Last weekend, Embakasi East MP Babu Owino made a whirlwind tour of Kisumu county, causing quite some excitement among residents who gave the vocal city legislator a triumphant welcome.
Social media commentators immediately went gaga with overenthusiastic forecasts of the emergence of a new community kingpin after the enigmatic Raila Odinga.
First, we acknowledge that being a region generally embracing regular political activity, the absence of Raila from the scene, or indeed, the absence of rallies, leaves room for excitement around any political action, however insignificant. This is not to say Babu’s excursions into Luo heartland are insignificant in any way.
Raila is undertaking shuttle diplomacy targeting the African Union Commission chairmanship, but he hasn’t said he’d abandon Kenyan politics or ODM.
At face value, the Embakasi legislator appears to be making a stab at the community’s leadership by raising the stakes and ensuring he will be at the table in any post-Raila settlement. But the amorphous title of Luo kingpin is not elective, suggesting the person who ultimately occupies Raila’s revered place in the community will have to do it within a political party framework.
Babu is not an ODM party official. And within the party, chairman John Mbadi as National Assembly Minority leader, and party secretary for political affairs Opiyo Wandayi rank higher as regional party leaders.
I suspect it is for the latter reason the former university student leader has opted to go straight to the people. In a way, Babu’s methods remind me exactly of the Raila Odinga of younger days.
From studying the Raila brand of politics over decades, it is safe to say that whenever the ODM leader has felt his interests were no longer served by a political party, he went back to the people and got the requisite validation to his moving on. The most lethal example remains his departure from [the late] Wamalwa Kijana’s Ford Kenya in late 1996, with devastating effect on the former Jaramogi party.
Babu’s moves are indicative of emerging new alignments within the ODM party. He has already been closely identified with deputy party leader Wycliffe Oparanya, who was the former Kakamega governor, and with former Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho’s faction.
Their formation seems to have heeded the common saying that power is not given, but taken. Joho, after a long hiatus, has returned to active political duty, and is visible across the country on party affairs. The danger, though, is that this faction may dance itself lame before the ball starts.
There is a delicate balancing act for those who assume the Raila succession is a factor of his possible election to the AUC as its chairman. Unlike, for instance, the Ford Kenya succession following the death of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga in 1994, in the event Raila actually clinches the position and moves to Addis Ababa, he will still be able to pull the strings within his party.
This is where those who salivate for his position have to be careful not to antagonise him, especially when he asks top leaders of his party to avoid scrambling for non-vacant positions.
You have to sympathise with those in ODM who have ambitions to succeed Raila but have to play it safe by keeping their intentions quiet to avoid looking disloyal. It’s known in the cultural realm as “inheriting the widow while the husband is still alive”. Unfortunately for this variety, the braver ones like Babu will be way ahead in their campaigns before the coast is clear for those awaiting a signal from the party chief himself.
It is not just within ODM that exciting things are happening. Take the case of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. He arrived in government in 2022 as the cantankerous, no-holds-barred Ruto attack dog and regime gadfly. He promised government enemies bad things, and behaved as though he was the messiah who had come to liberate the Mt Kenya region, with incessant attacks on the Kenyatta family and all regional aristocrats.
But Gachagua has been confronted by reality and has mellowed considerably. He has not only apologised to the matriarch of the Kenyatta family, Mama Ngina Kenyatta, but has gone ahead to declare brotherhood with former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Last weekend, during a function in Mbeere, Embu county, Gachagua shocked the nation by declaring he had become a proponent of the one man, one vote, one shilling revenue-sharing formula. He had bitterly opposed it when proposed by Uhuru and Raila in the Building Bridges Initiative.
It is clear that Gachagua’s Damascus moment revolved around triple issues. First, the rise of Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi as a more respected Ruto ally in government and possible alternative running mate in 2027. Second, the emergence of young leaders in Mt Kenya who appear to be Ruto’s blue-eyed boys. Third, the disenchantment within the region’s population over the regime’s economic policies.
It is difficult to find sympathy for the DP. His divisive rhetoric in the early days of the regime sometimes bordered on the bizarre. If it was up to me, I would encourage Ruto to shove Gachagua aside very rudely in 2027 and opt for Mudavadi, who would bring a little more unity and credibility to the ticket.
Speaking of Mudavadi, let us not forget that Western Kenya is not spared these realignments. Reports have it that National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula’s refusal to dissolve his party to join a proposed larger Kenya Kwanza, has irked regime insiders in no small way. And this has coincided with a vicious political war being waged against the former Bungoma Senator by Trans Nzoia Governor George Natembeya.
The latter’s attacks on the Speaker not only sound personal and angry, but the rallies at which the anti-Wetang’ula epithets are hurled appear well attended, very well coordinated and obviously enjoying the support of some higher offices. I do not want to be the prophet of doom by suggesting that Wetang’ula’s wings are being clipped by the same Kenya Kwanza government he supports, but if it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it has to be a duck!
I am excited by all these moves and ambition-fuelled emerging bouts of friendships and enmities. This is largely because I still feel the issues around which the current ruling coalition were formed, the us-versus-them brand of politics, was too divisive to be sustained.
I am persuaded that before the next elections, there will emerge a breed of young leaders with a more nationalistic agenda beyond tribes. In addition, the unfortunate experiment in which two populous regions mobilised around the politics of hate, to take power, will meet their Waterloo. That will happen when those two regions either fall out, or a new, possibly better experiment will emerge in their place.
In fact, I detest the Kenya Kwanza regime so much that whenever there are reports of internal fights, I begin to hope that like Kilkenny cats, they will tear each other to small political pieces on whose destruction a more equal and just country can emerge.
In the meantime, for a country where every day is campaign time, the new realignments offer exciting comical breaks from our myriad challenges, mostly caused by the power wielders.