Raila Odinga’s two-month absence away in the United States, where he was on a residency programme at Boston University’s African Presidential Centre (APC), has been cause for much speculation, including of the conspiracy theory kind.
The APC says it provides an unprecedented and unique approach to studying democratisation and free market reform in Africa for former democratically-elected African leaders and access to their papers, and through access to present democratically-elected leaders, the center provides a forum for them to share and a venue for others to benefit from their insights and expertise. The Center offers an exceptional opportunity to see the present phase of Africa’s development through the eyes of the ‘architects of that change.”
The APC also hosts policy debates and deliberations on free market reform on Africa. Established by a one-time US ambassador to Tanzania, Charles R. Stith, who still directs it, the Centre also contributes to the development of current US policy on Africa.
Given the interest the study tour excited, Ambassador Stith was compelled to issue a clarification about Raila’s programme, an unprecedented PR exercise for the APC. Stith explained Raila had been invited in his capacity as a “statesman and a representative of the democratisation trend in Africa”.
Turning to claims that Raila’s admissibility in a programme specifically described as “presidential” was questionable, Stith said the Kenyan leader was eminently qualified for the invitation and critics such as Kirinyaga Central MP Joseph Gitari not only do not understand what APC does but also that “being selected to participate in a programme as prestigious as ours speaks well of the country”.
To listen to Raila’s detractors across the political aisle, the man was basically up to no good and the study tour was little more than what in intelligence circles is referred to as a “cover story”. The Jubilee alliance rank and file was made to believe by their most ardent anti-Raila strategists that the ODM leader and ranking principal of Cord had several other agenda in the US, some of them extremely sinister.
Jubilee-compliant bloggers have spread the word about Raila having been to some kind of regime-change school or gymnasium in the US, being primed by shadowy CIA types to return to Kenya and foment an uprising. The Kenyan Post, an online newspaper, informed its readers that Raila and former aide Salim Lone had teamed up with Professor Makau Mutua in a series of meetings in April in Mutua’s rooms at the State University of New York and formed a clandestine organisation, the Kenya Action Group (KAG), dedicated to regime change before the 2017 general election.
One Diaspora Kenyan, Joseph Kinuthia of Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, told the Daily Nation newspaper of Nairobi: “The idea that Mr Odinga, an accomplished politician, can spend two months away from Kenya to attend some school in America is unbelievable. I know he has been up to something sinister”.
Other speculation included health issues, seeing as Raila is almost 70 and spent nearly a decade in total in the detention-without-trial cells during the marathon Daniel arap Moi presidency (1978-2002).
There was even talk of sheer political fatigue, particularly since he took the break barely a year after he had lost the presidential poll for a second consecutive time in the March 2013 general election. There was also the matter of the botched ODM Delegates’ Convention and elections at the end of February.
When he left Kenya, Raila left an interim leader, former ODM secretary-general Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, nominally in charge. In other words, he left his party in crisis. Raila had a fairly full and elaborate itinerary away from the APC, both during and after the study tour, almost all of it well-publicised by media. He delivered lectures at Morehouse College, a private, all-male historically Black institution in Atlanta, Georgia; Princeton University, the fourth-oldest in the US and world-famous as a research institution; Elizabeth City State University, one of the foremost historically Black colleges in the US; Columbia University, a private Ivy League research university; and 377-year-old Harvard University, one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. He also gave media interviews and participated in celebrity social events.
If Raila got up to something secretive and under the radar of media and intelligence attention, it will have to await his next volume of memoirs. If, say, he met secretly with a powerful and influential world figures like billionaire and regime-change specialist George Soros, an admirer, then the Joseph Kinuthias of this world will feel mightily vindicated, both here and in the Diaspora, in the fullness of time.
What is not in doubt is that Raila had some quality time away from the rough-and-tumble dynamics of politics at home for some serious reflection and personal stock-taking. He could well return home this morning a changed man in a number of subtle ways.
He has also almost certainly come to a number of major decision about the way forward for both ODM and Cord, which received a poor report card on their performance as the opposition in Jubilee’s first year in office. Speaking from the APC early in his study tour, Raila gave Jubilee merely a pass for its first year.
He delivered well-researched and well-written lectures and maintained a statesmanlike tone and gravitas throughout, observing, for instance, that the eastern African region will rake in multiple trillions of shillings over the next 10 years from hydrocarbon and other recently-discovered natural resources. This is clearly a near-future which he would like to participate in from a position of presidential power and influence.
Towards the end of the US tour, he told an interviewer that he had not yet made up his mind about a fourth stab at the presidency, which would also be his third consecutive one, in 2017.
His homecoming from the US today will be easily one of the highlights of the political year. And he could well have a surprise or two for both his followers and those of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, both pleasant and not.
- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-169269/what-has-raila-been#sthash.TZHqCXer.dpuf
www.doitadigital.com