[SIZE=6]How Raila influence in the West has dwindled[/SIZE]
Posted on November 16
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Opposition leader Raila Odinga returns today from his extended Washington, DC, visit, which handlers had promised would feature several key meetings, including with officials from President Donald Trump’s administration.
The Opposition chief seemed to have been acutely aware that his influence in the US capital is in tatters. Yet his National Super Alliance (Nasa) supporters have been made to believe the trip was a success. Indeed, apart from Donald Yamamoto, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, the only senior politician Raila interacted with in the US was Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons.
Unlike his high-profile visits ahead of the 2007 and 2013 General Election, Raila was this time round reduced to meeting staffers, including Michael Phelan (Director, Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Greg Simpkins (Director, House of Representatives Committee on Africa).
The International Republican Institute, associated with the Republican Party, offered the former Prime Minister a hurried, lunch-hour meeting with its president, Daniel Twining, while the National Democratic Institute (NDI) was expected to offer him a low-key dinner.
If the dinner event took place, the media did not cover it. The dinner was not even captured in DemWorks, NDI’s blog. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he delivered what was supposed to be his strongest-ever message to high-ranking US government officials, Raila was the first to admit, off the script, that his audience comprised mostly of “friends” and “familiar faces”.
What most Kenyans may not know is that CSIS, which they were made to believe is a key US government institution, is an independent think-tank that annually hosts more than 2,000 public speeches and small briefings, such as Raila’s.
Among those attending Rails’s briefing session was his Communication Adviser, Salim Lone, who inexplicably fled Kenya on the eve of last August 8 election. Retired ambassadors Johnnie Carson and William Bellamy, who served as Washington’s envoys in Kenya between 1999 and 2006, were also in attendance.
The two former State Department officials are believed to have been key in crafting Raila’s itinerary, which they had hoped would afford him the opportunity to mend fences with the US administration. These two are associated with the old order American policy towards Africa; “spread of democracy” and the“deepening democracy” era.
The US has since embraced the “American first” policy, displeasing those who now feel abandoned by the West. In his remarks at the CSIS, Raila was far from diplomatic. Claiming Kenya was “hurtling towards an outright dictatorship”, he accused the US and other Western countries of contributing to “electoral autocracy” by affirming Uhuru’s re-election.
For a man who has had an open-door relationship with successive US governments, many people think Raila’s grouse had everything to do with the scant attention he was accorded this time.
In fact, when he made a similar trip to the US early 2011, Raila did not only draw larger audiences at Washington think-tanks, but also visited the White House, where he held lengthy discussions with then Vice President Joe Biden.
Media houses were literally competing for his attention. What, then, explains the drastic change in relations between Raila and his erstwhile allies in the US? The answer to this question was partly given by President Barrack Obama during his State visit to Kenya in 2015.
At the tail end of that visit, Obama briefly met Raila and fellow Opposition leaders Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetang’ula to discuss the Opposition’s solutions to challenges facing the country. Shortly after the meeting, Obama disclosed to a civil society forum that he had just told off the Opposition leaders for being hypocrites.
Since the leaders have done little to salvage their dwindling fortunes in the West. For instance, just before the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission declared Uhuru winner of the August 8 annulled presidential election, Nasa leadership is reported to have had an ugly altercation with former US Secretary of State, John Kerry, who as head of the Carter Center Observation Mission urged the Opposition to file a petition against Uhuru’s victory as opposed to protests. Opposition leaders told off Kerry and other observers.
After the Supreme Court nullified the election and ordered a repeat, the expectation was that Raila and his team would grab the second chance to mount a better challenge against Uhuru.
Instead, Raila and his partners, acting against the advice of local and international stakeholders, decided to boycott the repeat poll. He also shocked the world when recently he converted Nasa into a National Resistance Movement.
Perhaps, in realisation of the extent to which this singular act had damaged his international image, Raila quickly defended the NRM as “a wing of our political party that will use non-violent means to force change in Kenya.”
It, therefore, remains to be seen whether the West, will respond to Raila’s call for their intervention in what he now claims is Kenya’s “worst crisis”.
By Ari Lemoronke, Washington DC :The writer is a regular commentator on international affairs.