Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga should be commended for declining calls from within the National Super Alliance to be sworn in as the “People’s President” on the same day and time in Nairobi as President Uhuru Kenyatta’s second Inauguration.
Raila is reported to have told his supporters to keep an eye out for his international image.
When he spent three months in the US in 2014 at the African Presidential Centre at Boston University, the director of the Centre defended Raila’s invitation as being to a “statesman and a representative of the democratisation trend in Africa”.
Ambassador Charles Stith, director of the Centre, was responding to Jubilee critics of Raila’s lengthy tour of the US. Stith is a former US envoy to Tanzania.
In declining to be sworn in Raila also cited his adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law.
This gesture and these considerations could well be a turning point in the continuing political impasse.
It is to be hoped that Jubilee appreciates this and makes its own reconciliatory overture.
