It is now three months since the National Accord and Reconciliation Agreement mediated by former United Nations Secretary-General Dr Kofi Annan was signed.
But Kenyans are still savoring and expressing their relief over the restoration of peace.
People tell me they feel a great sense of reassurance when they see President Kibaki and myself working together to build a new Kenya.
Never has the value of peace been so resonantly and keenly felt by a people who had enjoyed an essentially violence-free past until the results of the disputed election were announced.
Every one of us must do everything possible to ensure that this peace holds, and is made sustainable. The burden of that responsibility falls first and foremost on the Coalition Government and Members of Parliament.
We must work closely together to speedily address people’s most urgent and compelling concerns, and create the new laws and reforms that will entrench democracy, good governance, the rule of law and the enhancement of an ethical and equitable Public Service.
While we are rightly proud of having constructed Africa’s first ever Grand Coalition Government as a way to bring a halt to post-election violence and division, the fact remains that it is a novel experiment in which both coalition partners and Members of Parliament are trying to figure out how to do things the right way.
How to agree within the Coalition Government on the best way to resettle the displaced was the first major challenge.
Right now there is an intense and passionate debate about the large number of Kenyans being held merely for taking to the streets to demonstrate their fury over the disputed election results.
And within both main parties, backbenchers who enjoy the enshrined right of opposing government policy are struggling to find a way to exercise that right within the new arrangements.
But despite these and a number of other teething problems, it is clear that we must seize with gusto the opportunity that the Grand Coalition provides.
In doing so, we can finally achieve the reforms that Kenyans so overwhelmingly voted for in 2002 and last year.
As things stood in Parliament following the General Election, neither the Orange Democratic Movement nor the Party of National Unity alliance had the numbers to push through a new Constitution and all the other reforms on its own.
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Together, however, the two parties can entrench in the Constitution democracy and equity so that no Kenyan and no community feel marginalized.
And we must adopt policies, which will drive economic growth to the levels that are needed to effectively address the crises in land, impoverishment and joblessness.
I am committed to doing everything possible to make this Coalition Government succeed.
So even as I stress that Government ministers must support policies that are agreed within the Cabinet, that in no way is meant to stifle debate on issues that are on people’s minds and on which policy has not yet been agreed.
Support for the Grand Coalition Government must not be based on blind faith or coercion.
That is why I have publicly called for the speedy resolution of issues surrounding post-election violence, as a means of ensuring that the restored peace we enjoy is not undermined by the pursuit of short-term measures.
At the same time, as Prime Minister I am in regular touch with President Kibaki and ministers to influence both policy and actions that I believe will heal wounds and promote reconciliation.
Some of these discussions must necessarily be conducted in private, but other issues can be handled publicly.
For example, I will be shortly visiting with the relevant ministers the vital Mau Forest, which is one of the nation’s water towers, to see for myself how an amicable settlement to the problems afflicting the communities there can be quickly arrived at.
Similarly, even as I have stated my concern about the impact the formation of a Grand Opposition in Parliament might have on our overall goals, I am committed to respecting the right of backbenchers to organize themselves in ways which will enable them to exercise their hallowed right to be the watchdogs of the people and oppose government policies they consider inimical.
As someone who has spent so many years in opposition fighting for people’s rights, no one should imagine that I would ever allow that fundamental democratic right to be abridged.
The writer is the Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya
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Friday, May 23, 2008
Democracy, reforms can end fear of instability
Monday, April 14, 2008
Profile: Kenya's new PM Raila Odinga
Odinga was born in January 1945, in Maseno, Nyanza Province of Kenya, the second son of nine children of the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, who was Kenya's vice-president and doyen of opposition, and Mama Mary Emma Odinga.
Odinga was, until November 2005, minister of roads and public works and housing.
Odinga contested for the 2007 presidency and came "second" to the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, but Odinga refused to accept the result, accusing Kibabi of winning the race by rigging.
He is commonly called by his first name, "Raila," due to an interesting coincidence: he was an MP together with his father in the Kenyan parliament for a while, and is currently an MP together with his brother, Oburu Odinga, in the same parliament.
Odinga was educated in former East Germany and spent six years in solitary confinement for his alleged involvement in a 1982 coup that failed to topple the president of the day, Daniel arap Moi.
Later, Odinga was rehabilitated. Enriched by his family's molasses business, he helped to defeat Moi in the presidential election of 2002, this time by throwing his support behind a coalition led by Mwai Kibaki.
As a prominent and successful businessman, who runs the engineering firm Spectra International, he is experienced in global corporate practices and says he intends to inject this knowledge into his administration to reconstruct Kenya's economy.
Odinga has taught in Kenyan universities and held various positions both in the government and private sector.
Odinga has also attended courses at the British Standards Institution in London, Washington D.C., and the University of Denver, Colorado. In addition, he authored several publications both technical and political.
He grew up within the tradition of struggle, which has consistently stood for the complete liberation of the Kenyan people -- where freedom would form the cornerstone of Kenyan society.
In the dark days of political repression in Kenya, Odinga was detained three times without trial for a total period of eight years. In 1991 at the height of the struggle for democratic change, he had to briefly seek asylum in Norway in order to escape a fourth detention.
