The M23 rebel group was formed in 2012 as an offspring of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP). The group’s reason to wage war against the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is to protect the Congolese Tutsi and other ethnic communities in North and South Kivu from persecution and discrimination.  After 10 years of inactivity, the M23 has once again become a thorn in the flesh of the DRC government—especially in the province of North Kivu—by conquering territories and displacing populations in the process. According to the United Nations, over 200,000 Internally Displaced Persons have been forced to flee since March 2022 when the latest flare-up began. On June 21, the East African Community Heads of State agreed to send the East African Community Joint Regional Force to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help quell the fighting sparked by the re-emergence of the M23 rebel group. This was formalised through a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) signed on September 11 between DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and the EAC Secretary General Peter Mathuki.

The decision to set up the regional force is the first military deployment the EAC has undertaken since its reformation in 1999. According to the International Crisis Group, the initial plan indicated that the regional force would be made up of between 6,500 and 12,000 soldiers with a mandate to “contain, defeat and eradicate negative forces’’ in the eastern DRC. In addition, Kenya was to take the command role, to be stationed in Goma, North Kivu’s capital. The force would cover the four provinces of Haut-Uélé, Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu and the mandate was to last for an initial six months.

After months of uncertainty over the deployment of the regional force, on November 2nd 2022, Kenya became the first country to send troops to the DRC. This was followed by the announcement by Uganda and Burundi that they would be sending contingents. As the EAC deploys the force, reports on what exactly is the mandate of the regional force have been inconsistent. This being the first deployment by the EAC, its success and exit will rely heavily on the handover of responsibilities to an effective Armed Forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC). With incomplete security sector reforms, the FARDC remains as politicised, divided, and ineffective as ever. Considering this reality, an improvement seems unlikely in the short-term while the EAC regional force is in place. Therefore, there is a likelihood that the EAC force may end up extending its stay much longer than the initial guidelines provided. This will not be a surprise; AMISOM’s mandate in Somalia was an initial 6 months to 2 years before handover to the UN.

Historically, the AU and UN military intervention missions have been involved in cyclical internal conflicts; MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and missions in South Sudan, Central Africa Republic, Somalia, and Mali come to mind. No matter how precise and effective the interventions have been, they have never been the magic wand to resolve the underlying internal political challenges. They tend to prolong their stay, a perfect case being MONUSCO which was first deployed in 1999 and is still in the DRC.

There is a likelihood of the troops engaging in illegal smuggling to ‘’pay themselves’’, ending up becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.

As the EAC regional force continues to take shape, there are multiple underlying and interconnected challenges facing eastern DRC today. First, the M23 group is not the only armed group that is fighting in that region. According to the Kivu Security Tracker Report of 2021, more than 120 armed groups operate in the entire eastern DRC— in parts of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika. Generally, the conflict in the eastern DRC has been characterised by fragmentation among the rebel groups. Many of the groups identified by the KST report, have either been in existence for a long period or are splinter groups of the major groups. This makes it difficult to pinpoint the goals each group aims to achieve. More importantly, these armed groups are all driven by the need for survival which relies on extracting the rich mineral resources in the region and protecting their territories. Recent history has shown that outside intervention has been unsuccessful in addressing the security challenges and, therefore, the EAC regional force already has its work cut out.

Second, President Felix Tshisekedi has not given much needed attention and priority to the conflict in the east since coming to power. President Tshisekedi’s election remains contested, with allegations that it did not pass the democracy threshold test. His opponents believe that he was unduly announced as the winner due to the influence of former President Kabila. This has greatly contributed to his legitimacy being challenged and his influence reduced. As a result, his initial focus was geared towards managing the fledgling coalition he entered into with former President Joseph Kabila which ended up taking up much of his time. This might have distracted him from the much needed security sector reform. According to a January 2022 report by the Governance in Conflict Network, President Tshisekedi’s government has not undertaken a full and comprehensive security sector reform to improve capacity and efficiency.

