Raila Odinga

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Raila Odinga (2008)

Raila Amollo Odinga (born January 7, 1945 in Maseno ; mostly called Raila in his home country ) from the Luo people is a Kenyan politician.

Raila Amollo Odinga was Prime Minister of a large coalition government from April 2008 to April 2013 . He was the opposition candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Raila is the son of the politician Jaramogi Oginga Odinga († 1994) and his wife Mary Emma Juma. His father was vice president of the country under Jomo Kenyatta . Raila Odinga already sat in parliament with his father, just as he now shares the parliamentary bench with his brother Oburu Odinga . Until November 23, 2005 he was Minister of Construction in the Ministry of Roads, Public Works and Housing in the government of Mwai Kibaki .

The presidential elections on December 27, 2007 , in which Odinga was defeated by incumbent Mwai Kibaki, sparked unrest in Kenya , which ultimately led to the power being shared between Odinga and Kibaki. On April 13, 2008 Raila Odinga was appointed Prime Minister.

After losing the 2017 election and withdrawing from the repeat election in the same year, Odinga was proclaimed president by his supporters on January 30, 2018.

Life

Raila Odinga was born in Maseno in the Nyanza province in 1945. After school he went to the GDR in 1962 and learned German at the Leipzig Herder Institute . After high school he studied on a state scholarship to 1970 at the Technical University of Magdeburg , today's Otto von Guericke University , mechanical engineering . According to fellow students in his FET 2/64 study group , he was more interested in politics (including Maoist ) than technically. After returning to his home country, the graduate engineer worked as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi until he was elected to parliament. In 1975 he was appointed associate director of the Kenya Bureau of Standards .

Raila Odinga described himself as the cousin of US President Barack Obama . Obama's uncle Said Obama, however, denied direct relatives. Odinga's mother simply comes from the same region as the Obama's family. It is a common phrase among them to speak of cousins ​​in such a case.

exile

In 1982 a brief - and soon dejected - coup with civil war-like conditions took place in Kenya, initiated by a group of young Kenya Air Force officers . The then President Daniel Arap Moi had the opposition politician arrested with others. Despite denial, he was convicted of leading the coup and placed under house arrest for seven months . Then he was imprisoned for six years without a trial. As soon as he was released on February 6, 1988, he was arrested again in September 1988. He was accused in the one-party state of supporting the underground Kenya Revolutionary Movement , which supported a multi-party system. He was released on June 12, 1989, only to be arrested again on July 5, 1990. This time he was convicted with the well-known businessman and politician Kenneth Matiba and the ex-Mayor of Nairobi , Charles Rubia . A year later, on June 21, 1991, he was released. Shortly afterwards, in October 1991, he fled to Norway for fear of being murdered by the government . At first he had even considered asking for asylum in Germany.

In July 2006, with the consent of the person portrayed, a biography of Babafemi Badejo entitled Raila Odinga was published to Enigma in Kenyan Politics , in which the involvement of Raila Odinga and his father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga in the military coup of 1982 is detailed. With his father's knowledge and blessing, Raila Odinga commanded the putschists' observation and communication center in an apartment on Ngong Road. These publications sparked controversial and strong public debates: Raila Odinga's role was both vigorously defended and demanded from others for arrest, trial and possibly the death penalty .

Multi-party politics

In 1992, the year of the country's first free presidential election, Raila Odinga returned to Kenya from Norway. Here he immediately joined the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy ( FORD ) led by his father . FORD worked on the introduction of the multi-party system. Raila Odinga was elected Vice President of the Action Committee under his father. The FORD group split into FORD-Kenya under Oginga Odinga and FORD-Asili under Kenneth Matiba . Raila Odinga became deputy election director of his party FORD-Kenya.

Oginga Odinga died in January 1994. Contrary to what Raila Odinga had hoped, it was not he but Michael Wamalwa who was elected party chairman. Annoyed, Raila Odinga now joined the meaningless National Development Party (NDP). In this way he quickly managed to form a strong and active party. He also succeeded in persuading numerous parliamentarians from FORD Kenya, mostly from the Luo province of Nyanza , to switch to his party.

