PRESIDENTIAL CAUCUS SPEECH : HON RAILA ODINGA
Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi, May 6, 2007
YOUR Excellencies, Honourable Members of Parliament, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I, Raila Amolo Odinga, hereby submit my application to the people of Kenya for the position of president, which shall fall vacant later this year.
IT was our forefathers who coined and encapsulated the Kenyan Dream, at the time our country became an independent nation in 1963. They expressed the Dream in the words of our national anthem:
“Justice be our shield and defender.
May we dwell in unity, peace and liberty;
Plenty be found within our borders.”
Sadly, today, more than 43 years later, we are further from realising the Dream of our forefathers than we were at Independence.
We all know we want to change this. We want to end the way our leaders have used and abused us for the past four decades.
We confirmed this during the referendum on the Constitution, when the people of this nation rose up in a tremendous swell of humanity and said, ‘No’ to the Wako Draft, which had sought to entrench and expand executive power.
It will be a similarly crucial decision when the members of the Orange Democratic Movement-Kenya choose their flag-bearer for the 2007 general election.
It will be a crucial decision because it will affect every Kenyan. It will be important not only for the party, which must be strong and principled, but also for the country.
Almost every Kenyan today is affected by poverty, insecurity, poor education, inadequate health services, lack of social welfare programmes, huge disparities in income, absence of opportunity, disempowerment and consequent hopelessness and despair.
We have been spinning out of control on a downward spiral for more than 40 years. Experts have described Kenya as “a country of great potential but a disappointing under-achiever”!
At Independence, Kenya’s economy was at par with that of South Korea. All the major economic indicators in the two nations – GDP, per capita income, literacy, industrialisation – were comparable.
Forty-three years down the road, the South Korean economy is 40 times the size of Kenya’s.
Forty times! Not double, or triple, or even ten times, but 40 times larger.
What did the South Koreans do right that Kenyans did wrong? We believe we have the answer to that question.
The answer has its beginnings in those days, many decades ago, immediately after Independence, when the united nationalist movement, which had fought for and won our freedom from colonial rule, fractured.
It fractured down a fault line that divided two diametrically opposed forces, two contrasting ideologies.
In simple terms, one of those two ideologies wanted retention of the colonial status quo. That ideological group was the one that was forming government policy. The new government’s policies were based on maximising growth immediately and taking care of equitable distribution later.
This meant investing in those parts of the country that were already prosperous, due to their proximity to the centre of colonial power. The policy was justified with the explanation that, as the nation became more prosperous, the benefits would trickle down to everyone.
The promised trickle-down effect has never happened. Families who were poor then have become poorer. Millions of Kenyans have since been born into poverty – grinding poverty that defines and dogs their lives from birth to death, and from which there appears no chance of escape.
The policies pursued by successive regimes since Independence have not facilitated mobilisation of our natural and human resources for faster economic growth in tandem with the increased population. Instead, the national cake has been shrinking.
During the colonial years, when the nationalist movement was fighting against repressive colonial structures, opposition politics had always been portrayed as an illegitimate activity, and those involved had been criminalised and condemned.
After Independence, the new leaders, facing opposition from those whose concern for the poor was threatening their own acquisition of wealth, lost no time in adopting and employing the same repressive tactics that were its colonial heritage.
The struggle in our nation has continued. It has taken different turns at different times in our history but it has never ended. It has been a consistent quest for development, equality and fair sharing of our nation’s wealth.
We have sought and worked for a new Constitution, against the efforts of many of our elitist leaders – who still seek, just like those leaders after Independence, to protect their powerful and privileged positions.
Our national Constitution was first eroded when the post of prime minister, which we had at Independence, was abolished a year later, in order to vest greater power in the presidency.
Until that time, we had had two legislatures within our parliament, the House, which we retain today, and the Senate. The Senate was there to provide checks and balances on the work of the House.
These checks and balances disappeared as the Senate was discarded – the first of many amendments to the Constitution that not only increased presidential power and created an imperial presidency but also emasculated all the other institutions of government, including the House itself and the judiciary.
What followed was cronyism, where the president appointed only his friends, tribalism, where the president appointed only his tribe, nepotism, where the president appointed only his relatives, and the primitive accumulation of wealth through corruption by these few at the expense of the many with nothing.
This sorry state of affairs was made infinitely worse with the publication and implementation of the Ndegwa Commission Report of 1971, which allowed civil servants also to engage in private business. This in effect legalised and institutionalised conflict of interest within the civil service, which led to gross inefficiency and exploitation of the system for personal gain.
This is something that has destroyed any chance of progress in the provision of public services in Kenya and has dramatically affected the lives of every Kenyan today.
