The 'Welder' who held Kenya together: Unpacking the quiet resilience and legacy of Raila Odinga

Raila’s compassion grew from his own experience. He knew what it was to be hounded and terrified and in fear of his life.

It was nearing mid-1992, and the show trial of two Maasai Mara game wardens accused of British tourist Julie Ward’s murder was in progress at High Court No. 2 in Nairobi. James Orengo was the lead defence counsel, Githu Muigai his young deputy, and I was covering the trial for The Weekly Review (WR).

There was daily drama in the courtroom, but there was more drama outside it. The country was gearing up for the first multi-party elections in nearly a quarter of a century, and the fledgling opposition faced challenges characterised by the kind of danger, oppression and persecution that those who were not there at the time would hardly be able to imagine today.

Orengo, then aged just 41, was one of its leading lights, not only as a committed political activist but also as legal adviser and representative, running back and forth to other courts to protest and stop daily moves by the authorities to hamper and impede opposition efforts.

He sometimes had to leave his deputy leading the charge in Court No. 2, and as I watched and listened, I thought there were a few pertinent questions the defence had not asked. I approached Orengo and voiced my concerns.  

We met up and went through my verbatim notes, and thereafter had several discussions about the case. On June 29, 1992, the two innocent, fall-guy, game wardens were acquitted. And Orengo told me he wanted to take me to meet Jaramogi Oginga Odinga.

Jaramogi was the leader of the opposition vehicle, the recently formed Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (Ford), with everyone united for the cause under this umbrella. Or so it had appeared.

Jim and I went together to Jaramogi’s office in Esso House, and as we walked in and I was introduced to Jaramogi, I saw Raila Odinga sitting on a sofa staring at a card in his hand.

I had never before seen either of the Odingas in person, and each of them had a formidable reputation. Jaramogi had been portrayed as a violent Communist, Raila as a violent terrorist. Their names, particularly Raila’s, caused shudders down the backs of many people.

But Raila looked up, motioned me to sit down beside him and, with no other introduction or greeting, said mildly, “Look at this.”

Three small words. Obviously I had no way of knowing it at the time but I was destined to spend in the future some 2,000 hours sitting with Raila, listening to literally millions of his words as he told me his entire life story.

He handed me the card. It was a party membership card printed unilaterally by Ken Matiba, and was the harbinger of things to come. Matiba soon led a faction out of Ford, and he and Jaramogi were suddenly no longer comrades but rivals, in Ford-Kenya and Ford-Asili. That card and others like it were the beginning of the end of opposition unity in 1992.  

Not long afterwards, I left WR and joined Jaramogi and Ford-Kenya as a volunteer, and it quickly became my task to liaise with party aspirants all over the country to make their election posters.

I was trailed by Special Branch wherever I went in Nairobi but I had the courageous help of a sympathetic small Asian-owned printing concern, located down a dark back road, where we did the printing in the dead of night.

We then had to figure out how to deliver the posters to our candidates, somehow foiling all the obstacles put in our way. Raila was always on hand with arrangements and with endless, compassionate support for these brave people, some of whom were hiding out in the bush and travelling across country through forest and river to get to Ford-Kenya’s Nairobi offices without being discovered or killed. Not all of them made it.

Raila’s compassion grew from his own experience. He knew what it was to be hounded and terrified and in fear of his life. He had already survived what would have destroyed many.

Ford-Kenya struggled against government restrictions  to spread the word of change, trying to reach people who had known only Kanu and its propaganda, and who did not have the kind of exposure to alternative information enjoyed today. People were in bewildering times, and it was an uphill task to persuade them that they actually did have a choice, and that a better future could be ahead. 

After the elections, Jaramogi eventually became leader of the official parliamentary opposition in 1993. We said goodbye to this great man the following year, after which I continued to support and work with Raila through much of the subsequent tortuous political journey he travelled, culminating in our joint authorship of his autobiography, The Flame of Freedom, published almost 20 years later.

And one thing I quickly discovered about Raila was that he was no violent terrorist. If anything, he was a pussycat. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and was not the bank that some people wanted him to be – some called him mean when he refused to shell out cash, but he would never have considered buying public support or paying people to listen to him. He never needed to. But he had a soft heart, sometimes in my view too soft, so that he was at times vulnerable to insincere and dangerous people.

Today, harsh and ugly invective is spewed all over by someone who calls himself a leader. That was never Raila’s way. He never called people names or shouted the odds with shocking vitriol and hatred.

Instead, he made his points with the morality stories and riddles he had stored in his eclectic mind over the years, using them to test people’s wit, to teach them cultural and political values, and to entertain them. He loved these stories and told them with great delight, becoming famous for his ‘vitendawili’, as well as for his ‘football’ commentaries, based on years of supporting his beloved Arsenal.

