When we were kids growing up, Gusii was awash with tales of the supernatural powers that the late ~ and great ~ doyen of Kenyan opposition politics, Adonijah Ajuma Jaramogi Oginga Odinga possessed. We would be told of the ingenuity in the methods he used in the couple of dramatically failed assassination attempts on him, and the methods that he used to dodge the death traps that we were left in total awe.
We were told that Oginga Odinga while in Bondo, would turn himself into a house fly and attend clandestine night meetings in Nairobi between Jomo Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia to discuss how the plane carrying him would be brought down. The next day, Kenyatta would reportedly make a call to Odinga asking him to quickly fly to Nairobi to attend to an urgent matter. As the Mzee waited in State House for news of a tragic plane crush, the doyen would have long turned into an Eagle, flown the miles to Nairobi, then turned into a Lizard and crawled into State House before turning human again and showing up in Kenyatta’s siting room, explaining that he had preferred to drive rather than fly, when in the truest sense of the term, he had really flown there!
Later on, after reading books and newspapers, and understanding the ‘cold war’, the role and place of the ‘KGB’ and the ‘CIA’ in it, how each used intelligence and espionage to outwit the other in the field, and what important cogs Oginga and Kenyatta were to their respective sides, i realised that the ‘supernatural powers’ that Odinga used to outwit the ‘Kiambu Mafia’ were really just intelligence information that he received from the Soviet spy agency. Growing up in Odinga’s house, his son Raila Amollo must have internalized the extreme importance of having an extensive and elaborate intelligence network at every nook and cranny of not just the government and public spheres, but on every square inch of space across the country.
That is why even before a Margaryan and a Sargasyan set foot in Kenya, Raila already knows their real names, date of arrival, agenda in Kenya, and colour of their underwear. That is also why when he dramatically snatches away Uhuru from the jaws of death in a plane crush, takes him to the Lakeside to eat fresh fish and wash it down with the finest Whiskey, it is because he has his ears pressed firmly to the ground, and his finger on the national pulse. He sees and hears things that even the Commander in Chief doesn’t. And when he advises his brother Uhuru to take away all of Ruto’s powers and hand them to Matiang’i, and quickly follow it up with a major reshuffle of the senior security chiefs, what you immediately begin to see is ‘vintage Baba’ on the political chessboard!
CREDITS TO: Onyinkwa Onyakundi