Raila will enter Guinness World Records for losing political allies

Raila Odinga is vying to enter the Guinness World Records as the most frequently deserted political leader in world history.

The resignation of his erstwhile foremost sycophant, Mr Ababu Namwamba, as secretary-general of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is but a harbinger of his impending desertion of Mr Odinga. This desertion must give the ODM leader pause and sufficient cause for introspection.

After publicly swearing fealty to Mr Odinga in Parliament by referring to him as President even in the absence of legal proof of such by way of a declaration of election or administration of oath by a competent authority, Mr Namwamba quickly militarised himself in the army of sycophants and became an overnight general.

When Mr Namwamba, who had just been elected the party's secretary-general in a frank democratic exercise in 2014, was showing leadership as chairman of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee by rejecting bribes offered by corrupt officials in the security sector, nobody came to his rescue. Not even the party's leader. He was hung out to dry with his own mixtape of party members confessing to bribe-taking.

If this was a marriage, the actions and inactions of Mr Odinga were grounds enough for divorce since they appear to be more serious than cruelty and unreasonableness.

Mr Namwamba and Funyula MP Paul Otwoma, who was the ODM vice chairman, will not be the first political leaders to separate from Mr Odinga. His legendary political cruelty and neglect of his allies led to the departure of five members of ODM’s Pentagon team.

Hot on the heels of Mr Odinga’s stolen victory in 2007 in which he had polled 4,353,993 votes, Mr Odinga suspended Mr William Ruto from his position as Cabinet minister over the phantom maize subsidies importation scandal. Given that Mr Ruto had negotiated for Mr Odinga to become Prime Minister in the aftermath of the election crisis, this act of betrayal was only comparable to shameless adultery. Mr Odinga’s cruelty to another Pentagon member, Mr Najib Balala, was apparent when he sacked him as Tourism minister for demanding internal democracy in ODM.

FEND OFF

Mr Odinga refused to fend off attacks against ODM leader Musalia Mudavadi when the latter was under siege over the cemetery land scandal as Local Government minister. Mr Mudavadi later resigned his position in the Cabinet and left ODM for lack of internal democracy.

Even though two other Pentagon members held on to the end of December 2012, Mr Odinga’s serial political infidelity was impossible to ignore. He had secretly courted and embraced Pentagon member Charity Ngilu’s mortal political enemy and put him on the presidential ticket, thus leaving her no option but to leave. The last Pentagon member to leave, Mr Joseph Nyaga, was the last to leave seeing that the ship was sinking. Thus, when Uhuru Kenyatta was trebling his 2002 election presidential from the paltry 1,835,890 to 6,173,433, Mr Odinga was inching only to 5,340,546 in 2013.

Lack of internal democracy is the single thread running through all the departures from ODM. It is like a person divorced because they are short. Although lack of sufficient height is a congenital shortcoming, it becomes more noticeable when there is competition. The greatest political leap Mr Odinga has ever made in numbers terms was when he pole-vaulted from 667,886 votes as the NDP presidential candidate in 1997 to 4,352,993 votes in 2007.

With the exodus from his party beginning a full year before the August 8, 2017 election, his congenital issues with internal democracy will only be magnified as more eligible personages pass by the ODM.

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