This slow process of transforming the security sector is perhaps informed by the history that African presidents have with armies. As has been the norm, many African presidents have shown little interest in developing effective armies as they are viewed as potential threats to their hold on power. For instance, the 2013 peace deal signed between M23 and the Congolese authorities involved giving amnesty to the group members and reintegrating some of them into the FARDC. But President Tshisekedi never acted on the deal and according to reports, calls for talks have been ignored by Kinshasa. Faced with a re-election in 2023, is his inaction part of his strategy to get re-elected? Some analysts believe the current push to regionalise the conflict fits into the argument that whipping up nationalist sentiment is aimed at scoring political goals to gain legitimacy across the country. Thus, his recent focus and interest in the eastern DRC conflict may stem from the realisation that the elections are near and he needs an agenda around which to centre a rallying call for his campaign.

Third, the biggest elephant in the room remains the key objective of the EAC regional force being deployed to the eastern DRC. What are the key objectives of the countries that are contributing troops to the regional force? And what will be different from their previous involvement in the DRC? Each EAC member state has in one way or another deployed troops in the DRC. In 2021, President Tshisekedi granted Uganda authority to deploy its troops in Ituri and North Kivu. According to Kampala, the main aim of this deployment was to pursue the Allied Democratic Forces which were responsible for the increased bombings in Uganda. Along the same lines, President Tshisekedi allowed Burundi troops to enter the DRC to fight the RED-Tabara rebel group that is opposed to the Bujumbura government. In 2022, Kenya deployed around 200 soldiers to join MONUSCO under the Quick Reaction Force. Tanzania has its troops under the Force Intervention Brigade which is also part of the MONUSCO peacekeeping force. And finally, Rwanda has long held that the remnants of the 1994 genocide perpetrators, the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), still pose an existential threat to Kigali and thus the need to always intervene.

Recent history has shown that outside intervention has been unsuccessful in addressing the security challenges.

Dr Colin Robinson, a researcher on African militaries, argues that the foreign military interventions being witnessed in the DRC are more for the deeply entangled and vested interests of neighbouring countries than for the citizens of the DRC. Dr Robinson asks, “What do Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda want to achieve?” According to him, part of the agenda is not so much to make the eastern DRC peaceful but is an opportunity for the neighbouring countries to gain better access to the DRC’s rich resources. He contends that the deployment alone will not address the security situation in the eastern DRC unless the FARDC is transformed, saying that, as currently constituted, the FARDC often behaves just like any other splinter rebel group, exploiting the mineral resources and incapable of protecting the DRC’s territorial integrity. However, he also believes that transforming the FARDC to effectively function does not guarantee peace as this might force the neighbouring countries to support rebel groups in order to continue benefitting from exploiting the resources in the DRC.

The EAC member states contributing troops to the regional force will need to harmonise their various interests if they intend to achieve their goals. Otherwise, they will be fighting their separate wars for their interests under the EAC banner. Despite the agreement having Kenya assume the command, the country’s late entry into the DRC makes it difficult to see how Kampala, Bujumbura, Kigali and the FARDC will allow a newcomer to take over influence. Another challenge that has not been factored in is whether command of the force will rotate among the member states or whether it will be drawn from the country contributing the largest number of troops. There is need to address some of these teething problems if the regional force is to achieve its mandate.

Fourth, there have been debates about where the funding for the EAC regional force will come from. The EAC is not known for robust and timely contributions towards the running of its operations. In a recent address to the Kenya Parliament, Defence Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale said that Kenya was to fund its contingent to the tune of KSh4.5 billion (approximately US$37 million) in the first six months. Kenya is the largest economy in the region and can to some extent afford to fund its adventure in the DRC. However, bearing in mind that it has another commitment of troops in Somalia, the country may need additional support from other partners like the EU and the US. There is a high possibility that some troop-contributing countries may struggle to fund their troops in the long run. The risk with this is that there is a likelihood of the troops engaging in illegal smuggling to ‘’pay themselves’’, ending up becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.

