By Nyanza Wire 
JAMES ORENGO said on his recent interview with Jeff Koinange that he still “does not understand” why Jaramogi Oginga Odinga never became President and why — in later years — Raila Odinga never became President. Let’s revisit Jaramogi’s failure.
Jaramogi did not become President because he hoped to depend on the Kikuyu vote in 1992, while the Kikuyu long took an oath not to vote for a Luo, and more specifically, Jaramogi. He was deluded that the younger GEMA group surrounding him were any different from their parents simply because they were ‘hanging out’ with Orengo and Raila. He ended up having to again contend with a more virulent tribal smear campaign no different from the 1960s fallout.
I do not blame Jaramogi for the mess in 1992. He was already an old man in his 80s. It was the failure of the younger Luos around him to see Kenya for what it was and advise Jaramogi most appropriately: that Moi was bad, but the Kikuyu were worse!
The Kikuyu fallout with President Moi after 1982 coup had nothing to do with their new love for ‘democracy’ or ‘good governance’ just as today’s Kikuyu fallout with President Ruto has nothing to do with democracy or good governance. Multipartyism, which Matiba became the face of its agitation in the early 1990s, only started making sense to Matiba after he was rigged out of the 1988 polls.
Matiba did not embrace multipartyism because he believed in it. He embraced it, then appropriated it, because he’d LOST POWER in 1988, and was now a raia wa kawaida.
In the decade leading to 1992 polls, mainstream Kikuyu politicians were pro-one party state. They were “KANU damu”. From 1969, they’d designed KANU to be the only party. The proscription of the Luo Party, KPU, and the jailing of ALL its elected leaders, led to a “de facto” one party state. No one from any other tribe or region of Kenya ever dared to form another party to challenge Kenyatta.
Kenyatta died in Mombasa with KANU party still intact as the political machine of the ruling elite, composed 90% by GEMA elites. Kenyatta was not supposed to die. It was treasonous, Njonjo said, to even “imagine”the death of Kenyatta.
He died, nonetheless.
Under President Moi, it is again the Kikuyu who connived to make Kenya a “de jure” one party state. It is them who responded to the notion that KANU could be defeated with “you cannot cut a mugumo tree with a razor”. It is only after the events of 1982, whose full maturation came by 1988; that Kikuyus started accepted they’d lost out; and, it was only then that they started to embrace Jaramogi — who’d been out in the cold with his Luos, since the 1960s.
For Matiba, one of the biggest casualties of the 1988 polls, his defeat in Kiharu finally turned him into a “democrat”.
From independence to 1988, Matiba had cared very little how the political and government machine he’d benefited from treated “others”. He’d become one of the wealthiest Kenyans in the 25 years of independence.
It was only while Matiba had been ‘defeated’ in Kiharu in 1988 that — now out of power— he begun to realize just how cold and punitive the life they’d put Kenyans through under Jomo Kenyatta, felt.
This is the same thing happening with Gachagua today. Does Gachagua believe in good governance? Does he believe in the constitution of Kenya with its radical provisions on national inclusion and equitable sharing of resources (Chapter 10)? Does he? If yes, where is the evidence?
Three years ago Gachagua could use presidential functions to openly partition Kenya into in-groups (communities which deserve to be in government) and out-groups (those to be permanently out).
Three years ago Gachagua’s organizing principle was “ethnic exclusion”. Even those to be included had percentages set for each. Luhyas had 30%. Luos had ZERO percent!
Has he changed? Has he abandoned primitive tribalism?
In the 1988-1992 election cycle; the mistake Luos made were to join the Kikuyus in their hyper-opposition to President Moi.
With the death of Kenyatta and Moi’s ascension, the Luo should have exited opposition politics, embraced Moi much earlier (1978/79) and re-entrenched back in govt as rank insiders.
We, the younger Luos living at the tail end of the failed twin political experiments of Jaramogi-Luo generation and Raila/Orengo/Nyong’o-generation; we must not repeat the mistakes.
Because James Orengo refuses to see the ethnic reality of Kenya’s presidential politics, whose history is rooted in a Luo-Kikuyu faultline, he continues to wallow in hypocritical denials.