Raila has nothing new to offer, he is old wine in old wineskin

It is a big joke for Azimio la Umoja-One Kenya coalition to claim that Mr Raila Odinga heralds a new beginning for Kenya. In his 25-year search for the presidency, he has never envisioned how to remake Kenya.

Other than being largely a rebel without a cause, he has always wanted the Establishment to accept him into their inner sanctum. He has done everything – in private and public – to kowtow to the status quo. And he only blows a fuse when the doors are shut in his face.

After Mr Odinga’s first run in the presidential election of December 1997, he joined Mr Mwai Kibaki, who had come second on a Democratic Party ticket to President Daniel Moi, to reject the poll results. But shortly after, he accepted that Mr Moi had won fair and square and his party, the National Development Party (NDP), began cooperating with the ruling party Kanu in and outside Parliament.

Three and a half years later, in June 2001, the cooperation between Kanu and NDP was elevated and Mr Odinga and Dr Adhu Awiti were appointed to the Cabinet. Nine months later, on March 18, 2002, NDP and Kanu merged.

Mr Odinga became the new secretary-general of the party in a reshuffle that saw many Kanu veterans such as George Saitoti and Joseph Kamotho become casualties. But Mr Odinga’s hope for assimilation into the inner sanctum of the Establishment did not take long to unravel.

President Moi had other ideas and Mr Odinga fled Kanu six months later when Mr Uhuru Kenyatta was named the Kanu leader’s successor. Mr Odinga took along with him the group of Kanu oligarchs he had first displaced.

His plans to succeed President Moi up in flames, Mr Odinga opted to pay the Head of State and Mr Kenyatta in kind. He endorsed and campaigned for Mr Kibaki in a new outfit, National Rainbow Coalition (Narc). Mr Kibaki won overwhelmingly. But Mr Odinga was rocking the boat less than a week after the election because he had not been appointed to a non-existent position of prime minister.

Twenty-five years later, Mr Odinga repeated the 1997 feat of offering himself to the service of the government of the day in the hope of a room in the inner sanctum of the Establishment. The Handshake ensured that Mr Odinga, who was in the stumps as an opposition leader on ‘wananchi issues’, has dissipated. Why? He has got a nod to the inner sanctum, a life-long dream.

Not even the Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (Kemsa) scandal during the Covid-19 pandemic could awaken him from his newfound slumber. Well, he did, in fact, wake up to defend the scandal and those behind it. Why rock the boat when the bosom of the inner sanctum was his for the keeping?

In his long political career, Mr Odinga has not espoused any policy that could change the lives of the majority of Kenyans or Kenya from being a haven for a few and a peril for tens of millions. The democratic credentials his admirers credit him for are all well and good. But they are so clearly invisible in the operations of his party ODM.

During election campaigns, Mr Odinga has largely been known for divisive talk that centred on “Us-versus-Them” that ended up profiling those who did not support him. No wonder, his dissatisfaction with poll results in 2007 and 2017 led to violent demonstrations that targeted those who did not vote for him and their property.

After the 2017 election, he filed a petition with the Supreme Court and won. The election victory of President Kenyatta was nullified, but Mr Odinga refused to take part in the repeat election.

Instead, he called for demonstrations that turned violent especially in Nairobi and Nyanza. Eventually, he swore-in himself in a bizarre display of politics for politics’ sake.

This election, one would have expected Mr Odinga to champion a cause or causes that would show a flash of new thinking. The only clear-cut one is his pledge to follow to its conclusion the remnants of the Building Bridges Initiative to change the Constitution and increase positions in the Executive and muzzle the Judiciary and Parliament.

Otherwise, he has been lurching from one half-baked pronouncement to another, only to abandon them and pick up others. He started with the pledge to give every young and jobless person Sh6,000 a month. But that soon morphed into Sh6,000 for each vulnerable household. As of now, it is not clear what the fate of the proposal is.

Unable to stymie the Bottom Up Economic model of UDA presidential candidate William Ruto, Mr Odinga is copying the plan and doing a bad job of it. Yet he was the same man calling the economic model ‘takataka’ (rubbish) only a few months ago.

Dr Ruto has the pulse of what Kenya needs and how to get it. As for Mr Odinga, he looks and sounds clueless and rudderless. In fact, he is the same old story.