CIA and genesis of Jaramogi's and Raila's 'rebellious' streak

By: Douglas Okwatch
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[ Posted On: 2008-08-01 ]

The 'isolate and crush' tactics America's Central Intelligence Agency used to alienate Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in favour of Tom Mboya (TJ) and then tame Jaramogi Oginga Odinga have been deployed against Prime minister Raila Odinga.

Founding president Kenyatta and Tom Mboya at Lancaster House, London in 1962.

Today, 39 years after a lone gunman shot Mboya dead in Nairobi, evidence of CIA's role in TJ's meteoric rise and how this later planted the seeds for his assassination is almost incontrovertible, The Saturday Standard can reveal.

How this ideology was effectively used to consign Jaramogi and later his son Raila to a near perpetual life in the Opposition has also come out.

Fresh details show that the fate of Raila and that of his father, the doyen of opposition politics, may have been sealed as early as June 1965. A heavily bankrolled CIA spy machine, initially deployed to prop up TJ, while keeping Kenyatta in check, spurned the plot.

By labelling him demagogue, a tag that would follow him through his entire political career, a large chunk of which he spent in the Opposition, the isolation of Jaramogi had begun. The Readers Digest Illustrated Oxford Dictionary defines demagogue as a political agitator appealing to the basest instincts of a mob. This portrayed Jaramogi as primitive and violent. "....Odinga and the demagogues are out of the office. The men moving up.... are unemotional, hardworking and practical minded," is how an excerpt from an undated issue of the Ramparts, which forms part of an assortment of previously top secret materials now declassified, refers to Odinga.

This was soon after Jaramogi's powers, as the President's principal assistant, were clipped through a constitutional amendment forced through by Kenyatta. It is believed the move was touched off by CIA, which had laid the ground for successive governments to cast Odinga as a pariah.

The stage for future selective profiling of his son by successive governments had also been set.

It can be recalled that Raila, now PM following a power sharing deal brokered by former UN secretary general Dr Kofi Annan to stop post-election crisis, was also labelled 'dangerous' by President Kibaki's Party of National Unity. The Ford-Kenya chairman Mr Musikari Kombo, who claimed the initials of Raila's Orange Democratic Movement, stood for 'One Dangerous Man', also bandied around this tag.

The Lang'ata MP is also said to attract mania (extreme enthusiasm and admiration) and phobia (intense fear) in equal measure, at least according to former Vice President Michael Kijana Wamalwa.

American ideology

But his detractors have equated this near cult following that he enjoys to demagoguery. Over the years, 'scaremongers' seeking to curtail his ascendancy have created the impression that he appeals to mobs.

The 2007 smear campaign script may as well have been pulled out of the bag of Mr William Attwood's, the US ambassador to Kenya at the height of the CIA's 'isolate and crush' policy.

It seems a paradox the US should have been responsible for the dissemination of this ideology. Its enduring legacy is that it sowed the very first seeds of intolerance and dictatorship in Kenya.

Mboya at his wedding with Pamela.

Today, the CIA may no longer be the vanguard agency. But the momentum in the ideology that was set in motion continues. The Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and 1970s but was shut in 1975, adds that there is even continuity in the personnel that fostered it. Ramparts forms part of previously top secret materials on the assassination of Mboya stored at the Kenya National Archives. The materials have since been declassified.

The real plot against Mboya and Odinga began in June 1964, when Attwood met with Kenyatta, according to Ramparts. It was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya and his Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) movement.

"For balance, Kenyatta assured him that Russian and Chinese aid to the leftist leader, Vice President Oginga Odinga would also end," Ramparts reports indicate.

Simultaneously, the CIA was making appropriate shifts in its operations, throwing its resources into a new kind of vehicle, which would embrace the Kenyan political mainstream, while isolating the left and setting it up for destruction by Kenyatta.

In one of its most revealing excerpts, Ramparts reveals how Attwood, at the instigation of the CIA, encouraged Kenyatta to move against Odinga, cementing the deal he had negotiated with the Americans. "The Constitution was revised to strip Jaramogi's vice presidential office of its powers; his post in Kenyatta's political party was eliminated, his trade union base (competitive with KFL) reorganised out of existence."

When he resigned in protest, he had just signed his own passport to political limbo. Odinga had successfully been shut out. Inadvertently, the script for future presidents and how to deal with their opponents had been written.

It may, therefore, begin to become clearer why Thomas Joseph Mboya had to die, why Jaramogi Oginga Odinga would spend the rest of his life in the Opposition even after Kenyatta's demise, and why Raila is where he is today. In a word, successive independence governments quickly adopted this ideology.

Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics (Politics and History)

In the book Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics, Dr Babafemi Adesina Badejo, Raila's profiler, traced the journey of the PM as he negotiated the treacherous political terrain of post-independence Kenya.

In a review of the book, Dr Jeremy Matam Farrall of University of Tasmania, Australia, appreciates that Kenya's recent history read like a Shakespearian tale, full of dramatic intrigue, intricate conspiracies and king-making plots. He only fails to add — thanks to the CIA

The book reveals how the political scene came to be dominated by two figures in particular – Jomo Kenyatta, the country's inaugural President, and Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, who was Kenyatta's successor.

Tyrannical era

Kenyatta and Moi held sway for four decades, from Independence in 1963 till 2002.

When political pluralism knocked on the door, Kenyatta and Moi used all the tools at their disposal to consolidate power and marginalise political opponents, Farrall states in his review. He says that Kenyatta pursued policies that turned Kenya into a de facto one-party state under the control of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), while Moi went a step further, by passing a law that made Kenya a de jure (by law) one-party state.

Political rivals therefore had to join Kanu or risk being imprisoned for 'dissent'. But throughout these tumultuous times, brave individuals and groups continued to struggle, at considerable personal cost.

Like Mboya and his father, Raila had to fight various damaging and isolationist political labels like 'dangerous' and 'communist', battles whose foundations had been laid by the CIA. Raila has been branded communist because he was drawn to socialist activism during the Cold War.

Under Kanu Raila was repeatedly subjected to this 'isolate and crush' policy, which persisted throughout the 1980s, making him one of the harshest critics of the Moi regime. He was detained over his role in the abortive 1982 coup and was no stranger at the notorious Nyati House torture chambers.

Later as Kanu's reign edged to a close, Raila first embraced Kanu before a bitter fallout forced him into an alliance with President Kibaki under the National Rainbow Coalition.

Systematically, sidelined by yet another President, Raila campaigned against Kibaki's proposals for constitutional reform, securing a resounding 'No!' vote in the November 2005 referendum.

Badejo explored Jaramogi's and Raila's Luo heritage, describing the manner in which their ethnic origins both furthered and restricted their nationalist political ambitions. In so doing, the book illustrates how ethnicity has often been employed as tool of fear and divisiveness to prevent challenges to the power of the dominant Kenyan political elite.

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