Washington, D.C. — Kenyan Member of Parliament Raila Odinga is a leading contender for the nomination of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement of Kenya (ODM-Kenya) for this December's presidential elections. Odinga, MP for the Langata constituency and former Minister of Public Works and Roads, finished third in the 1997 Presidential Elections, and helped form a coalition that swept President Mwai Kibaki into power in 2002. He is the son of the late Oginga Odinga, the veteran Kenyan nationalist and the country's first vice-president under Jomo Kenyatta.
Raila Odinga was recently in the United States to speak to students in Minnesota and Florida and meet investors. During his stop in Washington, D.C., Odinga spoke to allAfrica about key campaign issues and his chances of winning the presidency. Excerpts:
What's the basic platform of your campaign?
My platform is change. Change has been a very elusive subject in Kenya. In 1992, when we introduced the multiparty system in Kenya, we ran on a platform of change. Unfortunately, the position was split, and we lost the elections. In 1997, again, the position was split. I was myself a presidential candidate… we lost. In 2002, we managed to bring the opposition together under the umbrella of the National Rainbow Coalition, and this time around we won the elections. Unfortunately, this coalition split almost immediately after the elections because of non-implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which we had signed before the elections. That undermined the reform agenda for change.
So what we're saying now is we want to go back to where NARC deviated from its original vision for change in 2002. We want to transform Kenya, change the way Kenya has been governed since independence, so that we can realize our socio-economic development, deal with excruciating poverty that continues to marginalize our people, and be able to make efficient use of our manpower and natural resources in the country.
Since the start of the multiparty system, one of the most important issues in Kenyan politics has been constitutional reform. ODM-Kenya has called for minimal constitutional reform before the elections scheduled for December. What reforms are you looking for and why?
Let me begin with the constitution itself and then move to the minimum – we now call them essential – reforms.
In that [2002] MoU, we said we were going to deliver a new constitution within 100 days of getting into office. But after the election, some of our colleagues changed their minds. They wanted more concentration of power in the presidency, what we called the authoritarian presidency, which we have had all along. There is a stalemate: there is a constitution that the people want – it a constitution that this small clique does not want.
We know it is not possible within the period that is now remaining [before this year's elections] to complete the constitutional review, hence our call for the minimum reforms, which are aimed essentially at leveling the playing field for the elections.
One [reform] is the Independent Electoral Commission. Under the current constitution, the president is mandated to appoint an electoral commission, but that was the case during the single party era. When we introduced multiparty-ism in 1997, there was a package of reforms we introduced called IPPG (Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group) package. That required that the opposition nominate half of the commissioners. Now President Kibaki has gone back to the old constitution, which empowers the president to appoint, and he has appointed nine commissioners to replace those nominated by the opposition. So the commission consists now basically of the president's cronies. We are saying that this is not right, we want a commission that is neutral and independent.
Two – we would like to ensure all the youths that are of voting age – five million – are enfranchised to vote.
Three – we are demanding the inclusion of affirmative action. Affirmative action would increase the number of women in parliament. Thirty-six new seats which have been provided for in the draft [constitution] prepared by the Parliament Committee on Administrative Objectives on Development Affairs [would] be distributed proportionate to the strength of political parties. We don't think it is fair to have this provision wait until the 2012 elections.
Four – we are demanding that the Political Parties' Bill be introduced and passed in parliament. [This provides] for funding of political parties by government.
We are also demanding that parliament should be independent of the executive. At the moment, the president has the powers to prorogue parliament as he wishes. In other words, parliament does not control its own calendar. It is controlled by the executive.
Then we want the judiciary also to be independent. The judiciary, at the moment appointed by the executive, is controlled by the executive. The executive therefore interferes with the judiciary's decisions. Take for example, electoral petitions. If you lose an election unfairly, for example, through rigging, the law says you can only petition through the courts. Now those petitions are supposed to be heard and decided on quickly. As I am talking, of the petitions that we filed in 2003, 10 have not been disposed of. So even if the court finds that you were unfairly defeated, it is of no consequence.
How is ODM-Kenya planning on nominating its candidate for president?
Well, there are about eight candidates who have declared so far that they want the ticket for the party, and we think that this is healthy, that it is advancing our democracy. We are going to go for our primary. There are also designs for a kind of consensus-building, so that candidates can agree among themselves on one without having to subject the electorate to this very elaborate system. There is fear that the ruling party might interfere with the nomination exercise, particularly in areas where our party is not very strong. The matter is being discussed. If there is no agreement reached, then we will go for a ballot. Eventually the most popular candidate will be nominated.
How likely is it that you will be ODM-Kenya's nominee for president?
I think my chances are very high. I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but I think that the people believe that I have the credentials required to lead this transition to a democratic constitution … because I have been in the reform movement for a very long time. The reason why we've had the setbacks we've had is because we put somebody who was very much part of the old system in charge – [President] Kibaki, and [he kept] the old constitution. To him, it was just business as usual.