I see parallels in the way a young man called  Edwin Sifuna would rather smilingly reference chickens than insult his competitors. He will be mocked, as Raila was mocked for his stories, by people without the intellectual depth to know that there are ways to do things that are not primitive and savage.

Raila was also mocked for allegedly doing nothing to improve his constituency after his election as MP for Langata in 1992. He was particularly mocked for building no toilets.

This was all vicious propaganda, and in 2007, we decided to do a pamphlet highlighting all that the Langata CDF fund, under constituency development chairman SK Thande, had done with Raila’s support during the previous three years.

It began by detailing 24 projects at primary schools, ranging through refurbishment or provision of furniture, walls, footbridges, toilets, water tanks, parking areas, and the completion of new classrooms and a laboratory. Seven classrooms and a laboratory had been built in secondary schools, and water tanks had been supplied and installed in 11 locations, from Laini Saba to Highrise and others in between. 

Roads and parking areas had been repaired in 15 locations, from Ndorobo Road to Ngong Karen View Road.

Other projects included construction of a chief’s office, upgrading the DO’s office health centre, building 200 jua kali sheds, and providing Sh6 million-worth of bursaries to orphaned and poor students from every part of the constituency – Kibera, Gatwekera, Soweto, Lindi, Bomas Slum, Karen, Sarang’ombe, Laini Saba, Makina, South C, Nairobi West, Mugumoini, Kianda, Olympic. The help these students received allowed them to attend schools with such famous names as State House Girls, Pumwani Secondary and Upper Hill, among others.

There was help for the disabled via the Disabled Support Project of Kenya, the brainchild of disabled Kibera residents, with a 10,000-litre water tank installed near the Sarang’ombe chief’s office from which the group could sell water at Sh2 per debe and help create an independent living for themselves. 

And yes, the toilets. Blocks of toilets had been built in 18 locations, in Kuwinda Village, Bangladesh, Hardy, City Cotton, Kisumu Ndogo and others.

All this was not the kind of flamboyant self-promotion we see today but, rather, quiet down-to-earth assistance desperately needed at the grassroots. Ninety projects were detailed and Raila visited and knew them all. He was hands-on and knew what was happening in every corner of his constituency, where he was always received with an outpouring of love and reverence.

But even with all he did for this country, Raila never had the chance to show what more he could have done. Even when he was technically in government, obstacles were put in the way of everything he tried to do. No one wanted him to shine.

When he became minister for roads in 2003 in Mwai Kibaki’s government, however, and uncovered a cesspool of malfeasance and profiteering, he resolved to make a difference.

The entire process of procurement was shot through with corruption, many civil servants also wearing hats as contractors and consultants, awarding themselves tenders, doing shoddy work and signing off for themselves inflated payments. The new Narc government had made a promise of accountability, but it seemed no one else’s heart was really in it.

Raila set to work, first convening a meeting of civil servants in his office and reading them the Riot Act. He told them that those who wanted to continue as civil servants should wind up their contracting companies, and those who wanted to continue contracting should resign from the civil service. They could not do both and he gave them three months to sort themselves out.

He discovered that any contractor’s claim had to go through 22 stages of approval, at each of which ‘toll stations’ someone had to be paid off for the requisite signature. He set a clean-up process in motion and gradually managed to reduce the number of required signatures to five, while introducing other initiatives.

He says in his book that “The measures I introduced brought harmony and sanity to the roads sector in the ministry. A number of civil servants took my advice and resigned to become solely contractors.”

It might seem like a drop in the ocean, but what Raila did in the roads ministry was perhaps a microcosm of what he could have done as president. Life might later force him into compromises, but for that short time, when he had that small power, he made the difference he was committed to.

Raila was also mocked for his engineering degree and called a welder (as if even those who are welders deserve only insults).

Raila was indeed a welder – the person who for several decades welded this fractious country together, always fostering the nation’s delicate unity through his resilience and perseverance, his ability to keep going and stay calm even when facing serious setbacks, his humility and quiet strength, his integrity and purpose, his values serving a greater mission and his emotional intelligence enabling him to build trust and resolve conflict.

Raila was not a perfect person. No one is. He was not a saint, but he was heroically brave and something very special, and without him, we are in grave danger of fragmentation and collapse, of falling deeper into bewildering times again.

But we have new hope now, in a new generation of leaders. The overwhelmingly sad paradox is that it is only our loss of that exceptional person that has allowed these exceptional young people to emerge, to step forward, and to take a different lead in inspiring, energising and galvanising this country towards a better future. It is Raila’s last and possibly greatest legacy.

The great sadness is that he is not here to see it. He would have loved it.