On a positive note, the M23 seems to have accepted the calls for a ceasefire from the heads of state mini-summit under the Luanda process. This was followed by the group requesting to speak to the EAC-appointed facilitator, former President Uhuru Kenyatta. This is a timely call that should not be ignored as it will avert the possibility of violent action in addressing the conflict.

The EAC is not known for robust and timely contributions towards the running of its operations.

Finally, the intervention of the regional force should not be an isolated act but should be accompanied by a political process. The continued isolation of the M23 from the peace talks negates the whole principle of inclusivity and if indeed the EAC wants to send a signal that it can justify why the DRC joining the EAC was the best idea, there is a need to be magnanimous and to involve all the belligerent forces in the conflict. The perception that the EAC is taking sides by selecting rebel groups to invite to the peace talks only contributes to the misinformation pervading the eastern DRC that it is simply a Trojan Horse for neighbouring states to exploit the country’s riches.

Overall, the EAC’s decision to set up a regional force to intervene in the eastern DRC is a positive sign that it is asserting its security role and slowly transforming itself from a purely economically-driven integration bloc. There is an emerging regional security complex in the East African region whereby an intractable conflict such as the one witnessed in the eastern DRC can engulf the entire region. However, to achieve the much needed stability, one hopes that the administration in Kinshasa is ready to first galvanise its authority by becoming ready to govern in partnership with different actors in DRC. Second, it must work together with the neighbouring states and other partners to address the proliferation of armed groups in the country. Renewed political agreement among these competing groups and Kinshasa’s willingness to work together with its neighbours could be the game changer.

When African students and other black persons escaping Ukraine at the start of the Ukraine-Russia conflict were being ejected from exiting transport (trains and busses) and denied entry into neighbouring Poland, many Africans were enraged with the shameless display of racism. One of these Africans was a middle-aged man from Congo—must have been a graduate student—only recently settled in Germany. Seated inside a café at the Berlin central train station with five of his German and British friends, he exploded: “One wonders how they built all these things? From where did you get all this money? Look where we are, this Hauptbahnof [main train station] must have consumed a fortune. The vehicles you make? No way!” His monologue lasted a while as his friends listened either in agreement or disbelief: “This is our money,” he went on.  “This is why you never stop these civil wars on the continent only to treat us like sub-humans. But we will not stop coming, whatever the cost!” he declared. His voice sounded austere, choked with emotion. None of his friends volunteered an immediate response. Then one said, this Ukraine situation is embarrassing.

While the angry tirade was sparked by the treatment of Africans trying to escape a war zone, clearly, this man had thought about all this stuff for some time. He must have been educated or observant enough to make the connections between the extraction back home in the DRC, the endless violent wars, the resources in Europe (as coming from his home), and the racist treatment of his kindred who otherwise deserve some respect for sustaining the beautiful lifestyles and infrastructures of the western world. Had he listened to Mallence Bart-Williams’ viral TEDx Talk? The story of this Congolese man, whom I will call Tshibumba Matulu (after the painter Tshibumba Matulu that Dutch anthropologist, Johannes Fabian writes about in Remembering the Present) is the story of “the metropole and the periphery” that dependency theorists Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The last line of his vitriol is interesting enough in the sense that now, Africans are seeking to see the world as one whole and thus determined to move to the centre—follow up on and seek to enjoy their resources—at whatever cost. Indeed, despite the innumerable roadblocks (immigration laws, expensive and convoluted visa processes, slave traders in the Maghreb, drowning in the Mediterranean, rank racism, and Islamophobia in the western world), Africans are moving to the centre, to the metropole, en masse. They are determined to follow up on their resources.

