Why Jaramogi should have become Kenya’s second president

The late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Commonly known as the doyen of Kenyan opposition politics, his death sparked off a fierce leadership wrangle in his Ford-Kenya party. PHOTO/FILE  NATION

By KOIGI WA WAMWERE
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For a long time I have agonised over who should have been the second president of Kenya.

I have hesitated to debate who should have been the first president of Kenya because Kenyatta had almost unanimous local and international support for national leadership.  

Though Kenyatta was hardly perfect and was a dictator, before he assumed power, he was such an icon of freedom and symbol of African struggle for independence along with other African freedom fighters like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere that the position of first president in their country was theirs automatically.  

In Kenya, Oginga Odinga already led the African campaign for the release of Jomo Kenyatta from prison and his assumption of Kenya’s first president.

Of all Kenyan politicians, Odinga was the most committed to the notion that Kenyatta should be the first president and there is no evidence that he ever contemplated challenging him for presidency. 

When it comes to the second president, however, I believe Oginga Odinga should have succeeded Kenyatta, not Daniel Arap Moi. And despite his age, I believe he was also more qualified to be third president of Kenya.  

But one might wonder why raise this matter, which many will consider mute now, when Odinga is dead and nothing can change the fact.

But if we accept that by appointing the less qualified Moi and not the more qualified Odinga to be second president we determined whether the country moved forward or backwards in the next 24 years we can no longer consider the matter mute. If Kenya became a dictatorship and a collapsed economy because of Moi’s presidency, it was because we made a wrong choice of Moi over Odinga. 

ENDURING LEGACY

We also know the fate of Kenya for many years after Kenyatta was not just determined by his presidency, but also by the enduring legacy of his rule.

Today, most likely, Moi’s political disciples President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto are in power because of Moi’s legacy and its support of them into presidency.  

Logically, it follows that, had Kenya picked Oginga Odinga for second president, we may have hard a more democratic regime than we had under Moi, a more developed economy than the collapsed economy we inherited from Moi and certainly, China and Kenya would have become co-operating partners sooner than today.  

While it is probable that Odinga could not have become Kenya’s second president without Kenyatta’s blessings, there are many reasons why he should have succeeded him and Kenya a better and more cohesive society than it is today. 

Oginga Odinga qualified for second presidency of Kenya, not because he was a Luo, but because he was one of the best nationalists that Kenya ever had – together with others like Bildad Kaggia and JM Kariuki, JD Kali, Pio Gama Pinto and others. 

Because Oginga Odinga was nationalist, he was not a tribalist. Instead he fought against negative ethnicity by championing the fight against poverty and liberation of all its victims across the land. And if Odinga had not fallen out with Kenyatta and had become second president of Kenya, like President Nyerere of Tanzania, he would have transformed Kenya into a country and society not consumed by negative ethnicity as it is today.

Odinga best demonstrated his nationalism by fighting hardest for the release of Jomo Kenyatta, who was not a Luo like him but a Kikuyu and also for his becoming the first president of Kenya. 

And while Odinga fought for the release of Kenyatta when neither Tom Mboya nor any Kikuyu leader could stand up for Kenyatta without provoking the ire of European settlers, Odinga continued to regard Kenyatta as his freedom hero even after they had fallen out and Kenyatta had detained him without charge or trial for two years.

To the disbelief of many, Odinga hung Kenyatta’s portrait on the wall of his Kisumu home, together with portraits of great freedom fighters like Nyerere, Nkrumah and Abdi Nasser of Egypt. When asked why he would give Kenyatta this honour, he said he had no power to revise history and deny that Kenyatta fought and suffered for the freedom of Kenya.

While he disagreed with President Kenyatta, Jomo the freedom fighter would always be his hero. Only a man with as big a heart as Oginga Odinga deserved to be the second president. 

Odinga also qualified for second presidency because he was one of the few politicians whose politics was driven by ideology rather than personal whims and by a vision that would have been a compass by which he would have led the ship of State. 

While capitalism ravaged and impoverished Kenya, Odinga’s socialism would have raised Kenya to the levels of Chinese or Scandinavian development. And while some will deny this possibility, the extent of Kenya’s poverty can never compare with the wealth of our tiny elite.   

If Jaramogi never became the second president of Kenya, it is not because he did not qualify but because Kenyatta did not reciprocate the loyalty that Odinga had demonstrated for him. Had Kenyatta supported Odinga the way Odinga had supported him, Odinga would easily succeeded him.  

Odinga should have become second president of Kenya because he was more qualified than Moi. Despite the hell I suffered at the hands of President Moi, I have no personal grudge against him. It is, therefore, for no personal grudge that I say that between Odinga and Moi, Odinga qualified for the job many times more.

In fact, on account of his unparalleled courage and admission of Kenyan leaders’ failure to take Kenya to the Promised Land, at the time of Kenyatta’s death, no other Kenyan leader qualified more for second.  

All other qualifications apart, Odinga also qualified because he was also a Pan-Africanist along with Nyerere and Nkrumah that would have united Kenya with the rest of Africa.  

Finally, to use the words of Johnny Carson that choices have consequences, our choices of Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki and Uhuru all have consequences that explain what Kenya is today – a land of unending calamities of terrorism, hunger, road carnage, corruption, negative ethnicity and death of the national soul.

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