In
The Flame of Freedom, his autobiography
to be launched in Nairobi on Sunday at the KICC, Mr Odinga paints a
picture of five years of torment at the hands of his Party of National
Unity (PNU) partners. They appeared bent on frustrating and humiliating
the Orange party wing at every turn, from the day the National Accord
was signed in February 2008.
Sources of conflict included the
extent of Mr Odinga’s powers and his position in the government pecking
order, the size and composition of the Cabinet, dealing with the Mungiki
menace and the fight against corruption.
Mr Kibaki fired the
first salvo, apparently meant to show that he was in charge, with a
letter appointing Mr Odinga to the post of Prime Minister, weeks after
the signing of an internationally mediated 50-50 power-sharing deal that
brought an end to the violence that followed the disputed December 2007
presidential election.
“On April 13, 2008, I received a four-page
communication from the Office of the President,” writes Mr Odinga, who
now leads the opposition Cord. “It was dated that day, marked
“Confidential” and, to my amazement, was headed “Letter of Appointment
for the Prime Minister”.
The letter, signed by Mr Kibaki, detailed the PM’s roles and responsibilities. Mr Odinga declined to sign the letter.
“I
was astonished that such a letter could be sent by one Principal to
another in a coalition of equal partners. Under the [National] Accord,
Kibaki and I were in a power-sharing arrangement, and I found it
preposterous for one Principal to purport to be appointing the other,
and to be spelling out his duties,” Mr Odinga says in T
he Flame of Freedom.
But that, according to
Raila’s book,
was just the beginning of what would be a tumultuous political
marriage. The next source of tension was a statement released by then
head of Public Service, Francis Muthaura, indicating the pecking order
in government.
Mr Odinga writes in
The Flame of Freedom, that
the hierarchy placed the President on top with Vice-President Kalonzo
Musyoka second. Mr Musyoka of ODM-Kenya (now Wiper) was a distant third
in the 2007 presidential election and had joined the PNU side of the
coalition.
“I as PM would be number three, with the title ‘The
Right Honourable’. My coalition partners were apparently determined to
cut me down to size at every turn, but I considered the fact that they
felt compelled to do this showed their fear of the Accord and of the
equal partnership between Kibaki and me under the Grand Coalition
Government,” says Mr Odinga.
Citing the law that recognised him as co-principal, Mr Odinga rejected the pecking order.
The Flame of Freedom details how the weeks that followed were marked with a public display of power intrigues.
Mr
Odinga said the practice of calling him to address public meetings
before the Vice President spoke and then invited the President was meant
to frustrate and humiliate him.
He gives two examples of events
in the Rift Valley in 2009 when he was forced to publicly object to the
practice and insisted that the VP speak first, by inviting him to
address the gathering and then invite the President.
Another was
at a rally in Eldoret: “The organisers had planned a repeat of the
previous day’s slight to me, and called on me to speak before the VP. I
objected, and said the VP should go ahead of me. It became a tense and
ugly public scene when Kibaki intervened and said that, no, I should
speak first.”
In the end, Mr Odinga took to the podium and explained himself, winning the supremacy battle.
“The
President’s men from the outset were determined to pay little more than
lip-service to the power-sharing arrangement spelt out in the Accord,
and the partnership started out on the wrong footing. As the weeks went
by, it seemed that instead of dealing with the bigger issues, we were
increasingly forced to engage in turf wars,” writes Mr Odinga.
CABINET BATTLE
But
it was in the formation of the coalition Cabinet that a full-blown
battle would take place. The National Accord did not specify the size of
the Cabinet, only stating that there would be portfolio balance and
that both sides would share positions on a 50-50 basis.
President
Kibaki had already unilaterally named his “half” of 17 ministers,
meaning the Cabinet size would have to be large enough also to
accommodate 17 ODM appointees. Mr Odinga said his party in fact wanted
the total number capped at 24, but PNU had other ideas. “We were
shocked. Kibaki now wanted 24 posts, which would mean a bloated Cabinet
of 48 ministers.”
But even after agreeing on the Cabinet size, the
two sides started wrangling over who would get plum appointments to
Internal Security, Local Government, Finance, Roads, Foreign Affairs,
Agriculture and Energy dockets.
“Our side argued that, since PNU,
with the President as Commander-in- Chief of the armed forces, would be
taking Defence, ODM should have Internal security as a counter. The OP
was insisting on having Local Government, so we said we wanted Finance,”
he writes.
