How sweet life must be for former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, a man who is constantly the prize? Tinga, as he is more famously called, never has to seek out anything or anyone. He is the one everyone looks for.
As he defended his latest handshake this past week, he said that a panicky President William Ruto had approached him to help tame the youth-led revolt against tax hikes last year. According to Tinga, the President came calling months later to broaden their ‘broad-based’ government, known in other circles as the ‘bread-based’ government.
The ‘bread’ borrows from the ‘mkate nusu’ days when Tinga shared half the government with the late former President Mwai Kibaki. It had to be a loaf, given that Kenya’s politics is all about eating.
Days earlier as he signed his Memorandum of Understanding with Ruto, which could see more opposition politicians have their turn to eat, Tinga implied that running for the African Union Commission chairperson position had not been his idea.
“I was approached by senior leaders of the continent who, when they saw that the position would become vacant, needed somebody with a pan-Africanist ideology to go and try to set that movement on the right path. They sent President (Olusegun) Obasanjo to me, to come and persuade me to run,” the former premier stated.
It is always the same story with Raila, who has unsuccessfully sought the presidency five times, each time claiming that it was the people who had implored him to run for office.
Tinga has claimed that his deal with Ruto, which he had long decided he would accept, was informed by “consultations” with his base. No other outcome would have resulted from consulting people who swore that if Baba were to say right, they would go right.
Tinga’s story reads like a tragicomedy. Born into relative privilege, he sweated his way out of his father’s shadow. He left Kenya in the early 1960s, just as he was learning to be a man, and learnt to survive in Germany alone.
He would return to Kenya in 1970 after earning qualifications in mechanical engineering or “welding”, depending on who you ask. Tinga joined the University of Nairobi’s teaching faculty. He loved teaching, but a rival, one which had been in his family for decades, would come.
Politics came calling and Tinga dove in. He has been in it for more than four decades, winning battles and losing as many. His recent loss was in Addis Ababa, served to him by Djiboutian Mahamoud Youssouf.
Tinga has taken his defeat better than his previous losses and has made no demands to open the AU servers. Perhaps it is because he knew a soft landing, another handshake, was coming. He is fond of those and perhaps holds the record for the most handshakes with sitting Heads of State.
Alarmed that the opposition veteran intends to keep shaking hands, some cheeky Kenyans propose to have caps on the number of handshakes one can have.
Each time he greets a hand and secures a spot in a “warm corner of the opposition”, he receives some perks. Five of his friends are dining in Cabinet, with others having a good time in Parliament.
What about Tinga, one may ask? Perhaps Deputy President Kithure Kindiki, whose job nowadays includes inviting Tinga on stage so that the latter may invite Ruto, should explain.
Stay informed. Subscribe to our newsletter
Tinga is considered a hero and traitor in equal measure. To his supporters, he is Baba, a name ordinarily reserved for the President (Baba wa Taifa).
But who is to say that Tinga has never been president?
In January 2018, he swore himself in as the “people’s president” at Uhuru Park but lost his way as he tried to access State House.
The former premier’s haters are less flattering. The few who exist in the lakeside like to call him ‘Omaya’, which translates to ‘I have been robbed’. Ruto, who also goes by Hustler, Zakayo, Kasongo and El-Chapo, will be happy to know that he is not the only one with unsavoury nicknames.
Tinga earned the little-known moniker courtesy of his consistent claim that he had been robbed of the presidency. Five times he has contested the presidency; four times he has come back singing: I have been robbed. Some within his backyard have often wondered loudly: “Why don’t you also steal?”