Again, look at my previous record. In 1997 I was a candidate. There were 15 candidates who were running for the presidency and out of the 15, I came in number three. [Former President Daniel arap] Moi was number one, Kibaki was number two, and I was number three. Now Moi is home, same with Kibaki, and if we can get the bulk of Moi's votes, I am fairly confident.
One major issue that has been covered extensively by the press recently is urban poverty. If elected, how would you plan to address this?
It is true that poverty is endemic in our society. Kibera slums are in my constituency. One of the reasons for the slums is the shortage of housing in urban areas; the government has not provided adequate shelter to cope with the influx of population to our urban areas.
Recently, the new Secretary-General of the United Nations came to Kibera and expressed shock at what he saw, and promised he would do something about it. The business community in Kenya was of course not amused. They led a delegation two weeks later to see the President in which they said we should not take tourists, visitors to Kibera. To them, tourists should be taken to Hilton hotels, nice urban areas, and should not know this poverty.
My position is that we should not wish it away. We must confront it and deal with it and remove it or reduce it. The way you do it is by creating more opportunities for people to be engaged in productive activities that will improve their conditions of life. When I was in charge of the slum upgrading program, working together with the UN-Habitat to improve the shelter, the type of housing, build more permanent houses, bring sanitation into the area, construct roads, build schools, health centers, set up workshops where people can be engaged in productive activities.
Kenya's economic growth rate has been impressive in the past few years. How would you assess the health of the Kenyan economy?
Of course, the economy has improved to a certain extent, the growth rate has gone to 5.8 percent, but it is mainly in the service sectors of the economy. Tourism has doubled; the banking sector and insurance sector is doing good business; the stock market is vibrant. But it is mainly the result of: (1) remittances by Kenyans in the diaspora – back home, they are investing in real estate and bank shares; (2) there is also quite a bit of laundering of drug money – the construction industry is booming as a result of this, basically because of laundering. This growth is not noticeable among the poor people.
Crime figures to be an important issue during the campaign. How would you fight Kenya's rising crime rates?
Security is of serious concern because crime rates have soared over the past few years. There have been armed robberies, criminal gangs robbing people on highways and shooting them. This high level of crimes is completely unacceptable.
Now of course one of the causes is high levels of poverty. You have a number of youths who have come out of schools and do not have anything better to do. They get frustrated and engage in crime.
The law enforcement agencies are not effective enough. The police force has been demoralized because of the poor conditions of service. Secondly, the police forces have become fairly corrupt, so you have some corrupt police officials who collaborate with these criminals. Some of them even hire these criminals. So we think there is a need for a complete reform of the police force. This is not just a question of changing the police commissioner or transferring police, which is what they have been doing. The police force needs to be reformed because they served under Moi, which was one of the most corrupt regimes in the country.
The U.S. government assisted Kenyan government with the National Intelligence Service, which in the old days used to be a brutal force that was used to torture people. Now they are one of the best in Africa. The same needs to be done with the police force. This insecurity is scaring away investors, those who want to invest in the country.
On the subject of security, regional security has to a major concern for Kenya. For example, Ethiopia recently drove out the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu in Somalia. How would you address Kenya's regional security situation?
Our insecurity also has something to do with the regional insecurity in the area. They have got problems in Somalia, and as a result of that, a lot of ammunition fell into the wrong hands and is finding its way across the border into Kenya. So you have got too many guns in the wrong hands in the country.
The same applies in Ethiopia where you have a very protracted civil war going on. For a long time you had the same thing in the Sudan. That is why it is incumbent upon Kenyan government to get involved in bringing normalcy to people across our border.
Our position [on Somalia] is that the Kenyan government has not done enough. There was a time when they had an opportunity to broker some sort of understanding between the Transitional Government and the Islamic Courts in Mogadishu, and they missed that opportunity. Then eventually, through the U.S. intervention, Ethiopia invaded from the north, and the Kenyan government was asked to seal the borders. We think that this situation should not have been allowed to get to that stage. It could have been defused much earlier. Right now, we need to move in to make sure there is some sort of dialogue or negotiations because you have not heard the last of Islamic Courts. They are beaten, but they are not finished. They will go underground, and that will be more dangerous.
The same thing in the Sudan – we are concerned that the government in Khartoum appears to be reneging on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [between the Government and South Sudan]. They are not moving fast enough to implement some of the provisions of that agreement. We would like the international community to put more pressure to ensure that this agreement is implemented.
What is happening in Darfur in my view can only be described as genocide. We think that the UN and international community need to move with more force to bring that situation under control. I do not think that people need to continue to be seeking permission from al-Bashir [Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan] in that situation because he is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In the last campaign, President Kibaki and NARC promised to fight corruption in the Kenyan government, and some Kenyans believe this promise has been unfulfilled. If elected, as President, how would you fight and crack down on corruption?