This is the story of both the open and disguised violence of neoliberalism, where Africa is heavily mined on the cheap, exploited through unequal exchange, climate/conservation colonialism, with the proceeds coming from African human and natural resources being stolen through inexplicable claims of value addition. This point of view has been recently, succinctly and loudly expressed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in her fight with French President Emmanuel Macron over immigration policies in Europe. Known for her anti-immigrant policies, Meloni’s (selfish) position is that if the French stopped stealing resources from 14 African countries through the clearly colonial and extortionist CFA, Africans would not be forced to make the dangerous journeys to Europe (where, by implication, they come to follow up on their resources, which are violently extracted leaving behind absolute poverty and suffering). In that viral clip doing the rounds across the globe, Meloni concludes that the solution to stop Africans from moving from their country to Europe is to leave them alone and have them receive the full benefit of their God-given resources:

So, the solution is not to take Africans and bring them to Europe, the solution is to free Africa from certain Europeans [especially France] who exploit it and allow these people to live off what they have.

While this message seemed directed at the French, the spread of (both violent and structural) capitalism across the African continent is real and threatening. With the collapse of the African economies about 30 years ago (via structural adjustment programmes), where foreign-owned companies returned under the neoliberal order and took over Africa’s major resources or the pillars upon which these economies stood—mineral resources (gold, oil, coffee, diamonds), banking, telecommunications, selling of agricultural products which used to be a function of cooperatives and direct government help—the continent has been left in a clear condition of morbidity. The bold choice, which I argue should be seen as revolutionary, is to move to the centre and demand the benefits of the resources that have been endlessly stolen from the continent, violently and through disguised extractivist structures.

***

Being a Congolese from Goma, Tshibumba Matulu must have witnessed the scramble for Congolese resources by the rich and mighty of the western world very up-close and personal—Dan Gertler International (DGI), Glencore Plc. and Alain Goetz, all of whom have a strong foothold in the country’s mining sector. These multinational companies own almost all the mining sites in the DRC, and have been implicated in the unending violence in the country, which is connected to the ways in which resources are mined. Take South Sudan as the other example where Glencore has a strong foothold in South Sudanese oil. In early November 2022, Glencore Plc. executives were found guilty of bribing the South Sudanese leadership—starting just four weeks after the country’s independence—as “they sought to profit from political turmoil . . . they inserted themselves into government-to-government deals that had been negotiated at preferential rates”.  The Africa Progress Panel estimated that in a period of two years (2010-2012), DRC lost US$1.3 billion in asset sales to DGI. A 2021 study showed that DRC risked losing US$3.71 billion to controversial Israeli businessman Dan Gertler. This is a lot of money—which ends up in Israel where Gertler is one of the richest men and has been controversially implicated in a thousand scandals in Congo. To understand the fact that modern extraction follows a colonial model, one has to appreciate the fact that colonialism’s extraction was and is always outsourced to corporations. King Leopold operated in his individual capacity as a businessman, using his loot to build estates, infrastructures and palaces in Belgium (and not on the African continent). That an independent businessman, Dan Gertler, would promise guns to a government and actually deliver on his promise exposes the ways in which governments in the west outsource businessmen to colonise Africa on their behalf.

These multinational companies own almost all the mining sites in the DRC, and have been implicated in the unending violence in the country.

Dependency theory so succinctly exposed the roots and execution of underdevelopment in Black Africa, which is, in brief, resources being extracted on the cheap from the periphery (Africa), to be moved and generate more value in the metropole. If these resources ever come back to the continent (Latin America or Africa), they return more expensively. In this periphery-metropole dichotomy, endless capitalist exploitation (which mostly thrives on violence) not only depletes resources and opportunities at the periphery, but also makes life unliveable and unbearable. It then enacts tougher controls to keep the peoples of the periphery at the periphery so that they do not move to the metropole and overwhelm its amenities. This is why African journeys to the metropole are not only dangerous, but are also defined by more drama that tends to generate an incredible amount of grim news broadcasts. Dependency theory does not explicitly follow up on the revolutionary journeys where the exploited—like Tshibumba Matulu—painstakingly seek the benefits of their resources in the metropole. This is perhaps because it pursued another route out of this colonial conundrum, which was to de-link the metropole from the periphery.