We have witnessed grand larceny on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the field of government procurement, and particularly regarding infrastructure, defence and government supplies. This corruption has fleeced the country of billions and billions of shillings. Where a lot of this money has gone is more than evident in the way senior civil servants and military personnel retire from public service as multi-billionaires.
To paraphrase the immortal words of the late JM Kariuki: We did not attain independence to have a country of 1,000 millionaires and 34 million beggars.
This kind of conflict of interest drew the alarm and dismay of some of our early leaders. They opposed what was happening and stood up for the poor of Kenya – and many of these opponents of looting died in their attempts to defend their poverty-stricken fellow countrymen and women.
It is against this background of conflict of interest in many areas of public life that we can seek and find explanations for the assassinations of such patriots as Pio Gama Pinto in 1965; of Tom Mboya in 1969; of those who died in the Kisumu massacre on October 25, 1969; of JM Kariuki, in 1975; of Robert Ouko in 1991; and of Odhiambo Mbai, in 2005.
It is against this background that we can seek and find explanations for the arrest and detention without trial of many Kenyans, including Kenneth Matiba, Charles Rubia and myself in 1990. Those detained over the years included university lecturers, students, lawyers, law enforcement officers, journalists, MPs, private citizens. Their names, and the names of many other Kenyans – some of them no longer with us – make up the roll call of those who suffered in the cause of the Second Liberation of this country.
It would be a terrible indictment of this country if their suffering remained forever in vain.
Those of us who worked for the Second Liberation formed the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy in 1991. That group suffered a split and most of us who had been there from the start moved on into Ford-Kenya. When it became clear there, again, that some of our original principles were being subsumed by personal ambition, those of us of like mind became members of the National Development Party, which eventually went into a merger with the then ruling party, Kanu.
Ultimately, we formed the National Rainbow Coalition, in the hope that this would prove a powerful alliance that would finally set us back on the right path in our journey towards the Kenyan Dream.
Everything was anchored on that Dream. We wanted to achieve the Kenyan Dream, and we needed a legal framework for its realisation. The emphasis was on review and reform of the constitutional architecture that underpinned our nation. We needed a new Constitution, one that would replace the old, colonial-inspired edifice that had suffered a patchwork of amendments over the years – all designed to keep one party in power. A new Constitution was the conditione sine qua non of the way forward.
Unfortunately, we were shortchanged by a few opportunistic elements – self-seekers, relics of the old order, people who could not change.
But we HAVE to change. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The ultimate measure of a [person] is not where he [or she] stands in moments of comfort, but where he [or she] stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
I believe, as Mahatma Gandhi before me that “progress depends on not repeating the past and that, if we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history.”
Gandhi also cautioned us against seven ills that we must guard against lest we are destroyed as a country. These are:
• politics without principle;
• pleasure without conscience;
• wealth without work;
• knowledge without character;
• business without morality;
• science without humanity,
• worship without sacrifice.
I am deeply committed to a new Constitution and a parliamentary system of government, as contained in the Bomas Draft. The USA is the only country among the major western powers with a presidential system. All the rest are parliamentary democracies, and this is what we must aim for in Kenya.
We must remove power from the power brokers and give it back to the people of this country, so that the people have a real say in their destiny, and are not just dispensable pawns in a complicated game being played by our leaders to rules that only they know.
Presidential systems are associated with lower public spending and fewer benefits for the people, and this eventually results in the kind of inequality that characterises our system. That is what I will change. Power-sharing in a people-driven and consultative process is the way forward, along with devolution of power, as provided for in the Bomas Draft. This is something I am 100 per cent committed to.
Concomitant with the ideals contained in the Bomas Draft is dual citizenship for Kenyans. Kenyans abroad remit billions of shillings – far more than our country earns from foreign aid – yet, Kenyans living abroad are not recognised and bestowed with the rights all citizens must have, including the right to vote. My government will change that.
I believe that, for our country, we need a social-market economy – also christened the Third Way. It is the system best suited to achieving faster socio-economic development and equitable distribution of the fruits of our labour.
The private sector must be promoted as the engine for more efficient wealth-creation, while ensuring equity in the distribution of the wealth generated by our efforts.
My government will concentrate on creating a favourable environment for the private sector to prosper. Under a clear privatisation policy, government will quickly exit from profitable and well-managed companies and cede ownership to the Kenyan people.
My government will only intervene in enterprises where public effort is required for restructuring, and eventually privatising, or by providing seed capital in investments that are needed, but where the risk-reward ratio is too high for the private sector alone. Where such intervention is necessary, my government will exit at maturity of the investment.
