Azimio stares at tricky unity test if it wins contest for State House

President Uhuru Kenyatta and ODM party leader Raila Odinga consult after attending the first Azimio council meeting at KICC, Nairobi.  [David Gichuru, Standard]

Long before anyone could dream of Raila Odinga’s Azimio la Umoja–One Kenya Coalition, his father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was already talking of another Azimio, in the mid-1960s. Irreconcilable ideological differences between the elder Odinga and President Jomo Kenyatta gave birth to the left leaning Kenya People’s Union (KPU), with Azimio la Wananchi as its rallying call. 

The citizens, Odinga asserted, were unhappy with the direction the country was taking. The Kenyatta government had stepped into the shoes of the colonial masters and the country was not yet independent. It needed to be liberated a second time, now from the liberators. Hence the clarion call for a second liberation as the people’s call – Azimio la Wananchi.  Fifty-seven years on, his son, Raila, is rallying a slew of the population around what he calls the third liberation. The agenda is economic liberation, he says, going right back to the same theme and concerns that engaged his father and KPU in the 1960s.

The question that is likely to travel into history, beyond the present political dynamics, will be whether Raila’s Azimio was truly about economic liberation, as he says, or whether it was about political succession and capture of power. When Raila and President Uhuru Kenyatta for the first time brought into the open the process that has morphed into the entity that is today known as Azimio la Umoja–One Kenya Coalition, they stated that their focus had nothing to do with politics, and especially not the politics of Uhuru succession.