Raila's courage to choose peace over raw power

Anna Tibaijuka [Courtesy]

Raila Amolo Odinga’s burial after death on October 15, closes a long chapter of Kenyan and African political history. He leaves behind not only a record of opposition and reform but an example of something rarer: a leader who, having suffered under the cruelty of power, refused to visit that cruelty upon others.

His political life cannot be separated from his years of imprisonment during the 1980s and early 1990s. He was detained without trial for nearly eight years, subjected to isolation and humiliation in the infamous Nyayo House cells. Those years could have turned any man toward vengeance.

Instead, they turned him toward discipline. He emerged from darkness with an unyielding belief that democracy, however flawed, is safer than violence. The testing ground came in 2007–2008. That conviction was tested during the post-election crisis that pushed Kenya to the edge of civil war. 

The vote counting had collapsed into suspicion; rival communities were mobilising; hundreds were dying. Inside the United Nations compound in Nairobi, we felt the urgency of history pressing against the walls. As head of the UN system in Kenya, I reported directly to the Secretary-General on the unfolding crisis and recommended that a power-sharing framework be explored. 

I also consulted my former superior, Kofi Annan, then in Ghana, who agreed that mediation would be essential. Through my friend Mary Chinery-Hesse, political adviser to African Union Chairman President Kufuor, I conveyed the same message to Accra.

These consultations reflected what many of us believed: Africans had to mobilise the world to help Kenya before the conflict consumed the region. It was within that atmosphere that proposals for a power-sharing arrangement began to circulate among the UN, the African Union, and key international partners. 

When I briefed partners in Nairobi, I urged American officials and visiting envoys to reconsider early congratulatory statements that risked foreclosing dialogue. I spoke not only as a UN official but also as a daughter of the Great Lakes region, who had seen, as a child in Kagera, the first Rwandan refugees crossing our border in 1959.

My mother fed them as my father looked on helplessly; I peeled bananas for their meal. That childhood memory never left me. I knew what flight and displacement do to families, and I could not bear to see Kenya follow that path. The logic was simple but revolutionary: when an election is contested to the point of bloodshed, legitimacy can only be rebuilt through inclusion.

It required courage from both sides. When Odinga was approached with the idea, he did not hesitate. He agreed—on one condition: that the arrangement be real, not cosmetic, inspired by the German model of a ceremonial president and an executive prime minister.

It was a demand for substance, not symbolism, and it ultimately became the foundation of the Grand Coalition that steadied Kenya and opened the path toward a new constitution. Behind the headlines, African diplomacy moved with rare unity. 

The United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON) became the operational base for the mediation secretariat that supported the African Union (AU) panel led by Kofi Annan, with the participation of former Presidents Kufuor, Mkapa and Kikwete. 

Behind closed doors, UN political-affairs experts and African negotiators worked side by side to design the framework that eventually produced the Grand Coalition Government and opened the road toward the 2010 Constitution. 

The writer is a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, and Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)