Above all, in order to be able to move from the clutches of poverty, our economy must grow in double-digit figures, and as it does so, the accruing benefits must be equitably distributed among our people. My team of skilled economists, men and women selected on merit alone, will oversee the re-engineering of our economy to end the vicious circle of “private affluence and public squalor”.
We will invest heavily in the development of people-power, emulating those countries whose success has grown beyond measure as their developed people-power drives their economies.
And to move the economy forward, we must immediately invest heavily in three things:
• number one, infrastructure!
• number two, infrastructure!
• number three, infrastructure!
In this regard, we will:
• expand and modernise the railway system;
• sustain ongoing reforms to improve telecommunications;
• convert Mombasa port into a free port, construct another port at Lamu, and modernise the inland port at Kisumu;
• expand and elevate to international airport status Kisumu, Malindi and Wajir’s facilities, as well as expanding and improving those at Isiolo, Lamu and Lodwar up to full airport status;
• rehabilitate and expand our road network, building a dual carriageway from Mombasa to Malaba/Busia;
• construct water-supply and conservation systems for irrigation and industrial, domestic and livestock usage;
• improve the infrastructure in all our cities and major towns.
The net effect of this massive investment in infrastructure will be an increase in wealth-generation, and my government will ensure that this wealth is widely distributed through increased employment.
We shall emphasise the productive sectors of the economy – manufacturing, large-scale agriculture, and the IT revolution.
We shall also promote development of the service sector, including tourism, communications and financial service, while laying specific emphasis on the expansion of capital markets.
In this context, my government will vigorously pursue the following:
price stability in the economy;
a policy of meaningful and sustainable public debt;
a tax policy that encourages domestic savings for investment in increased production and more equitable wealth distribution. A centerpiece of this policy will be the creation of a large middle-income group in the country that will rapidly constitute a large market, which in turn will fuel further private-sector investment.
We shall facilitate access by Kenyans to the factors of production, including land, capital and technology, all of which are essential for the upward social mobility of the people.
In doing so, we shall pay particular attention to the need of women to access the factors of production, introducing legislation that will ensure women equal rights with men in this regard, and consolidating and expanding women’s access to credit facilities, business advisory services and training. We shall work to remove the socio-cultural, policy and legislative frameworks that perpetuate the marginalisation of women and girls in our society.
My government will pay special attention to creating opportunities within rural areas, where the majority of Kenyans live. We shall provide support and training to farmers, fishermen and pastoralist communities. We shall also pursue a policy of investing in facilities that add value to locally available produce.
We shall launch our version of the Marshall Plan – the recovery programme introduced in Europe after World War II – in historically marginalised regions of the country, in order to fast-track development in education, health, social services, infrastructure and facilities for livestock processing and marketing.
We propose increasing provision for the Constituency Development Fund from 2.5 per cent of the national budget to 10 per cent – the Kibaki government having refused to increase it to 7.5 per cent, despite parliamentary approval. The emphasis will be on placing more resources in the hands of communities, where funds will be used directly to meet the needs of the local people and enhance the production of wealth where the majority of people live.
Food is a basic need but, because of huge and widespread poverty and unemployment, people are still starving, even when National Cereals & Produce Board silos are full – because they have no money to buy the food. My government will pursue a policy that will ensure there is sufficient food available to rural and urban poor at affordable prices.
Shelter is another basic need, but all we have is a proliferation of unplanned and ill-developed settlements all over the country, with an unacceptably large population of our people living in makeshift shelters. My government will correct this situation by developing and implementing a sound physical planning policy, to be followed by the development of appropriate and affordable and secure shelter for the people.
Social security is a fundamental human right, and it is the responsibility of the government to provide it, in order to protect the people from destitution and other vagaries of life. My government will ensure the establishment of an effective social protection policy framework under three pillars:
a universal social welfare insurance scheme;
employer-driven contributory pension schemes;
and (iii) private savings, insurance policies and co-operatives.
With regard to factors of production, my government will develop a progressive and clearly articulated land policy, based on a set of simplified, rationalised and consolidated laws and regulations. This is a critical requirement for sustained economic recovery.
We shall promote Kenyans to engineer growth and development in the private sector, at the same time attracting foreign direct investment by creating favourable conditions for that investment, including tax holidays – and most importantly by removing the bureaucratic red tape that currently dogs potential investors and helps prevent the creation of wealth.
We shall remove the punitive taxation that is killing domestic industries, as well as putting structures in place to remove the possibility of extortion, particularly that regularly practised by Kenya Revenue Authority personnel when they visit companies and other enterprises.