For him personally, great success did not materialize until he won a by-election in the Langata constituency of Nairobi with a large majority. In the 1997 presidential election, he beat his ex-party FORD-Kenya and came third behind Moi and Kibaki. Raila Odinga widely pursued a volatile rocking policy, supporting President Moi, who had put him behind bars for years until he even united his party (NDP) with the party of his adversary, the KANU . In gratitude, Moi appointed him energy minister and in the 2002 party elections he was elected general secretary of KANU. Odinga steered with power towards the successor in the presidency, because Moi could not run for elections in 2002 for constitutional reasons. However, to Odinga's disappointment, Moi did not make him, but Uhuru Kenyatta , the eldest son of the first President of the Republic of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta , as KANU's presidential candidate in 2002 . Odinga then teamed up with very different partners to prevent Kenyatta from being elected. Together with Kalonzo Musyoka , George Saitoti , Joseph Kamotho and others, he formed the cross-party protest platform "Rainbow Movement", the aim of which was to choose a common and suitable presidential candidate for the 2002 election. This rainbow group took over the relatively unknown Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and soon formed the successful "Rainbow Coalition" with the National Alliance Party of Kenya (NAK), a coalition of various smaller parties to which the later election winner Mwai Kibaki also belonged National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), to form. Odinga signed a well-known agreement with Kibaki, a so-called Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), in which he was promised a constitutional amendment that should have made him prime minister in less than 100 days and the LDP promised half of all ministerial posts in the expected cabinet . With this promise, Odinga and the LDP supported Kibaki, who had a mysterious car accident towards the end and then looked ailing for a long time, in his election campaign, which he won convincingly.

Election loser

In contrast to the MoU, the newly elected president did not appoint his campaign partner as prime minister. Likewise, the LDP did not receive the promised ministerial chairs. Kibaki even appointed ministers from the opposition parties KANU and FORD-People. Odinga picked up this gauntlet. The break came with the new constitution, which, unlike the MoU, favored a strong president - and thus would leave Odinga without the promised power. Under the image of the orange, a major campaign ran against the presidential favored draft constitution under the image of a banana. The referendum, which took place on November 21, 2005, resulted in a clear rejection of the new constitution by the Kenyan population with 58 percent. It was a great victory for Odinga and the opposition. After losing the referendum, President Kibaki dismissed his entire government team on November 23, 2005 - including Odinga - and after long negotiations reinstated politicians who were close to the banana wing or who overflowed them as ministers.

In his home province, but also among the youth of the big cities, Odinga is an important politician, a leader of the poor and a grassroots movement . In contrast, he does not have many supporters in the educated middle class or in the rural areas of other ethnic groups. In particular, he is accused of a poor economic concept. In January 2006, he reported death threats he had received to the police.

Election 2007

In the 2007 presidential elections, Raila Odinga ran as a candidate for the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) against incumbent President Mwai Kibaki . The ODM had incorporated Odinga as a rallying movement for the referendum against his previous party, the LDP . Opinion polls in September and October 2007 always gave Odinga around 50% of the vote, followed by Kibaki with a gap of around 7–12 percentage points.

After Odinga gained a certain lead in the first projections after the election, suddenly there were no further results, but after two days enormous numbers of votes were registered for Kibaki, who hastily declared him the election winner and sworn in as president less than an hour later. The German politician Alexander Graf Lambsdorff said in a statement as the head of 150 EU election observers: "The counting process is not credible, we have evidence of irregularities in various constituencies." Kibaki insisted on his election victory and dispatched paramilitary police forces on January 2, 2008 after violent protests against him rose across the country. More than a thousand people were killed in the resulting civil war-like unrest.

At the mediation of the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan , Odinga and Kibaki began negotiations on a solution to the political crisis in Kenya. At the end of February 2008 an agreement was reached on the formation of a joint government, and on April 13, 2008 Raila Odinga was finally appointed Prime Minister of Kenya.

As a result of this, tourism (an important source of foreign currency in the country) collapsed by up to 70%. For months there were hardly any tourists in Kenya's hotels.

Election 2013

On March 4, 2013 Raila Odinga also stood as a candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement as part of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) together with Kalonzo Musyoka (Wiper Democratic Movement, short: Wiper) in the elections. After the vote was counted, he came to 43.31% and did not achieve the necessary majority of 50% plus one vote, while his competitor Uhuru Kenyatta achieved 50.07%. In total, more than 12.3 million votes were cast. The 2013 election followed for the first time the requirements of the new Kenyan constitution that was passed in August 2010. On Saturday, March 9, 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta was officially confirmed as the winner of the 2013 presidential election by the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC). Due to considerable technical difficulties and alleged irregularities in the vote counting process, the result of the election should be challenged in court by Raila Odinga and the CORD Coalition .

