The Promise Raila Will Never Keep: Can We Really Change Kenyan Politics?

Kenyans from all tribes and communities really appreciate the leading role played by leading Kenyan politician, one Raila son of Jaramogi Odinga in exposing the Mwai Kibaki government for what it really is. A fraudulent administration based on little else but lies.

This is a government that lies about corruption, about a new constitution, about taped evidence, about the economy, about its' true intentions and now wants even to fraudulently re-write history by erasing known facts and replacing them with lies and propaganda. But isn't that what Kenyan politics has always been about?

This is a fact that was recently clearly demonstrated when his excellency the President, a man who is respected, if for nothing else then for being the grand dad of a number of grand children, faced the world and told a white lie (albeit while blinking several times). Raila was one of the first to bring up the issue of Kibaki's careless-whispers-sweet-nothings-promises when he was actively seeking to be the united opposition's single presidential candidate in 2002.

Sadly the man who would have been at the forefront of exposing Baba Jimmy (Kibaki's eldest son answers to that name) is now dead. Former VP Michael Kijana Wamalwa however left adequate evidence on tape, and audible tape at that, to the effect that the game plan was for Kibaki, the oldest man in the group to go first and complete his 5 years and then leave the next 5 years to Wamalwa and so on and so forth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth is that what clinched Kibaki's pole position in this arrangement was the fact that the opposition needed to neutralize the massive Kikuyu vote that was destined for Uhuru Kenyatta, and the most effective way of doing that was to also choose a Kikuyu candidate to face the Kanu presidential nominee.

But this article is not about Baba Jimmy (sorry for getting carried away). It is in fact about our hero Raila Odinga.

Kenyans now need to ask themselves some sobering questions about Raila. In his swiftness to rightly judge the president, he should also face up to some very serious broken promises of his own.

Kenyans have conveniently forgotten about the murder of the late foreign minister Dr Robert Ouko and are really not interested in bringing the murderers to book. So the guys who tortured and shot the former minister continue to roam the streets and countryside and are in fact actively seeking to control the outcome of the forthcoming polls. But this is one murder that won't go away.

During the wedding last year of Dr Ouko's daughter to the son of legislator David Musila, Raila in a moment of compassion (widows always have that effect on you, don't they?) promised Christobel Ouko that he would not rest until the killers of her late husband are brought to book. That is one promise Raila has done very little to follow up on. Actually he has done nothing. And information reaching this writer from an impeccable source indicates that there is no way Raila will be able to deliver on this one unless he breaks other serious promises he made in the recent past.

I am informed that when Raila's NDP merged with Moi's Kanu in March 2002, one of the promises Moi made (which he later broke) to Raila was that he would support him to win the presidential nomination for Kanu in the elections later that year. In return Raila solemnly promised that he would never pursue the matter of Dr Ouko's murder. As a further reward, Raila became the joint owner with Moi of the Molasses plant in Kisumu. Yep, the very damned molasses plant that was one of the reasons that led to the gruesome murder of Dr Ouko. What I would call "blood property."

Little wonder that Raila is in the same parliament that had a widely publicized parliamentary select committee investigating the circumstances of Ouko's murder but which never concluded the matter in a manner that would have been satisfactory to the Kenyan people. And this is despite spending a fortune in taxpayer's money where the committee even sat in London. Raila's silence on the issue has been deafening.

This is just one more reason why Kenyans will this time be best advised to seek alternative leadership from a brand new group of personalities who have never previously been to this house of selfish dealmakers and broken promises. The current political elite holding all of us at ransom will call them inexperienced nobodies, but we the voters have the power to turn nobodies into somebodies and that is a message that we must make sure sinks deep into the minds and hearts of the political class this time round.

Meet the man who can give you a dream holiday safari in Kenya.