruto agreed a long time ago that ODM would team up with Ruto in 2027 and leave to political vicissitudes the future beyond that. Oburu is not about to bend to pressure from the dissenters and get ODM away from Ruto. Whatever of ODM remains in his hands at the end of this game of attrition, Oburu will take to Ruto, on the day of reckoning. 

It remains up to the dissenters to smell the coffee and decide their next move, which they probably have already begun putting in motion. They will, as part of that, be possibly waiting for Oburu to expel them from ODM. Yet, as he says, he will not do so. For, to do so is to open the tribal pandora box. Keen observers will have noted that apart from Babu Owino and James Orengo, the other leading dissenters – Sifuna, Caleb Amisi, and Godfrey Osotsi, are all Luhya.

Oburu cannot expel them from ODM without attracting a bad tribal backlash.  The Luhya have for some time felt used and damped by top leadership of their Luo neighbours and cousins. Indeed, the Luhya and Luo are the perfect cousins, away from former DP Rigathi Gachagua’s imposed Bantoid cousinhood. The two communities have intermarried and intra-migrated and assimilated over hundreds of years, to the extent that they have become one tribe with two languages. Their distinction is linguistic rather than ethnic. Yet, politically, an artificial ethnic sentiment that is linguistically driven can drive a wedge between them, and it did so in the past, until when Raila demystified the division by demonstrating that in point of fact, he was genetically Luhya, and only linguistically Luo. 

These distinctions notwithstanding, if Oburu expels his Luhya cousins from ODM, there will be a backlash. He, accordingly, must continue to keep them around and put up with the incessant bickering within the party. Babu Owino, meanwhile, remains conscious of the complex ethnic mix in Embakasi East, and now even Nairobi governor’s office, which he stands to lose hands down, should he go the Oburu way. He will remain a thorn in the ribs of the broad-based government for a long time to come. Moreover, he has nascent presidential ambitions, which he would like to give a cosmopolitan urban springboard. 

Romantic idealist

For his part, Siaya Governor James Orengo is the perennial ideological romantic idealist. His instincts are completely contraindicated with the kind of politics that Oburu is playing with Ruto. He would die sooner than depart from his beaten straight and narrow ideological landscape. In this, he gives Oburu sleepless nights. He has occasioned Oburu to wonder about “which human rights he is fighting for!”

Yet, Oburu cannot do much about Orengo, either, beyond frustrated declamatory pronunciations. 

Oburu lacks the gravity to discipline these individuals. The Kilifi push to discipline them, of course, reveals not strategy but panic. Apart from having their fingers on the pulse of the greater nation, in line with the latest Infotrak polls, they are articulate, media-savvy sophisticated political operatives. They are urban-facing and generationally resonant. If Oburu takes them head-on, he will in all probability lose. And if he tolerates them, he looks weak, as he is doing. 

Is Oburu probably essentially weak, anyway? Is he more of a mediator, a political midwife for Ruto, whom some mistake for a mobiliser? That some people have whispered into his ears what message to pass in Kibra speaks to poor messaging anchorage, and even political anchorage. Those who rooted for his leadership of ODM mistook a symbol of the Odinga family symbolism in leadership for a source of legitimacy and competence. At the very best, Oburu represents continuity of the Odinga lineage in leadership in Luo Nyanza, and elsewhere in Kenya. But he does not represent leadership efficacy. 

As an Odinga, or Oginga, he represents family continuity of presence, but not necessarily continuity of vision, or ideological renewal. He is a man who wants to be in government – any government, regardless of its sins and offensives against the people. He keeps the Odinga family warm. He is useful as a political trustee of the Raila-Ruto 2024 pact and as the symbol of memory that the Odingas have been a part of the political centre. However, he does not bring anything fresh or exciting. 

This is neither strange, nor surprising. Oburu lived in his younger brother’s shadow for eighty years. Right from childhood, Raila was the leader, and Oburu the faithful disciple. If ODM needs command, discipline and direction, Oburu is not the person to look up to. But if it needs a symbolic leader to keep it in the broad-based government, he is the right man. 

He will not re-write any rules, regrow, or regenerate the party after the Raila exit. Nor will he rattle anybody. Oburu is not a new bridge to the future, except a bridge at the crossing point stuck where Raila left him. “Raila left us in the broad-based government until 2027,” he says, repeatedly. But, beyond that, he has no idea what should be done next. Hence, he will remain in that spot, even after 2027. 

Dr Oburu Oginga, for all these deficiencies, is in the right place. He is in the right place for Ruto, who craves the Luo vote. Oburu will not run away from him. He is a disciplined chapter chorister, who will not attempt to redefine the party beyond Raila. He reinforces the Odinga symbol in top political leadership without being a bridge to the future. He is, accordingly, not a disruptive individual. He not stop the narrative that Ruto arrived at with his brother Raila, and he will not generate any new narratives. 

Above all, Oburu is useful in maintaining equilibrium in politics in ODM and in the broad-based government. He is helping the innermost sanctum of ODM to buy political time, and reorganize and strategize for long-term succession. They can suspend the tough question of who owns the party after Raila, for he is not the new owner. 

Oburu is the embodiment of ODM’s unresolved questions. He is the proof rather than the source of the crisis in the party. Edwin Sifuna speaks the language of rights, accountability and good governance that Raila used to speak. Wherever he will be when the dust settles, the ODM Party will also be there, regardless of the name of the entity. Conversely, Oburu will remain with ODM in name. He is likely to take the name and a fairly frail and limping entity of remnants to President Ruto. He will learn to get used to thin crowds; indifferent to his messages. 

For ODM, the party, is gone. They used to say ODM was Raila. Well, Raila has gone. Where he sleeps, ODM rests there with him.

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.