Election 2017

After it became clear that Odinga had lost the presidential election in August 2017, he accused incumbent and likely election winner Uhuru Kenyatta of election fraud. While the projections were still being presented on television, he complained that hackers had falsified the results and that there was no other way of explaining his own defeat when, according to internal party forecasts, he should have won by a million votes. He later added that there was a conspiracy against the Kenyan people and alleged that, according to his party's information, people had broken into the computers of the election commission and falsified the data. His party later submitted server logs according to which someone with the identity of the election supervisor Chris Musando, who was murdered before the election, logged into the databases on election day. The user is said to have exchanged information on an ongoing basis through election results that preferred the opposing candidate Kenyatta. The credibility of these allegations is controversial, as no substantial discrepancies between the counting results documented on site and the results published by the central election commission were found.

Odinga initially threatened to call his supporters onto the streets to protest demonstrations. As this would presumably have led to bloodshed, he finally agreed a week after the election to challenge the election results in the Kenyan Supreme Court. The Supreme Court partially ruled Odinga in a 4-2 vote on September 1, 2017. It stated that the election was invalid due to various violations of procedural requirements of the constitution and some proven irregularities and would have to be repeated within 60 days. However, it also emphasized that there was no evidence that the voting process and the counting of votes had been carried out illegally.

A repeat of the presidential election was initially scheduled for October 17, 2017 and was later postponed to October 26, 2017. On October 10, 2017, Odinga withdrew his candidacy. A large part of his supporters then boycotted the elections. The only remaining candidate was Kenyatta with 98.2% of the vote. Odinga's National Super Alliance (NASA) contested this result again before the Supreme Court, but the court did not revoke Kenyatta's election victory this time. Odinga described the result as a forgery and announced that she would like to be proclaimed president.

Self-proclaimed President

Odinga had himself proclaimed "President of the People" by his party alliance National Super Alliance (NASA) on January 30, 2018 in Nairobi and then took an oath of office. The appointment is seen as an affront to incumbent Kenyatta.

See also

literature

  • Babafemi A. Badejo: Raila Odinga - An Enigma in Kenyan Politics. Yintab Books, 2006, ISBN 978-37208-8-0 .

Web links

Commons : Raila Odinga  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gunnar Leue, Magdeburg student wants to become Kenya's president in Magdeburg's Volksstimme on December 8, 2007
  2. ↑ Political relatives: Kenya's opposition leader Odinga and Obama are cousins. In: Spiegel Online . January 8, 2008, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Some Kenyans forget crisis to root for Obama ( Memento of October 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Brent Hentschel: Kenya's opposition leader wants asylum in Germany , Neues Deutschland from November 6, 1991
  5. ↑ Die Welt : The Fight of the Oranges against the Bananas of December 27, 2007.
  6. ↑ Die Welt : Africa's Hope Land Kenya tripped itself from December 31, 2007.
  7. ↑ Der Spiegel : Kibaki and Odinga shake hands on January 24, 2008.
  8. ^ SF Tagesschau : Odinga new head of government of Kenya from April 13, 2008.
  9. ↑ http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/03/08/kenya-election-ballot-counting.html
  10. ↑ http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/03/2013390137748204.html
  11. ↑ http://www.euronews.com/2013/03/09/kenyan-election-result-disputed/
  12. ↑ Catrina Sterwart: Kenya election 2017: Two dead in clashes amid fears protests over contested result could become widespread. The Independent on August 10, 2017
  13. ↑ Thomas Scheen: When a dead programmer influences the choice. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from August 10, 2017
  14. ↑ EU EOM Kenya 2017 Final Report, 10 January 2018 - EEAS - European External Action Service - European Commission. Retrieved January 31, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Kenya's opposition leader wants to go to court after all. Deutsche Welle from August 16, 2017
  16. ↑ Judgment of the Supreme Court of Kenya, paragraph 385: Presidential Petition 1 of 2017 - Kenya Law. Retrieved January 31, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Judgment of the Supreme Court of Kenya, paragraph 301: Presidential Petition 1 of 2017 - Kenya Law. Retrieved January 31, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Kenya's Raila Odinga quits election re-run. bbc.com of October 10, 2017 (English), accessed October 24, 2017
  19. ↑ Kenya: Election Commission reports almost 100 percent for Kenyatta . In: Spiegel Online . October 30, 2017 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 31, 2018]).
  20. ↑ a b Jason Burke: "Kenya's opposition swears in Raila Odinga as 'people's president'" The Guardian of January 30, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Odinga, Raila
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Odinga, Raila Amollo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Maseno