To protect all our investments, we shall dedicate increased resources for training, equipment, housing, pay, life and health insurance, and retirement benefits for our law-enforcement personnel. But we shall tackle not only the apprehension of criminals but also the prevention of those human conditions that become the seedbed of criminal activity, first among them poverty, and second ignorance.
We shall develop a curriculum for our schools that answers the moral, social, cultural and economic needs of our country.
We shall employ more teachers and provide them with better training and remuneration, with the objective of achieving within five years a teacher/student ratio of one to 35.
We shall provide continuous, compulsory education from primary to secondary in all schools, and ensure standardised physical facilities and equipment in all public education institutions.
We shall enhance the establishment of post-secondary vocational training institutions for artisanry and middle-level managerial training.
We shall also restructure the ownership and management of village polytechnics to provide more effective training, and we will ensure that there is a public university in each province.
Delivering universal healthcare of an acceptable standard is an urgent priority. The clinics that dotted our estates and countryside soon after independence were well equipped and efficient, and offered a meaningful service to patients. All that has been lost. We shall expand and improve primary and secondary healthcare facilities, as well as implementing a comprehensive national social health insurance scheme.
My presidency will be one of ideals and practical ideas. It will be ambitious in achieving its economic and social goals.
To help fund the far-reaching programmes we shall put in place, we plan to broaden the tax base, which will at the same time allow us to reduce the individual tax burden, particularly for certain overtaxed groups in society, such as civil servants, who will benefit from a significant tax reduction under my administration.
More power will be devolved to communities – the power to shape the future of the environments in which people live their daily lives, widening the spread of public services and promoting social development.
And we will care for our country. We will face head-on the huge environmental challenges confronting us. We will recognise that youth are the future, and we will tend our youth as they grow to maturity, knowing that, in doing so, our nation’s future is secured.
To help achieve that future, we shall position Kenya on a path to the centre of the burgeoning Pan-African trading bloc, so that our nation becomes a key player in African political and economic development.
The moral ethic that drove public servants to provide a quality public service has been cast aside, because of our people’s confusion as they have watched their leaders loot and pillage our economy for personal gain. Corruption has “become a god”, in the words of the Nigerian poet Ben Okri. Unfortunately, we have to face the fact that it is now a false god worshipped by people from the top of our society to the bottom.
I will use all the powers of my office and energy to shatter this false god. I will help cultivate and promote a new national morality, a sound work ethic, a pride reborn in what it means to be a citizen of this country and a new sense of hope. For without hope, we cannot prosper as a people.
And to ensure that the public gets what it deserves from our public servants, I shall establish a Citizen’s Charter, which will guarantee the standards of service that public officials must offer all Kenyans. The services I have in mind include the issuing of business licences, national ID cards, voting cards and passports. The Charter will detail how the public may seek redress against officials who offer services that fall short of the standard required. Such officials will be held accountable.
Accountability is the watchword. It’s an old one, but it is a concept never more necessary than today, when corruption and tribalism have torn large holes in our national fabric.
The Narc coalition came together in 2002 to put an end to tribalism. Kenyans from all tribes and all ethnic groups voted for Narc and for Kibaki, who received a clear mandate to end this vice.
But the government, including the president, has let Kenyans down badly. Those who have acted in ways that have entrenched tribalism even deeper in the past four years are not going to do anything about it. In fact, they are the ones shouting at the top of their voices and calling other people tribalists. But Kenyans know who the true tribalists are.
Tribalism is today tearing this country apart. It is at its highest point since Independence. Why is this happening, when the country voted together to end tribalism only four years ago?
The answer is simple: it is because the most powerful institutions in the country, namely the Office of the President and State House, have become dens of tribalism. We cannot fight tribalism in Kenya unless and until these two key institutions are detribalised. Key Office of the President and State House staff, as long as we need them under our current Constitution, must reflect the face of the country.
Under my government, that will be the case. Staffing at the two offices will reflect our national diversity, and I challenge anyone to hold me accountable.
In addition, all informal government structures that allow family members, personal friends and moneybags more access and control at State House than elected officials – more even than cabinet ministers – will go. Kenyans will have only one government – the one they elected. The informal structures that currently exist are rooted in tribal alliances and cronyism, and our history tells us that these have been the real engines running our past and current governments.
These are the forces that keep giving us such scams as Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing. They are the forces that give birth to quagmires such as the Arturs saga. They are forces that operate above the law of the land and make a mockery of hard-working Kenyans. We will make this their last year of existence.
Cabinet ministers have also turned their ministries into tribal employment agencies, and have made tribal enclaves of this nation’s financial institutions.