Capitalism’s violence, revolutionary journeys

Transiting through airports in Dubai or Doha, one will encounter East African languages, especially Kiswahili and Luganda. Manning a counter in twos or threes, staff tend to speak to each other in their languages. While duty stations may not be allocated depending on the mutual native linguistic intelligibility between workers, since all speak English, somehow, workers from the same Great Lakes linguistic community find themselves together. That the numbers of labour migrants moving to the Middle East have soared over the past years is not just testament to the availability of job opportunities in the Middle East, but also to the dire conditions in which they live in their countries—conditions made difficult by the capitalist neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, and in some cases by conflict (especially in Northern Uganda, Karamoja, Turkana areas, South Sudan and Somalia). Middle Eastern salaries are not the greatest attraction as they range between US$600 and US$900 depending on seniority (far much less for domestic work). But that the same amounts cannot be earned back home speaks more to the dire conditions at home.

Data from the Uganda Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development published in the Daily Monitor, indicates that for the last six years (2016-2022), an average of 24,086 Ugandans left the country annually in search of employment, especially in the Middle East. What makes conditions so hostile in the Great Lakes Region?  Besides Somalia and Central African Republic—where there is outright violence—why is the scale of movement of young people in particular so high in the Great Lakes region? It is the ravages of both internal capitalism (by the petty bourgeoisies) and foreign capital moving from South Africa northwards, but also coming from Europe and North America—and China exploiting the neoliberal environment. This is evident in cases of land grabbing, forced evictions, refugee crises caused by resource wars, especially in DRC and South Sudan, and the terrible business environment in the region.

Dependency theory does not explicitly follow up on the revolutionary journeys where the exploited painstakingly seek the benefits of their resources in the metropole.

Theoretically and practically, without the violence of the state and other related state actors, it is difficult for capitalism to reproduce itself.  States do not only set the conditions under which extraction occurs (such as banking regimes, neoliberal regimes), but they are also ready to commit violence on the exploited. In Uganda, cases of land grabbing by local capitalists have made land ownership and agriculture difficult. In other cases, collusion between the state and foreign capitalists to evict peasants off their lands is causing first, rural urban-migration, and then journeys abroad. Among the most memorable cases is that of the 2001 evictions in Mubende where the German coffee company Neumann Gruppe used outright violence (with the help of the state), including shooting, burning houses and animals, and maiming people to create way for a coffee plantation. Over 2,000 families remain destitute and are yet to find justice. Faced with mass unemployment, extortionist banking regimes with high interest rates that have stymied creativity and made business difficult across East Africa, many young people struggle to start thriving businesses.

Violent evictions have also taken place in Kenya and Tanzania to create way for capitalist expansion or capitalist ostentation (Franz Fanon warned that political elites would turn the continent into an entertainment centre for foreign capitalists). This is the story in Samburu where evictions have taken place to create way for American charities. It is the story of the green colonialism that led to the Ogiek and Maasai evictions from the Mau Forest in the name of conservation. Guillaume Blanc’s recently published book, The Invention of Green Colonialism, demonstrates how the rhetoric of conservation (by colonially founded organisations including UNESCO, WWF, IUCN) perpetuates a colonial model of conservation that privileges animals and plants over humans. While capitalists in Europe and North America—consuming endlessly—have destroyed nature, they have maintained a mythical, fictionalised Eden in Africa, insisting that peasants, who have developed ways of coexisting with nature, who eat very little meat, have neither cars, nor computers nor smartphones, are a danger to the environment. They are evicted from huge swathes of land that are then reserved for white people to hunt and gaze at wild animals.

Away from the forests and the plains, the poor are also being “cleansed” from the capital cities. The 2021 Mukuru Kwa Njega eviction in Nairobi that left 40,000 people homeless is etched in the memories of Kenyans. In what Mwaura Mwangi aptly termed “Demolition Colonialism”, thousands of poor Nairobians have had their houses demolished so that the rich can enjoy easy transit. This is not anti-development position, but rather a reading that seeks to recognise the rights of the poor, and make visible the history of slums in major cities across Africa.

Theoretically and practically, without the violence of the state and other related state actors, it is difficult for capitalism to reproduce itself.

