Raila Odinga: Unmasking the archetype of violence

Today, Friday April 29 2011 the leader of Kenya's Orange Democratic Movement Raila Odinga is scheduled to visit Zimbabwe in his personal capacity to deliver a keynote address at the MDC-T Congress in Bulawayo. All Zimbabweans, great and small, deserve to know who this man is and what he stands for.

The choice of a speaker to give a keynote address is never taken lightly. After thorough analysis and vetting, political parties often settle for those candidates with whom they share common values, ethos and aspirations, and from whom they believe they have much to learn. The choice of Raila Odinga, therefore speaks volumes not only of what his hosts think of him but also of their values, political ethos and aspirations.

Raila Odinga is an African brother, of Kenyan extraction. In his official capacity he holds the highly exalted and equally highly esteemed office of the Prime Minister of Kenya. Zimbabweans hold their Kenyan brothers with the greatest respect, and venerate with utmost humility the office he occupies.

However, there is a need to make a clear distinction between Odinga, the Prime Minister and Odinga the private citizen of Africa. One's political identity is not defined by the title of the office that one holds, but by his values and the works that proceed from those values.

Afterall, yore wisdom counsels that just as a tree is known by its fruit, so is a man known by his works. Whereas it is beneath the dignity of Zimbabweans to even imagine of denigrating his governmental office, it would be remiss for Zimbabweans not to subject his credentials and persona as a private visitor to the country to robust, unbiased and scrupulous scrutiny.

We owe it to ourselves to examine closely those figures that our political leaders and those that aspire to lead us cosy up with in public and also in private. Just as birds of identical plumage flock in close proximity, a man's character can also be judged from the company that he keeps.

Odinga - The merchant of violence
Who then is this Raila Odinga? Raila Odinga is a political schizophrenic. His rhetoric oozes with refined contemporary democracy dogma, but his actions reveal a very violent and dictatorial streak. The exorbitant nature of his obsessive preoccupation with violence is rivalled by a few in modern day Africa. His proclivity for violence can be traced to his student days.

As a youth, Raila Odinga, whose father served as deputy president of Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta, was given a scholarship to study in the then East Germany. He studied engineering.
However, his choice of his undergraduate thesis is not only revealing but also a source of great perturbation. His thesis focused on bomb-making with special focus on nail bombs. Why would a civilian - the son of a vice president of a recently independent African country, at peace with its neighbours and its citizens, be obsessed with making nail bombs? To bomb who and for what purpose?

The answers to these pertinent questions were to come on August 1 1982. On that fateful day, Kenya experienced one of its darkest days as an independent nation.

Hezekiah Okucha, who was a senior private in the Kenyan Air Force, led a brigade of air force soldiers in an attempted coup. The bloody fiasco lasted less than six hours, as loyal soldiers from the infantry put it down.

The failed putsch claimed the lives of thousands of Kenyans and for many days corpses littered the streets of Nairobi like flies.

At the time, it was believed that the intended beneficiaries of the coup were Raila Odinga and his late father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Raila was arrested and detained for no less than eight years. In the absence of unimpeachable evidence to prosecute him, Odinga was eventually discharged.

The shadowy figures behind the 1982 attempted putsch remained anonymous until 2006. Safe in the knowledge that the statute of limitations (the period within which a suspect can be tried for his crimes) had expired, Odinga released his official biography aptly titled Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics.

In it, Raila openly declares to Babafemi Badejo, the author, that he was the chief architect and financier of the attempted coup. By his own admission Raila is therefore vicariously and directly liable for the death of thousands of Kenyans in that failed putsch. He shows no contrition about it but instead boasts with pride.

A military coup, by definition, is antithetical to democratic ethos but for a man to boast of being a protagonist of a failed coup that claimed thousands of African lives and also claim to be a democrat is the height of hypocrisy gone mad.

In the run-up to the December 2007 elections, Raila cast himself as the scion of the Luo tribe and the other smaller tribes in Kenya.

Prior to the elections, Odinga's campaign team leaked a document titled "Executive Brief on the Positioning and Marketing of the Orange Democratic Movement & 'The People's President.'"
The document posits that: "It is possible to trigger a class war by painting the Kibaki Government as an insensitive, uncaring group of Muthaiga Golf clubbers. Available research also suggests that this strategy could also resonate with poor Kikuyu youth who feel economically marginalised by their own government.

"As part of this strategy, the party should seek to elevate the emotions within all youth constituents who may if successful, be willing to vote for us in the protest. Visible signs of class disparity will provide important fodder for this theme."

Before the elections both The Guardian and the BBC reported that there was a sharp increase in the purchase of machetes mainly by Raila's supporters. Their mantra was, "our time has come." Against this backdrop it is clear that the violence that ensued was carefully premeditated, diabolically choreographed and executed virulently by the youths whose emotions had been elevated in line with the previously enunciated strategy.

This election strategy was overseen by Dick Morris, the disgraced political strategist once investigated for tax evasion in the US, and who was alleged to have been instrumental in fomenting chaos and anarchy in Ukraine and Mexico.

