Raila Odinga: Why I ditched Manchester United
What you need to know:
- Mr Odinga may have been referring to the 1971 season when the English giants were penalised for crowd trouble.
That year, Manchester United were forced to play at their perennial rivals Liverpool home tuff and Stoke City, after fans had thrown knives into the away section the previous season.
The ban wasn’t for a whole year though.
National Super Alliance presidential candidate Raila Odinga was once a Manchester United fan.
Then he quit.
Mr Odinga, who is known to include football metaphors in his rally talk, argues he left backing the 20-time English Champions because their fans had turned violent.
“For a whole year, Manchester United was playing without fans in the stadium,” he told Radio Maisha on Tuesday morning.
“That is when I moved to support Arsenal. Since that time, I never left Arsenal.”
Mr Odinga, who played for Luo Union football club (later known as Re-Union FC), may have been referring to the 1971 season when the English giants were penalised for crowd trouble.
That year, Manchester United were forced to play at their perennial rivals Liverpool's home tuff and Stoke City, after fans had thrown knives into the away section the previous season.
The ban wasn’t for a whole year, though.
ARSENAL
But Mr Odinga’s journey to supporting Arsenal is longer than that.
From playing for his community club back in the 60s, Mr Odinga, who spent time in the then East Germany studying engineering, says he was once a diehard follower of Hannover 96, erstwhile Bundesliga champions now playing in the lower division of Germany’s league.
Mr Odinga has indicated he studied at the Herder Institut, part of the University of Leipzig in the then East Germany. Later, he went to the Technical School of Magdeburg (today’s Otto-Von Guericke University Magdeburg). He was by then supporting Bayern Munich.
He says he ended up supporting Liverpool initially before jumping to Manchester United. But violence forced him to move on to Arsenal.
Yet Raila’s football sojourn is very much a reflection of his political career.
CHAOS
In the interview, he argued football used to be a nice game to watch because officials were fair, no one hurled stones after the match and players could remain friends despite the results.
"Politics is like football. During colonial times, referees were white and linesmen were Asians. And there was no chaos in football. Those who won could shake hands with losers and the game ends there,” he said.
“Chaos started when we started appointing our people as officials and they started to side with one team against another. You could find one team gets awarded a penalty that didn’t exist.
“There was one time, I remember, a team got three dubious penalties. It was chasing the game and it was only five minutes remaining.”
He refused to name the team that benefited from this partial officiating, but he argued the same can be said of politics.
FORD
The four-time presidential contender is vying for State House in the August elections on an ODM ticket, endorsed by the Nasa coalition.
The alliance brings together his ODM party, the Wiper Democratic Movement, Amani National Congress, Ford Kenya and Chama Cha Mashinani.
Mr Odinga joined politics on the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (Ford), then led by his father and Kenya’s first vice-president Oginga Odinga.
He would later be part of Ford-Kenya after the original Ford splintered.
NARC
He would later form the National Development Party (NDP) after he disagreed with former Vice President Kijana Wamalwa on how to run Ford Kenya.
NDP would merge with Kanu in a short-lived marriage that saw Mr Odinga join Daniel arap Moi’s government.
Ahead of the 2002 General Election, Mr Odinga left Kanu to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which would later be a part of the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) that brought to power Mwai Kibaki.
But Mr Odinga would form ODM after the 2005 constitutional referendum that saw the government embarrassed in a defeat masterminded by Mr Odinga’s “NO” team.