Then come the wars in the DRC, Somalia, CAR, and South Sudan—a product of business dealings by multinationals including Glencore and CNOOC, among others— that have led to an increase in refugees numbers, now reaching 2.3 million people according to UNHCR. In his book Saviours and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani implicates CNOOC and ExxonMobil in protecting oil wells using different rebel groups in the Sudan-South Sudan conflict. The end product of these clandestine oil dealings are the over 1.5 million refugees hosted in Uganda, making it the country with the largest number of refugees in the world. The influx of people escaping resource-related conflicts has overwhelmed resources in the Great Lakes region.  And while many of the refugees will stay in the region, many others are making the journey to the Middle East, to Europe and to North America.

With all this aggressive capitalist expansion manifesting in different forms, the African in the Great Lakes (and other places on the continent) is left with no choice but to make the journey to Europe and to North America. I want to read these journeys not just as migration, but as revolution. They might seem puny, unorganised and migrating out of desperate need, but Africans are moving to the centre to benefit from the resources that continue to be extracted from their continent. This is how the extractors perceive these journeys—not as migration, but as revolution—which explains why there are so many roadblocks along the way.

The Original sin

A seasoned Nairobi politician, Timothy Wanyonyi had cut a niche for himself in the Nairobi governor’s race that was filled with a dozen candidates who had up to that point not quite captured the imagination of Nairobians. Some candidates were facing questions over their academic qualifications while others were without a well-defined public profile. In that field Wanyonyi, an experienced Nairobi politician, stood out. On 19th April, the Westlands MP’s campaign team was canvasing for him in Kawangware. They had sent pictures and videos to news teams seeking coverage. But that evening their candidate would receive a phone call to attend a meeting at State House Nairobi that would put an end to his campaign. Before Tim made his way to State House, insiders around President Uhuru Kenyatta told reporters that Wanyonyi was out of the Nairobi governor’s race.

Wanyonyi’s rallying call “Si Mimi, ni Sisi”—a spin on US Senator Bernie Sanders’ “Not me. Us” 2020 presidential campaign slogan—distinguished him as a candidate who understood the anxieties of Nairobians. “They were looking for someone who would see the city as a home first, before seeing it as a business centre,” one of his political consultants told me. But the Azimio coalition to which Wanyonyi’s ODM party belonged was very broad, with several centres of power that didn’t take into account—or maybe didn’t care about— Nairobi’s political landscape. Wanyonyi’s candidacy was hastily sacrificed at the altar of the coalition’s politics. Former President Uhuru Kenyatta, the coalition’s chairman, had prevailed on Raila Odinga, its presidential candidate, to essentially leave Nairobi to Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party in exchange for ODM picking the presidential candidate.

That was the only consideration on the table.

However, it was a miscalculation by the coalition. Azimio failed to appreciate the complex matrix that is a presidential election in Kenya. While the top ticket affects the races downstream, it can be argued that the reverse is also true. It is ironic that Raila Odinga, a power broker and a master of coalition building who was running for presidency for the fifth time, was choosing to ignore these principles. His own ascension in politics had been based on building a machine—ODM—that he used carefully during every election cycle. Yet in this election he was killing his own party and brand. The Azimio La Umoja coalition party was built as a party of parties that would be the vehicle Raila would use to contest the presidency. However, the constituent parties were free to sponsor parliamentary candidates. It sounded like a good idea on paper but it created friction as the parties found themselves in competition everywhere. To keep Azimio from fracturing both itself and its votes, the idea of “zoning”—having weaker candidates step down for stronger ones, essentially carving out exclusive zones for parties—gained traction, and would itself lead to major fall-outs, even after it was adopted as official Azimio policy in June.

However, beyond the zoning controversy, Wanyonyi’s candidacy served as a marker for a key block of Odinga voters—the Luhya—assuring them of their place within the Azimio coalition. Luhya voters have been Odinga’s insurance policy during his last three presidential runs. With Nyanza and the four western Kenya counties of Kakamega, Bungoma, Vihiga and Busia in his back pocket, he would be free to pick up other regions. Odinga claimed 71 per cent of the Luhya bloc in 2017 but this time, western voters were feeling jittery about the new political arrangements.