When the final results were announced depicting that Raila Odinga had lost the election, his team with his tacit consent called for mass action, which in essence panned out to be a euphemism for mass murder, and an attempt to subvert a constitutionally elected government.

That the election result was disputed has never been in dispute; and that Raila's supporters initiated and orchestrated most of the post election violence has also never been disputed.

Without their actions, Kenya would not have experienced that dark hour. The worst of the violence was enacted in Raila's constituency which includes the Kibera slums and in a church in Eldoret, where more than 200 women and children, mainly Christians who had sought refuge in a church were burnt alive by Raila's hordes of vile brigands.

The violence was perpetrated in Raila's name, and for Raila's benefit; and he did not make even a feeble attempt to dissuade his supporters. It has been widely reported that Raila was on the original list of about 20 Kenyan politicians identified by the International Criminal Court as most responsible for the post election violence.

Although his name did not make the final list of six, it has been posited, rightly in my view, that that list is designed to sideline some players from the coming elections and lend Raila an unfair advantage. It is instructive that Joshua Arap Sang, a journalist, who was the de facto Odinga broadcaster in the weeks preceding the elections, was indicted by the ICC.

The majority of indicted people were allies of Odinga. His politics, then as now, is deeply steeped in Machiavellian thinking that the end justifies the means, even if it carries with it an astronomical human cost. In this regard the slaughter of innocent Kenyans was deemed an acceptable means of obtaining state power. This again can be classified as a failed attempted coup d'état.
Since independence Kenya has had three attempted coups. All of them were sponsored by the Odinga family and also designed to thrust a member of the Odinga family forcefully into the state house.

Raila: The epitomy of the modern day anti-Christ
On August 29, 2007 Raila Odinga signed a memorandum of understanding with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF), an umbrella organisation comprised of the nation's principal Islamic groups. The Memorandum had Odinga promising "within six months" to "rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognise Sharia as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran for Muslim declared regions." Odinga, according to the Memorandum, would recognise "Islam as the only true religion" and give Islamic leaders an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions." This memorandum was made public by the Sheikh himself, and in an attempt at damage control and subterfuge, Raila published his own version of the memorandum which was not substantially different from the one the Sheikh had given to the media with Raila's knowledge.

The present Kenyan constitution that was adopted in August 2010 enshrines Islamic family courts called Khadis which apply Sharia law to family disputes, and also loosely permits abortion. Odinga vigorously distinguished himself as a seminal campaigner for these provisions to be incorporated in the Kenyan supreme law, ostensibly to assuage his Muslim constituency. Christian leaders under the aegis of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya called for rallies to campaign against these provisions. Two of these rallies were bombed by Islamic fundamentalists resulting in several casualties. By virtue of his association with the Islamic campaign, and by virtue of being the chief campaigner against the Christian values that the evangelicals stood for, Odinga is vicariously liable for the death of these innocent saints. His hands are tainted with

Christian blood. He has been identified by Islamic fundamentalists as a willing and ready conduit for Islamic fundamentalism in East Africa as a prelude to it propagation to the rest of Africa.

Odinga's terrorist connections
Two of Odinga's most benevolent financiers in the run up to the 2007 elections were Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and A K Al Bakari, whose company A K Al Bakri & Sons Holding is based in Saudi Arabia. One of the prime contracts they would get was for the supply of jet fuel to Nairobi Airport and petroleum products to Raila's petroleum business at subsidised prices, which allowed him to undercut the competition there.

This started when Raila was the minister of Energy and there were clear conflicts of interest. The deal made Raila filthy rich.

This same Abdulkader Al Bakri is listed as a defendant in the First Amendment Complaint suit brought by various insurance companies in the United States against al Qaeda and associated organisations and individuals. Within that suit is mentioned documents (known as the Golden Chain document) picked up by Bosnian police on a raid on a charitable front organisation for al Qaeda in Sarajevo. One of the listed documents is the "Tareekh Osama" ("Osama's History") in which Abdulkader al Bakri aka Abdel Qader Bakri gets a prominent listing as a financier of Osama bin Laden. His link to terrorist fanciers is therefore well established.

Raila, the corrupt one
When Raila was an opposition MP during the presidency of Moi, he attempted to purchase the Kisimu Molasses Plant and failed because of lack of financial capacity. A few months later Raila joined Moi's government and was appointed Energy Minister. His portfolio had oversight of the Molasses Plant. Within months Raila structured a deal that saw him buy the plant at a grossly subsidised price. The true extent of the fraud became clear a few months later when Raila sold off just a small fraction of the business to overseas investors. The due diligence that preceded that transaction revealed that Raila's subsidised purchase of the plant prejudiced the Kenyan tax payer of more than half a million US dollars.

In conclusion, much can be said about Raila, but there is one ineluctable conclusion. To be charitable to the man and parsimonious with adjectives, he is not the enigma that his biography purports him to be, but the archetype of prime evil overly eager to cast himself as a latter day African saint. On the eve of his arrival in Zimbabwe, he must be unmasked and exposed for who he is.