Power without responsibility: Why Raila can’t resist the call of the streets

In April 2009, Raila Odinga erupted in the ‘Mother of all rages’ when he alighted upon the coastal city of Mombasa to a reception that fell far below the standard befitting the status he had become accustomed to, as the prime minister.

That eruption is significant for two reasons. In the heat of his rage, Odinga let it be known that the contemptuous disregard demonstrated to him by civil servants was directed from higher up. As such, Odinga biliously asserted that ‘thieves’ must respect the ‘owners’ of power. 

One year into the Grand Coalition Government, established under the National Accord and Reconciliation Act, which installed Odinga as Prime Minister and President Kibaki’s putative co-equal in the executive, Odinga still would not acknowledge that Kibaki was duly elected in 2007. 

Serena talks 

The Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Process, colloquially known as the Serena talks, began on a most acrimonious footing.

Mwai Kibaki intransigently demanded that Odinga recognise his legitimate governing mandate as a precondition to any discussions. 

Equally obdurately, Odinga insisted upon the vacation of office by Kibaki and the declaration that he won the election, as the condition sine qua non for any negotiation.

Ultimately, the National Accord was entrenched into the Constitution, and the anomalous and utterly kaleidoscopic political-executive carnival by way of the nusu mkate regime came to pass. 

Kibaki never again mentioned the question of being duly elected or the legitimacy of Odinga’s claims and all that. Odinga was not as gracious.

The other telling dimension of Odinga’s Mombasa ‘nusu kapet’ eruption was this paradoxical juxtaposition of the disparate travails of the two ODMs: here was the prime minister cacophonously litigating prestigious appurtenances and luxurious accessories of the most trifling order to enhance his performative stature in government, while, at the same time, the lowliest, yet often the most committed and selfless members of his campaign had been abandoned to their own devices.

It is a notorious fact that by 2010, ODM campaign agents were still mobilising to agitate on the sidelines of public functions in order to press their demands for compensation. 

As far as I know, many gave up and moved on. This precedent has been replicated in subsequent general elections and, together with shambolic nominations, comprises a fundamental component of the ODM campaign canon.

Accordingly, ODM waged the 2022 General Election and, despite, or perhaps on account of the merger with the Azimio circus, managed to exceed its already extravagant superlatives in campaign mismanagement. 

The nominations were such tempestuous chaos that they effectively suppressed ODM’s support and voter turn-out in its strongholds.

Results portal 

On election day, the IEBC opened up the results portal to public access, enabling the country and the world to follow the vote tallies from the polling stations sequentially as they were transmitted. 

Every voter had the power to compare what transpired at their polling station, the final decider of an election, and what was reflected in the portal. The Kenya Kwanza campaign had its parallel tallying mechanism, where agents submitted their final reports before demobilising, and whose computations were used to compare and verify IEBC’s outputs. 

IEBC’s policy to post returns to the portal not only took electoral transparency and credibility to full conformity with the Constitution, but it also exposed Azimio by pre-emptively retiring the traditional basis post-election agitation.

That is why the petition before the Supreme Court stood no chance, and why this season’s edition of maandamano has been woefully bereft of mobilising grievances. 

This time around, many of Odinga’s close associates have been forthcoming with credible disclosures of the causes of his defeat.

Some have gone so far as to postulate that the President did not win the election so much as Odinga lost it. Saitabao ole Kanchory, Odinga’s chief agent in the election, has documented his account, and it faithfully confirms the notorious consensus that Odinga fell victim to corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, hubris, entitlement and a basic lack of seriousness all around. 

Spurious claims 

What Odinga understands about situations like this is that it does not matter whether one wins or loses an election, if one can sufficiently mobilise adequate extra-legal leverage, necessitating the formulation of extra-constitutional mechanisms to accommodate spurious claims for power sharing.

This understanding is the origin of Odinga’s acute political allergy to legitimate institutions and, in fact, to the Constitution itself, at this phase of his agitation: the Constitution needs amendment, hence BBI and the IEBC are illegitimate without the Cherera Four, while the Supreme Court is jurisprudentially deficient insofar it keeps disaffirming his propositions. 

Only the streets will do, and only if the chaos and violence emanating from constitutionally protected demonstrations is of such a magnitude that normal life is no longer conceivable. Because this terrible policy has been lavishly rewarded in the past, Odinga prefers it to serious campaigning and legitimate accession to executive authority.

Both serious campaigning and formal authority entail too much work. Handshakes, on the other hand, are a shortcut to power without responsibility and authority without accountability. 

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.