There is also another consideration. The Luhya voting bloc in Nairobi is also significant, and Odinga had carried the capital in his previous three presidential runs. The Nairobi electoral map is largely organized around five big groups: the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kamba, and Kisii. For the ODM party, having a combination of a Luo-Luhya voting bloc in Nairobi has enabled Odinga to take the city and to be a force to reckon with.

However, it appeared that all these factors were of no importance in 2022. So, Tim Wanyonyi was forced out of the race. He protested. Or attempted to. Western Kenya voters were furious, but who cared?

Miscalculation

The morning after the State House meeting, a group calling themselves Luhya professionals had strong words for both Odinga and Azimio.

“We refuse to be used as a ladder for other political expediencies whenever there is an election,” Philip Kisia, who was the chairman of this loose “professional group” said during a press conference that paraded the faces of political players from the Luhya community. The community had “irreducible minimum” and would not allow itself to “to be used again this time.” Other speakers at that press conference—including ODM Secretary General Edwin Sifuna—laid claim to what they called the place of the Luhya community in Nairobi. The political relationship between Luhyas and Luos has not been without tensions; in the aftermath of the opposition’s unravelling in the 90s, Michael Kijana Wamalwa and Raila Odinga fought for supremacy within the Ford Kenya party. Wamalwa believed the throne left by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was his for the taking. However, Odinga’s son, Raila, mounted a challenge for the control of the party, eventually leaving Ford Kenya to build his own party, the National Development Party (NDP). The Luhya-Luo relationship was broken. Luhya sentiment was that, having been faithful to Odinga’s father, it was time for Wamalwa to lead the opposition.

These old political wounds have flared up during every election cycle, and Raila Odinga has worked for decades to reassure the voting bloc and bury the hatchet. This time, however, he was different. He didn’t seem to care about those fragile egos. After the press conference, a strategist in Odinga’s camp wondered aloud, “Who will they [Luhyas] vote for?”

The next 21 days were to be pivotal for Kenya’s presidential election. Azimio moved on and introduced Polycarp Igathe as their candidate for Nairobi. A former deputy governor in Nairobi who had quit just months after taking office, Igathe is well known for his C-suite jobs and intimate links to the Kenyan political elite. His selection, though, played perfectly into the rival Kenya Kwanza coalition’s “hustlers vs dynasties” narrative which sought to frame the 2022 elections as a contest between the political families that have dominated Kenya’s politics and economy since independence. The sons of a former vice president and president respectively, Odinga and Uhuru were branded as dynasties while the then deputy president claimed for himself the title of “hustler”.

These old political wounds have flared up during every election cycle, and Raila Odinga has worked for decades to reassure the voting bloc and bury the hatchet.

But, William Ruto’s side also saw something else in that moment—an opportunity to get a chunk of the important Luhya vote. Ruto first entered into a coalition with Musalia Mudavadi, selling their alliance as a “partnership of equals”, and then followed that up with the offer of a Luhya gubernatorial candidate to Nairobians in the name of Senator Johnson Koskei Sakaja.

Meanwhile, Wanyonyi’s half-brother, the current Speaker of the National Assembly, Moses Wetangula, was a principle in Ruto’s camp. Up to this point, Wetangula had struggled to find a coherent message to sell Ruto’s candidacy to the Luhya nation. But, with his brother being shafted by Azimio, Wetangula saw a political opening; he quickly called a press conference and complained bitterly about the “unfair Odinga” whom he said the Luhya community would not support for “denying their son a ticket to run for the seat of the governor of Nairobi”. His press conference went almost unnoticed and it is not even clear if Azimio took notice of the political significance of Wetangula’s protestations.

