Raila embraced the rights of citizenship and also its duties.
By Kennedy Buhere
Most of those who have paid tributes to the former Prime Minister, Raila Amollo Odinga, who was interred two weeks ago, hailed his lifelong commitment to freedom, to freedom of thought, speech and action of the individual.
He fought against actual and perceived infraction of the state, of the government on these values. He suffered fighting for them.
Public intellectual, Barack Muluka noted: “Raila is honoured for Constitutional reform in democratic reform in Kenya, culminating in the 2010 Constitution.
By common consent, the fight for democracy, for limited government in the lives of the people was Raila raison d’être, reason for the existence of Raila.
Kenyans from all walks of life—among the ruling class and the commoners alike—paid tribute to Raila’s devotion to freedoms.
However, there is another aspect of Raila that defined his approach to public affairs that nobody talked about in mourning Baba.
Raila fought for the rights of the citizens but without ignoring the concomitant duties that are embedded in the concept of Citizenship. True citizenship pivots on two essential ingredients—that of rights and that of duties.
Unrestrained freedom creates disorder, and eventually anarchy. Raila was apprehensive of anarchy impairing the foundations of society. The preponderance of freedom over duties produces disorder and anarchy.
In other countries, men of his stature and influence have thrown caution to the wind and caused unmitigated tears, blood, suffering and privation in the country.
Raila disdained this path. He held back his ambitions. He was willing to compromise for a larger good.
The word compromise has negative connotations in our political lexicon.
But for a USA statesman, Henry Clay, compromise simply is: “…a work of mutual concession—an agreement in which there are reciprocal stipulations— a work in which, for the sake of peace and concord, one party abates his extreme demands in consideration of an abatement of extreme demands by the other party.”
I believe this idea of compromise is what impelled Raila to join former President the late Mwai Kibaki, in forming the Grand Coalition Government in 2007 in the wake of the post-election violence.
The deal that former US Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered between PNU and ODM helped stop further bloodletting that gripped the country in the aftermath of the election.
A politician with vaulting ambition like Macbeth in William Shakespeare Macbeth, would have let “the blood to flow like a mighty stream,” in a bid to wrest power from the incumbent. Statesmanlike Raila didn’t take that road. But Raila took the road less travelled—the road of the Golden Mean, of compromise—to avert steady the ship of state to avert blood.
Raila was back on this road in the aftermath of the nationwide protest against the Finance Bill 2024. The protest that took an ominous turn after the overrunning of Parliament by Generation Z. Few remember that Raila gave moral support to the movement against Bill—but recoiled when it assumed a totally different goal.
When he did so, he took the wind out of the sails of Gen. Z. He thereby helped to steady the ship of state as Prof. Makau Mutua observed his tribute in a local daily.
That action stopped further bloodletting. The course of the events would have gone one way or the other. But the common thread would have been tears, blood, and destruction of property.
Raila had walked this road before.
He did it earlier, when he joined former President Daniel Moi in the wake of the 1997 General Elections. He had come a distant third in the Presidential Elections. Kibaki came second. Very few can remember that Kibaki mobilised Presidential candidates to challenge Moi victory. However, Raila took the wind from Kibaki’s sails by joining a resolution to work with the Moi government.
There is a presidential candidate in Eastern Africa who found himself in the dilemma of Raila in 1997—being a Presidential Candidate but a dark horse in the race. He caused a lot of bloodletting thereafter. Raila didn’t take this road.
In retrospect, I see Raila as having espoused conservative political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Edmund Burke, and that of the founding Fathers of the USA of the federalist wing—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, not forgetting Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Hamilton in The Federalist Papers No. 70 observes, rooting for a strong but responsible government: “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”
I don’t know whether Raila had read the Federalist Papers. However, Raila tempered his politics with a regard for the claims of the State and government.
He fought the government or the state when it crossed the red line—when it rode roughshod on the legitimate claims and expectations of the citizens.
But when the sense of duty, of obligation, of citizenship had been loosened, he stood as bulwark for the state—not to crush the rights of the citizens, but when the sense of citizenship had gone down the drain.
When the bonds that hold society together snaps, you have anarchy, you have hell. A US General William Tecumseh Sherman told us: “war is hell.” For two We saw a glimpse of hell in the aftermath of the 2007 General election.
It is that hell that Raila sought to avert by agreeing to join the Grand Coalition Government, which former MP for Budalang’I nicknamed Nusu Mkate government at a Funeral Service at a Bungoma MP, the late Joseph Khaoya.
Raila was without any shadow of doubt, an enigmatic leader. Part of his enigma was because of this seeming ambivalence. Embracing freedom, the rights of the citizens and at the same time, embracing their duties.
Very few leaders attain this stature, this father figure in the eyes of his people or the institution he led.
John Gardner decries, in his book, On Leadership, the tendency of followers to look up to their leader through the lens of a father figure.
But on this one, I don’t agree with him.
People are always looking for guidance, for direction, for mentorship, for meaning. The environment is far too complex, too meaningless, too intimidating for them to face.
These people will give way, they will stand at attention before anybody with the courage, vision and intelligence, to face danger, and cut through the complexities of life and the environment.
The more confident the person, the more the followers defer to him. The more helpless they are in the face of the complexity of life, the more loyal they are to the leader.
English Historian Thomas Carlyle called such leaders hero leaders in his book, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History.
“A hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and the Omega of his whole heroism, that he looks through the shows of things into things,” Carlyle notes.
No doubt, Raila met this view of hero in life and in death. A discerning eye can see, in Raila political life, certain periods, certain occasions, when it can be said that ‘he looked through the shows of things into things’ thereby galvanising his followers to follow him