The genesis of mega-corruption was the decision sometime in the 1970s… that allowed civil servants to be involved in businesses. That in my view is what transformed the civil service into a very corrupt force because you are allowed to hold shares in companies, to own companies that are also doing business with government. When I was the Minister in Charge of Roads and Public Works, I had a situation where there were engineers in the ministry who also had their own construction companies, who were also tendering for construction. They were the ones who were advertising, they were the ones who were judging the tenders, and awarding those tenders to their own companies. This is a clear case of conflict of interest.
The corruption has two sides – there is the corruptor and the corruptee. You can't just deal with the corruptee, the recipients; you must also do something about those who give the bribes. Most of the international companies in competition to get contracts will go and offer bribes to civil servants so they can cut corners and give the contracts.
We introduced the Public Ethics Act and Code of Conduct. This act requires civil servants to declare their wealth and the source of it. It should also include the close members of his or her immediate family. As a Member of Parliament, I fill those forms every year. Our forms are submitted to the Speaker of the National Assembly who keeps them in a vault with a lock and a key. Nobody has access to them. I would go further and introduce a provision that insists that those declarations be made public.
Then I would make the Anti-Corruption Commission more effective. At the moment, the Anti-Corruption Commission can only investigate but it cannot prosecute. It has to hand over the prosecution to the Attorney General. So it has become a lame duck institution.
Getting back to you as a presidential candidate, how would you address charges that you've been party hopping?
I've not been party hopping. Our multiparty system is actually still in its infant stage; it is evolving. Political parties are evolving, not only in Kenya, but in Africa in general. As a result of this, we have people from disparate political backgrounds, who come together. Most of these parties are more or less coalitions.
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You reach a stage where it becomes almost incompatible to continue working with a party, because you disagree fundamentally with the leadership of the party, and you maintain your principles but you then feel that it probably in the interest of yourself and your supporters to part with it. I left Ford-Kenya over the issue of Goldenberg, which is a major scandal, the biggest national scandal in post-independence Kenya. Because of this, I left Ford-Kenya with a very clear conscience, and went into LDP [Liberal Democratic Party].
In the LDP, we fought an election, and lost because of the polarization of politics in our country, the ethnicization of politics. Because Moi was on his way out at the time, and there were a lot of people in Kanu [Kenya African National Union] who wanted the opportunity to work with other people, we saw that the constitutional review was the key thing. Unless the constitution was reviewed, it would be difficult for the opposition to win elections. So, we came up with the policy of cooperation among political parties; we ended up with a merger of the two parties [to form New Kanu]. We had felt that it was necessary in order to take over Kanu and transform it into machinery for change or destroy it from the inside.
When we went into Kanu, we were very clear on what we were going to do. We called it New Kanu, and we came up with a completely new constitution and a new manifesto, which basically was a replica of the policies of the NDP. Moi and his conservative cronies resisted this and then they wanted to impose a candidate on the party. That is what caused the disagreement between us.
In all these – from Ford-Kenya to NDP [National Democratic Party] to Kanu to LDP – if you look at the policy documents, they remain the same. Winston Churchill changed parties four times, and when asked, he said that he remained what he had always been, a Tory Democrat, who had been forced by circumstances to serve in other political parties. There's nothing wrong with changing, so long as it's changing for the better. So, what I've done is changed for the better, many times. I've never changed or compromised my principles.
You mentioned the role ethnic groups play in politics. How do you plan to transcend ethnicity in your campaign?
Ethnicity, in my view, is a very primitive ideology. It was introduced in our country by the British, who pursued a policy of divide and rule. The subsequent post-independence regimes have perpetrated it.
It doesn't have to be that way. Next door, Mwalimu Nyerere, Julius Nyerere, managed to unite a country with even more ethnic groups than Kenya. It is possible to do that in Kenya. In fact, we did that in 2002 when we supported Kibaki. When I said "Kibaki tosha," people said the Luos will never vote for a Kikuyu president because of the past history that Kenyatta had betrayed my father who had fought for him, they had killed Tom Mboya, they had detained so many of our people.
But then I said, "Look, the differences between my father and Kenyatta were not tribal or ethnic, they were ideological. One believed in a capitalist system of development and the other was a socialist." It was not ethnic. That's why one of the main strategists for Kenyatta was Tom Mboya, who was a Luo. One of my father's main strategists was Kikuyu.
Under Kenyatta, an ordinary Kikuyu did not benefit any better than an ordinary Luo. That united the people, and the Luos voted for Kibaki in 2002 by 98 percent. Kibaki's percentages were actually lower among the Kikuyu, his own tribe. Kenyans are willing to vote across the ethnic divide. That's the reason why I'm confident that I will get vote from all tribes across Kenya.