Azimio had offered their opponents an inroad into western Kenya politics and Ruto wasted little time trying turn a key Odinga voting bloc. With Sakaja confirmed as the Kenya Kwanza candidate for the Nairobi governor’s race, Wetangula and Kenya Kwanza made Western Kenya a centrepiece of their path to presidency. Tim Wanyonyi was presented as a martyr. The Ford Kenya leader took to all the radio stations, taking calls or sending emissaries, to declare Odinga’s betrayal. In the days and weeks that followed, William Ruto would make a dozen more visits to Luhyaland than his rival, assuring the voters that there would be a central place reserved for them in his administration. In contrast, on a visit to western Kenya, Raila Odinga expressed anger that an opinion poll had shown him trailing Ruto in Bungoma. “He is at nearly 60 per cent and I am at 40 per cent. Shame on you people! Shame on you people! Shame on you!” he told the crowd. He would eventually lose Bungoma and Trans Nzoia to William Ruto.

To be sure, Odinga won western Kenya with 55 per cent of the vote, but William Ruto had 45 per cent, enough to light his path to the presidency. He would repeat the same feat in Nairobi and coast regions, traditionally Odinga strongholds where he would have expected to bag upwards of 60 per cent of the vote. Azimio modelling had put these regions in Raila’s column but Kenya Kwanza took advantage of the mistake-prone Odinga. And wherever Odinga blundered, Ruto mopped up. As Speaker, Wetangula is today the third most powerful man in in the country. Yet just four years ago, he was an Odinga ally who had been stripped off his duties as a minority leader in the Senate by Odinga’s ODM party. At the time he warned that the divorce “would be messy, it would be noisy, it would be unhelpful, it would not be easy, it would have casualties”. It was the first of many political blunders that Odinga would make.

Unforced errors

Looking back, Odinga’s 2022 run for the presidency had all the hallmarks of a campaign that didn’t know what it didn’t know; it was filled with assumptions, and sometimes made the wrong judgment calls. By handing over his backyard to Ruto and choosing to ally with President Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila ended up being branded a “state project”.

In 2005, Odinga had used the momentum generated by his successful campaign in a referendum against Mwai Kibaki’s attempt to foist on the country a bastardized version of the constitution negotiated in Bomas to launch early campaigns for his 2007 presidential run. However, this time, as the courts hamstrung his attempt to launch the BBI referendum, Ruto was already off to the races, having begun his presidential campaign three years early.

“He is at nearly 60 per cent and I am at 40 per cent. Shame on you people! Shame on you people! Shame on you!”

With the rejection of constitutional changes, which were found to be deeply unpopular among many Kenyans, Odinga was finally in a strange place, a politician now out of touch, defending an unpopular government, a stranger to his own political base. The failure of BBI as a political tool was really the consequence of Odinga’s and Kenyatta’s inability to understand the ever-changing Kenyan political landscape. Numerous times they just seemed to not know how to deal with the dynamism of William Ruto. He would shape-shift, change the national conversation, and nothing they threw at him seemed to stick, including, corruption allegations. For a politician who created the branding of opponents as his tool, Odinga had finally been branded and it stuck.

Bow out

In the final day of the campaigns, both camps chose Nairobi to make their final submissions. Azimio chose Kasarani stadium. It was, as expected, full of colour, with a Tanzanian celebrity musician, Diamond Platnumz, brought in to boot. Supporters were treated to rushed speeches by politicians who had somewhere else to be. Azimio concluded its final submission early and the speeches by Odinga and his running mate, Martha Karua, weren’t exactly a rallying call. It was as if they were happy to be put out of their pain as they quickly stepped off the stage and left the stadium. In contrast, Ruto’s final submission was filled with speeches of fury by politicians angered by “state capture” and the “failing economy”. Speaker after speaker roused the audience with their defiant messages. They ended the meeting an hour before the end of IEBC campaign deadline. A video soon appeared online of William Ruto sprinting across the Wilson airport runway to catch a chopper and make it to one final rally in central Kenya before the IEBC’s 6 p.m. campaign deadline.

Pictures of the deputy president on top of a car at dusk in markets in Kiambu were the last images of his campaign to be shared on social media. Ruto won because he wanted the presidency more than Odinga and was willing to work twice as hard as both Odinga and Kenyatta.