The endless negotiations caused further anxiety and Mr
Odinga says his side of the coalition had eventually to cede some
ground “in the best interests of the country”.
Mr Odinga says,
“PNU had also begun under-the-table negotiations with several of my
Pentagon [ODM top leadership] members, making them offers they were
finding difficult to refuse, and some were even beginning to soften.
Najib Balala came to me to plead that we should take the deal and move
on. The others, [Musalia] Mudavadi, [William] Ruto, Charity Ngilu and
Joe Nyagah, were likewise not averse to making a deal.”
At a point
in the course of the negotiations, Mr Kibaki asked everyone else to
leave the room at State Lodge, Sagana, where discussions were taking
place, and leave him alone with the PM.
Mr Odinga recalls
President Kibaki saying that, having spent many years at the Treasury,
he was the de facto Finance minister and wanted to retain the docket,
which was supposed to go to ODM for “balance”.
Mr Odinga writes:
“Kibaki put all this in a way that made it difficult to say no. Here was
an old man, practically on his knees. So I said I understood, but in
that case, ODM should get Local Government.”
Mr Odinga says
instead of being treated as an equal partner, he was increasingly being
regarded as the “head prefect”. He also thinks the Cabinet was “too
large and too unwieldy to transact any business efficiently”.
The Flame of Freedom
lends credence to the belief that ODM ministers were being undermined
by PNU-leaning Permanent Secretaries (a position since renamed Principal
Secretary).
“Certain crucial projects that would have promoted
ODM’s image were being sabotaged. These instructions were coming from
the Office of the President. I received continual complaints from the
agriculture, lands, water, immigration, local government and roads
ministries. In health services, Minister Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o went as
far as demanding the replacement of his PS.”
The former PM also
accuses the Treasury of delaying project funds and Mr Muthaura of
bypassing the PM’s office to issue directives on behalf of the President
to Cabinet ministers on how to perform their functions. He says he
initially raised the issues with President Kibaki, but the frequency of
their one-on-one meetings began decreasing as part of the obstacles
placed before him.
Mr Odinga says he did not want to be a
lame-duck PM and he consulted widely on his role. “In (2008) July, I was
invited to visit the UK by the British PM, Gordon Brown, and one
department we visited there was the PM’s Delivery Unit.” Some of Mr
Odinga’s staff subsequently went to the Unit for training.
Mr
Odinga says his vision for the PM’s office was that it should play the
role of “catalyst in injecting efficiency into management of the
government, so that it could deliver on its campaign promises”.
He
describes how “People in the OP were initially resistant. They mistook
my enthusiasm concerning change and positive development for an attempt
to duplicate government activities and ‘take over’.”
The former PM
says he found President Kibaki “stiff and unresponsive” when he went to
discuss the strategic plan for his office. “I knew Kibaki from working
with him previously and I understood that pressing him further would be
futile. So I told him I was going to get the staff from his office to
work with my people to revise the draft.”
HOSTILE RECEPTION
Mr
Odinga also says in his book, that his pledge to dialogue with the
Mungiki sect soon after being sworn in as PM received a hostile
reception from Mr Kibaki’s side. He describes a meeting with the
President in the OP soon afterwards as a tense affair, with Mr Kibaki
clearly angry at his decision.
The ex-PM says he had raised
questions about the alleged extrajudicial killings by police of
suspected Mungiki members and got support from the US embassy for the
FBI to be brought in to investigate the killings.
As the coalition
struggled to remain together, it seemed destined to lurch from one
crisis to another. The restoration of the Mau Forest, for example –
which some analysts have said cost Mr Odinga and ODM significant support
in the Rift Valley – was yet another area of conflict.
Having
agreed to go ahead with the project at Cabinet level, some ministers,
notably the then Agriculture minister William Ruto, now Deputy President
in the Jubilee government, disowned the project during visits to the
area.
“They went to the area and incited title-less settlers in
Phase Two not to leave until they had been paid compensation. The
agitators ferried forest families to makeshift camps, called in the
media, and blamed the ‘inhuman’ exercise on me. A compliant media went
along with it, regrettably too lazy to research the facts, or too inept
or partisan to point out this was a necessary and collective Cabinet
decision to which everyone was party,” he writes.
The Flame of Freedom book will be launched on Sunday at KICC, Nairobi. The chief guest at the event is former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo
