Just after the recent Kenyan national elections, a disruptive and revelatory book appeared: Stronger Than Faith: My Journey in the Quest for Justice in Repressive Kenya – 1958 – 2015 by Oduor Ong’wen. Just who is this author, and how does his life fit the provocative description in the book title? Prof. Yash Tandon, respected Ugandan policymaker who is renowned for a career opposing the viciously oppressive Idi Amin, wrote this about Ong’wen in the Introduction:

… In 2015 he [Ong’wen became] … the Executive Director of Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). The ODM is a centre-left political party – a grassroots people’s movement which was formed during the 2005 Kenyan constitutional referendum campaign and led by Raila Odinga, whose foreword to this book aptly captures the twists and turns of Kenya’s democratic struggles, at the centre of which Oduor was.

Do powerful interests in Kenya want to suppress this book? Why did it suddenly appear after the national elections? Is its fate safer now? Or potentially more disruptive?

Most striking in this voluminous memoir is Chapter 28, “The New Eating Chiefs,” which alleges more than twenty power-grabs, public thefts, and scams on Kenyan taxpayers by the outgoing administration. Lest these protests seem fake news promulgated by the defeated party, note that The Standard – the nation’s most respected newspaper in Nairobi – is serializing the book in its current issues – perhaps to counter fears that Ong’wen’s version of history will soon be suppressed by entrenched interests.

Kenyan politics – and geopolitics – interest me because before the Covid outbreak I was a resident in Kenya for two years, having gone there to support my wife’s work in wildlife conservation and child welfare. This residency occurred after years of trips between our US home and various ecotourism venues in East Africa.  Just before our decision to move there, the previous national election had taken place in 2017. The principal opponents for president were Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president and founder of the republic Jomo Kenyatta, and Ong’wen’s colleague Raila Odinga. Raila (Kenyans often use given names rather than surnames, even in formal writing) is a veteran politician with a reputation as a populist leftist. Uhuru is seen as more conservative and backed by entrenched interests. Uhuru, the incumbent, and Raila have been contending with each other for decades. Accusations of voter fraud have been common in Kenyan elections, but when Raila lost to Uhuru for the second time in 2017, concerns about corruption exploded as violence in the streets. Raila insisted so vehemently that the process was rigged that he held an “alternative swearing-in ceremony” in a public park, attended by a huge crowd.

If some of this sounds familiar, bear in mind that this cockeyed scenario in Kenya took place three years before the disruptive events of the 2020 US elections – well before many of my countrymen and I thought such events were possible here.

Parallels, although tempting, between US and Kenyan politics are not straightforward. Far from being an exemplar for our election-denying past president, in political philosophy, Raila might have been viewed as Kenya’s Bernie Sanders. And to make matters perhaps more confusing to Western observers, in 2018, after a year of prolonged disputes compounded by longstanding tribal unrest, Uhuru and Raila came together in what has since been termed “the Handshake Deal.” Besides affirming peace between the parties, the deal seemed to make his rival Uhuru’s new right-hand man – so much so that Uhuru must have agreed to back Raila for president in the next national election – which is just what he did in the one concluded in August.

So Raila was looking like he’d made a deal of either convenience or necessity with the establishment. His populist messages softened, but they didn’t disappear. Meanwhile, after another year, the third man at the top of the government – Uhuru’s deputy William Ruto – broke away from the ruling Jubilee Party and declared himself an independent.

Ruto, himself a political veteran who had previously held cabinet posts, had initially been groomed by Daniel arap Moi, the country’s long-serving president from 1978 to 2002, having served since Independence in 1963 as Jomo’s vice president. To this day, Moi is widely regarded by Kenyans as their most unashamedly corrupt leader. But in joining Uhuru’s government, Ruto disassociated himself from Moi.

In this last election, Ruto squared off against Raila. Ruto won by barely a percentage point. Raila once again cried fraud, but he nevertheless conceded after the Kenyan high court ruled his objections had no basis.

Raila recently pointed the finger at those responsible for his defeat:

Our election was not stolen by [Ruto’s coalition] Kenya Kwanza. It was an international conspiracy involving Britain and the United States. A former president of the USA who many Kenyans admired greatly was on [the] Smartmatic Board. (Raila Odinga quoted in Kenyan Lyrics, October 8, 2022).

So – here we are today – Raila is still an active voice in Kenyan politics and head of the Orange (ODM) party of which Ong’wen, author of this confessional book, is the director.

One might assert that Ruto’s hands are not clean. Since his swearing-in as the nation’s new chief executive, Ruto is acting like a reformer. Maybe he is one. Perhaps significantly, politicians from both the Moi and Kenyatta families lost their seats in Parliament.

But now Raila continues to spin the next installment of the conspiracy story. He keeps insisting that the vote was rigged against him. He further accuses Western powers of favoring Ruto over him, presumably because of Raila’s prior leftist positions. Raila is telling Kenyans that the world’s big-money interests want to manipulate the future of this fast-emerging economy, and he stands instead for regional control of resources and investment.

All during my stay there, I heard Kenyans in the coffee shops, taxis, markets – and especially when tongues let loose in the bars – repeat, “Corruption is the mother of Kenya.”

Now I live once again in Southern California, having returned just prior to the Covid outbreak.

Then in 2019, I began to look at the US political scene with Kenyan eyes. All the while, I have marveled at how fast economic development in Kenya is progressing. (And this is a factor in the persistent human-animal conflict that threatens the natural world everywhere and the health of the planet.)

I have speculated and still believe that Kenya is poised to become the Silicon Valley of East Africa.

With Ruto in place and the elections having been settled this time peaceably, I’d expect international investment there to boom. Apparently, the Biden administration concurs, as evidenced by the appointment of Meg Whitman, past CEO of Hewlett-Packard, as ambassador.

A fictional story of love, intrigue, conspiracy, and corruption in Kenya.