Journalist and political publicist Sarah Elderkin declares in an article for the Weekend Star’s Siasa pullout headlined ‘Forgery and Propaganda’ (March 17-18, 2012) that “Many of the world’s greatest leaders have done as Raila Odinga did”. Believe it or not, she is talking about Raila’s activities, attitude and selected utterances during the post-election violence (PEV) of 2007-08. She is in fact disputing Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta’s recent description of Raila as reckless in his utterances.
Just before making this astounding remark, Elderkin asks: “Or are you saying that Gandhi was reckless? Are you saying that Martin Luther King was reckless? Are you saying that Aung San Suu Kyi is reckless? Would you demand that they also be hauled before the ICC because of their repeated calls for peaceful mass action?”
Only Elderkin would place the Prime Minister on the same pedestal as these three great exponents of non-violent democratic protest and do so with a straight face.
Ms. Elderkin’s recent series of writings on behalf of Raila, in which she defends her publicity and PR client to the hilt but brutally and wantonly character-assassinates anyone she perceives as standing in his path to the post-Mwai Kibaki presidency, including, bizarrely, the now long-dead Vice President Michael Kijana Wamalwa, would be laughable if it were not so serially petty and pathetic.
Elderkin has Raila spewing the word “peace” like a benediction at the height of the PEV, including when he meets delegations of eminent men and women who came to Kenya’s rescue: “In meetings with the visiting Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Desmond Tutu and Graca Machel of South Africa, Sir Ketumile Masire of Botswana, Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, Joacquim Chissano of Mozambique and other African leaders, Raila Odinga repeated the mantra of peaceful mass action – peace, peace, peace”.
Unfortunately for both Elderkin and her Number One publicity client, the events of the PEV are not something lost in the mists of history, they happened barely four years ago and in the full glare of digital media. If Raila was dispensing declarations of peace so benevolently, so constantly and in so many different directions at the height of the PEV, what, then, was afflicting at least 650,000 Kenyans who were uprooted from their farms in the Rift Valley in barely a week in one of history’s biggest and swiftest evictions of a population outside of wartime? Were they fleeing from their own shadows, were they merely hallucinating?
The writer is a political commentator
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