After the re-introduction of multi-party politics, Odinga vied for the Lang'ata seat, a multi-ethnic constituency within Nairobi city and won with a wide majority on a FORD-Kenya ticket.
Following disagreements within the leadership of the party, in December 1996, he resigned from both FORD-Kenya and parliament, and joined the National Development Party of Kenya (NDP). He contested the ensuing by-election in his former constituency on an NDP ticket in March 1997, and retained the seat.
Raila was elected leader of the NDP, and was the party's presidential candidate in the 1997 general election, coming third in a field of 15 candidates.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Man Who Would Be President
Andrew Ehrenkranz and Silvia Spring (Newsweek)
Most Kenyans can only wish they were as confident about the future as Raila Odinga appears to be. Amid the violent ethnic unrest that has killed more than 600 people in the past three weeks, the 62-year-old opposition leader seems positive that he--not Kenya's incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki--will ultimately prove to have won the country's disputed Dec. 27 elections.
"Part of the vote was for me," Odinga told NEWSWEEK last week over a home-cooked breakfast of steaming porridge and hot tea. "But part of it was against Kibaki, because he failed to unite the country. That is what I am going to do." He left the table and strolled through his sprawling Nairobi house, weighing the errors of Kibaki and his regime: "You know what the Somalis say? 'Never mistake a lion for a cat that's been rained on.' I think they mistook me for a wet cat."
Kenyans are increasingly fearful of the damage a prolonged battle for the presidency might do to their lives and their livelihoods. Odinga has vowed he's in this for "the long haul," and he's a born fighter, descended from a family of great warriors and kings. His great-grandfather became a legend in the Luo tribe for killing an elephant single-handed, and the spear the old man used now hangs proudly in a family collection. Odinga's father, a prosperous businessman and an outspoken leader in Kenya's independence movement, was the country's first vice president until he quit the government and launched an opposition party. "I've been in politics since birth," says Odinga--whose mother, as it happens, belonged to the Alego clan, just like the father of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama.
But Odinga's formative years gave him another crucial advantage: an ability to think outside the bounds of Kenya's tribal politics. He left home at 15 to attend school in East Germany and eventually returned to Kenya with a master's degree in mechanical engineering and experience of life on both sides of the Berlin Wall. His Kenyan passport allowed him to pass freely through Checkpoint Charlie, and his friends in the communist East would send him to bring back fancy watches, TVs and other forbidden luxuries from the West. He served as a translator when Louis Armstrong visited the country on an Iron Curtain tour in 1965. And yet a speech by Fidel Castro impressed Odinga so much that years later he would name his firstborn son after the Cuban dictator. "I've lived in both sides of the world," says Odinga. "I'm better placed than most people who only hear about these things in books." (Today he owns five cars, including a pearl gray Jaguar and a ruby red Hummer.)
He got to know still other sides of the world after he came back to Kenya in 1970. He shuttled between government posts and the opposition, all the while remaining a close friend to Kibaki. Odinga's life changed again in 1982, when he was jailed for nearly a decade for his alleged role in a coup plot against Kenya's then dictator, Daniel Arap Moi.
Odinga talked about those years at breakfast last week. The government sent him from one prison to another. One was in the middle of a game preserve, where an escapee would have no hope against the predators of the savannah. In another he spent weeks on end in solitary confinement. His mother died in 1984, and his guards didn't tell him until two months later. He went on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration, and at night he yelled, to let his fellow prisoners know he was still alive. "I intended for everyone to hear," he says. "I didn't want to die like a dog in there."
That kaleidoscopic past helps explain Odinga's massive popularity. Unlike many African politicians, he doesn't pander to narrow tribal interests. Instead he has aggressively courted--and won--support among all of Kenya's 40-odd tribes, visiting them, listening to their concerns and working to build a sense of national identity, beyond local and ethnic loyalties. His entourage is filled with bodyguards, drivers, cooks and cleaners across the tribal spectrum. His communications director is a member of Kibaki's dominant Kikuyu tribe, as are several prominent business leaders who have pledged long-term support.
His agenda aside, Odinga has electric charisma. "He's not so eloquent," says Naji Balalla, one of Odinga's senior advisers (a Muslim). "But he doesn't have to be. He just walks into a room and looks at you and people go crazy."
That flexibility was on display recently in Nairobi, where NEWSWEEK caught up with Odinga. It began on a Sunday when Raila appeared at the Jesus is Alive Ministries before a rapturous crowd of about 2,000 worshippers. "Kenyans saw the blatant rigging of an election," he intoned in a rolling cadence that perfectly matched the religious fervor of the crowd. "Somebody has stolen your cow. How are you going to talk to that person?" As the crowd swelled to cheer him on, the bishop draped Odinga in a white shawl, anointed his head with oil to rapturous applause and called him "president."
Still, the ongoing crisis isn't helping Odinga's popularity outside his party. Immediately after the election he attracted a vast wave of support, but U.S. officials in Kenya, unwilling to be named on such a sensitive topic, tell NEWSWEEK that the surge has ebbed since then, and they now believe that the election itself was too close to call. At this point there's considerable skepticism that Odinga can do anything more than work out a feeble power-sharing deal with Kibaki--a far cry from the vehement recount demands of early January. Odinga still visibly believes in Kenya's momentum for change. Somehow he needs to revive Kenya's faith in itself.
