Raila's second killing: Why Ruto's high praise of 'Baba' is a second betrayal

President William Ruto during the Jamhuri Day celebrations at Nyayo National Stadium on Friday. [PCS]

It was Mozambique’s Moisés Samora Machel who told his countrymen that the day they see their enemies praising him, they must be alert, because that would be the sign that he had sold them out.

What Machel did not tell Mozambicans is what they should think of him when his enemies praised him after his death.

As the waves of Raila Odinga’s death manifested during the Jamhuri Day celebrations at Nyayo National Stadium on Friday, my thoughts flew to then former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

President William Ruto did not just request the ceremony’s attendants to observe a minute of silence; he also endorsed Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja’s stage-managed proposal that the new Talanta International Stadium be named after Raila Odinga.

The proposal was received with wild cheers.

A recognition of Raila by President Ruto sounded like a perfect replay of what happened in Zaire (now DRC) over six decades ago. Field Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko, then president of the country, on June 30, 1966, issued an ordinance proclaiming Patrice Lumumba a national hero in a function attended by international dignitaries.

In what looked and sounded like the Friday Nyayo Stadium pronouncement, the Congolese masses tearfully cheered Mobutu’s move as if they had forgotten the true facts of Lumumba’s betrayal and execution. Even more striking similarities between the two events stand out.

There is global consensus among political and historical analysts that Mobutu Sese Seko planned and pushed through Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in January 1961. What then pushed him to declare the man he had killed a national hero only five years later? Whichever way you look at it, this was a self-serving event. It had everything to do with self-preservation in power, riding on the heroic standing of Patrice Lumumba.

After his murder, Lumumba’s wave of endorsements as a hero swept the entire globe. Children born were named after him across Africa. Current national celebrities such as Prof. PLO Lumumba, who was born around that time, were christened after Congo’s Lumumba. Moscow did even better by naming a university after him—Lumumba University. In Kenya, the KANU ideological school in Kasarani was named Lumumba Institute. Unfortunately, Kenyatta quickly shut it down when he realized that Bildad Kaggia, Pio Gama Pinto and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga had influenced its curriculum, inclining it towards socialism.

Mobutu’s ordinance did not honour Lumumba; it was meant to puncture the people’s anger against his regime. It was a deflation exercise. His advisers must have told him: “Deflate the people’s anger and stabilize your government.” After capturing the people’s love and attention by publicly making peace with Lumumba—though only theoretically—Mobutu would then speak for Lumumba and re-engineer Lumumba’s ideology.

By so doing, he would succeed in derailing the struggle for the liberation of Congo from his neo-colonial partners. That way, Lumumba would die twice: first as a person, then secondly, ideologically.

Does the above analysis apply to the relationship between William Ruto and Raila Odinga? Perfectly, if you ask me—and in fact, worse at the ideological level. If death is a process comparable to the construction of a building, then it is legitimate to say that the building blocks for Raila’s death were contributed by past regimes, with Ruto’s regime completing the construction process.

Baba lived wiping tears whose history was state terror. He survived many assassination attempts, the most vicious being under the Ruto regime when bullets were sprayed on his car after the contentious general elections. Come to think of it, how come the identified officers have never been held to account? That defines Ruto’s real spirit.

Raila was steadily worn down by tear gas, depression and general state terror by the Ruto state, leading to his death ahead of his elder brother, Oburu Odinga. The cumulative effects of his suffering occasionally made him cry like a child as he narrated his nightmares before his supporters. Raila’s death was a process heavily contributed to by the man who declared him a national hero on Jamhuri Day.

Whatever anybody thinks, the histories of these two Kenyan politicians show that they were as radically different in beliefs and values as Lumumba and Mobutu of Congo were. What then does Ruto hope to reap from lionising his ideological rival? After the stadium is renamed following a proposal by Nairobi’s Sakaja and the endorsement by Ruto, Raila supporters breathed out their anger through endless cheers, similar to Mobutu’s manipulative pronouncement about Lumumba in 1966.

In fact, I believe it won’t take long before Ruto goes to Kibra to be crowned the new “Baba”. Does this renaming fulfil Raila’s dreams for Kenya? Not at all. It creates the environment for Raila’s ideological killing.

Here is how.

During the ODM 20th anniversary in Mombasa, Winnie Odinga said something people took lightly. She expressed her lack of belief in any leader in ODM after Raila’s death who could manoeuvre the broad-based government arrangement as effectively as her father could.

Raila had shown time and again that he could create crises on a national scale that only he could cure. As we stand today, the nation has numerous institutional and policy crises. Most of these challenges were instituted under the knowledge or endorsement of Raila himself. Examples of these anomalies are many: extensive controversial privatisation without public participation, the manipulated selection of IEBC commissioners, the emasculation of the opposition in Parliament and the subsequent dilution of checks on government.

Most dangerously to the national aspiration for a change of government, he pushed the largest party, ODM, into government.

How does his death and Ruto’s conferment of hero status portend for national politics? Raila died without unequivocally addressing the issue of succession within the ODM party and ODM’s 2027 electoral plan. This has led to disagreements within the party. Ruto has since used the perceived goodwill between him and Raila to position sympathisers of the broad-based government project in leadership positions within ODM.

Given the ideological rift that has defined their politics, Ruto’s disruption of ODM amounts to the second killing of Raila—ideologically. With the massive endorsement he received at Nyayo Stadium for labelling Raila a national hero, he has strengthened the hand of his moles in ODM, stabilising himself by controlling ODM the same way Mobutu did.

As Winnie Odinga implied in Mombasa, only Raila had the political intelligence to handle the governance arrangement with UDA. However, with Ruto tightening his grip on Raila’s legacy through friendly public gestures, he is acquiring the locus standi to define Baba’s path going forward, to the detriment of Raila’s known political philosophy.

Is President William Ruto genuine about Raila’s status as a national hero? How else can this be determined other than by observing efforts made to fulfil Raila’s known aspirations? Raila fought for justice, tolerance and transparency. At Raila’s funeral in Nairobi, several people were killed by bloodthirsty police who had terrorised him in life. To this day, no statement has been made by the government regarding justice for the victims or compensation to their families. Ruto’s newfound allies maintain a conspiracy of silence on the matter.

Ruto’s pronouncement of Raila as a hero weakens the constituency of those who would seek justice on this matter. Raila spent his life fighting electoral malpractices. If this aspiration made Raila a hero to Ruto, we would have witnessed a change in the manner in which by-elections are conducted.

Instead, we have seen an increase in the manipulative and coercive hand of the state, perhaps laying the groundwork for yet another confrontation in the near future. Raila often identified corruption as Africa’s fourth malady after ignorance, disease and poverty, as stated by our founding fathers. In Ruto’s Jamhuri Day speech, he ignored corruption and mentioned only the other three.

The crowd that cheered Ruto’s honour to Raila is being treated to ideological revisionism—Raila’s second killing. If Ruto were genuine, he would have made appointments from the list Raila presented to him before going to India for treatment. The appointments were set to be made around the time Raila was reported dead.

Among the prospective appointees was Ronny Raburu, who was to be posted to Tanzania as a diplomat. Raburu gave Raila the wild-beast flywhisk that was buried with him. Raburu was also the person who coined the name Azimio la Umoja for the opposition in the 2022 General Election.

Ruto may be celebrating the relief from the pressure of appointing Raila’s people into office. In a nutshell, his pretentious embrace of Raila as a hero endears him to Raila’s followers, deflating their revolutionary energy as they simultaneously become vulnerable to ideological revisionism at the hands of Ruto.

That way, Raila will die ideologically in what political historians will describe as his second killing.