HOW ODM WAS FORMED CHAPTER 5
After the defeat of KANU, i resigned myself to a fairly quiet and private life, especially during the period 2003 to 2005. I spent most of the time reorganizing personal issues. I later decamped to LDP during a thanksgiving ceremony after Moody Awori was named Vice President. I had been persuaded by my Western colleagues to decamp and it had been suggested i use the ceremony to state my position. I received a standing ovation when i declared that i was ready to denounce KANU and cross over to the other side.
The youth wingers in the ruling coalition were feeling shortchanged probably because they thought Kibaki would name someone a bit younger for the position of Vice President and also FORD Kenya felt shortchanged because they thought the President would name someone from the Party since Kijana Wamalwa who held that position until his demise came from the Party. people had began agitating for a new constitution since while on the campaign trail, the NARC Government had promised to deliver a new constitution within the first one hundred days.
The idea of a new constitution had only been appealing to the extent that they were out of power but now that they were in power, they felt like the best thing was to forget about the constitution and move on. Things had deteriorated very steadily between the Mt Kenya side of Government and the Raila Odinga fronted “rest of the country” to the extent that Kenya’s third President was a worried man. The whole constitutional Saga went hand in glove with the perception of betrayal of Raila Odinga and the LDP squad in Narc by Mwai Kibaki and the LDP battalion.
Raila should have been named the Prime Minister in the Kibaki Cabinaet, so the story went. How Kibaki ever changed his mind, nobody knew. Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) announced that the referendum would take place on 21 November 2005. The split in the Kibaki Government was complete and irreconcilable as made by the manifest by the rift in the campaigns. We had seven Ministers on our side. The referendum campaign was an expensive affair. We had no special funds as such. We, the leaders had to dig deep in our pockets for the funds. You raided your savings and assets to fund the campaign rallies, fuel vehicles and procure publicity materials. Recall i was out of formal employment. The victory was decisive. We garnered 58 percent of the votes.
The president responded by an instant dismissal of rebellious ministers and strengthening of his alliance with Ford people and KANU rebels who had abandoned Uhuru and Ruto. The reality shook the Kibaki Government to its very roots. He looked set to lose the election in 2007.The defeat woke him up to the reality that he would perhaps need to do things differently in the elections, if he hoped to win. While on the campaign trail, we had agreed that Najib Balala would test the waters at a rally in Kisumu by suggesting that the orange campaigns transform into a political party, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).
The idea was enthusiastically received everywhere we went. The huge fallacy was the thought that the situation would hold but soon things began to change. One of the clearest challenges was the drifting away of the leader of the opposition Uhuru Kenyatta. Uhuru had asked hard questions to his community, why is it that the referendum had been lost everywhere except the Central region, did they sincerely believe they would thrive alone at the expense of everybody in the country.
Uhuru sounded like an organized true statesman who was against the position his tribe was taking on National politics but he could not run away from his people. He must also have been doing some heavy soul searching. For how long would he remain a kikuyu political outsider. Did he have a meaningful political future if he did not return home and remained in the opposition?. The more we embraced the thought that Kibaki must go, the more he seemed distant. It was just a question of time before Uhuru would decamp and go back home. This angered his Party Secretary General William Ruto, to no mean end. Ruto often displayed open impatience with Uhuru, whom he accused of dragging back the democratization process in ODM, Eventually, Uhuru fled.