In my government, key personnel in the Kenya Revenue Authority, the Central Bank, the ministry of finance and so on will reflect the face of the country. Institutions will not be packed with my tribesmen and friends. The governing principles in making appointments will be merit, accountability and diversity.
There will be a proper vetting system to ensure that all public service appointments are based not only on merit but also reflect the ethnic, gender and age diversities of Kenya. Appointment lists will be published annually. Affirmative action will be one of my government’s guiding stars.
And securing all this will be defence of our nation, where we shall be sensitive but strong, focused, decisive and committed. Clear priorities will no longer allow us to waste billions of shillings buying outdated military equipment that we don’t need, and whose purchase is simply another means of fleecing the country of public funds.
We shall continue to maintain robust armed forces but will trim military expenditure to realistic levels, and invest the resources saved in real and effective law-enforcement programmes to protect our borders. Among our priorities will be anti-terrorism efforts, along with properly structured and effective security at our airports (we want no more Artur incidents in future!) and truly secure port facilities and inland depots.
What I have laid before for you today relates to my realistic Dream of what Kenya could be. I have laid out objectives, not prescriptive economic programmes. I am not an economist and I will not pretend to you that I am.
Those would-be leaders who purport to be economic specialists are taking you for a ride – and we have had too many people doing that in this country for more than four decades,
Throughout those four decades, mandarins have been appointed to public positions they are not qualified to hold. They have used their undeserved power to take us ever further from the Dream of our forefathers.
That is what I intend to end. I intend to move this country forward, and away from the imperial presidency mentality.
Our nation now needs someone who has demonstrated the will to finish forever the culture of greed and selfishness.
I have that will. I have that history. I have that intention. I am able.
What I can promise I will do for you is appoint people to take charge of our economy whose superb skills make them absolutely the best in their field. It will not matter who their fathers were or who they know. They will be people who are committed to, and who can realise, my Dream of a Kenya founded on the notion of all our citizens having an equal chance in life.
I intend to take this nation to Second World status by the year 2020 – not 2030. We shall make this happen in our own lifetime. We can do it because ODM-Kenya has brought together quality Kenyans – not just in the leadership but also among the many people working behind the scenes, who are deeply committed to the party and its ideals, and to our beloved country. We shall make a very effective team.
And it is a team spirit that will inform and guide all our decisions. When I am elected president, I shall consider myself merely the first among equals. I will run my presidency on the basis of extensive consultations prior to decision-making.
As we meet today, we are at a crossroads. We have worked hard to get this far. Now the next decision we make will determine what will become of us.
The signposts are there, but sometimes the fog, especially the fog of propaganda, makes the signposts indistinct. In deciding which way to go, we must therefore take great care.
The road straight ahead leads only to a dead end. While a few people speed forward on the tarmac, the rest of us are left floundering at the roadside in a boggy swamp that engulfs us and holds us fast, leaving us no way of escape, and drowning our hopes of a better life.
But the road down which I guide you is the right one for this nation. The road crosses a bridge of sturdy steel that will not bend or break, no matter how often it is lashed by storms or blown by the four winds. The bridge remains strong and steadfast, spanning the turbulent waters beneath, providing safe passage to the other side.
Our nation needs this bridge, to carry us from the honest efforts of our forefathers, struggling for independence, through the contest for multi-partyism, on to the work of the referendum, and now beyond all that to the future.
I am that bridge – the bridge that links the historic moments of our past to the golden tomorrows of our future.
Kenyans! I call on you!
If, today, you feel the same passion I feel for our country;
If you want the same things I want, the same things I have fought for all my life;
Kenyans!
If you share my Dream, if you share my hope, if you share my will, if you share my determination;
If you want us, as a nation, to grow into what our forefathers dreamed of;
Kenyans!
If you love your families and you want the best for them;
If you yourself have a Dream of being the best YOU can be – we can win.
We can win the ultimate prize of freedom-from-want, and of economic self-determination and self-respect, for every citizen in this country.
Some people see things happen, and they ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of a united, developed and democratic Kenya, and I ask, ‘Why not?’
Join me! Join me as we return to our forefathers’ visionary path towards the Kenyan Dream, as we cast off and leave behind us four decades of political darkness.
If you make the right decision (and I know you will), we can at last go forward, together, to realise the Dream for our nation.
To paraphrase Nelson Mandela, I dream of a Kenya at peace with itself; a country free of hatred. As Martin Luther King Jr said, hatred paralyses life while love releases it. Hatred confuses life, while love harmonises it. Hatred darkens life, while love illuminates it.
I preach love, commitment and equality for our country.
Fellow citizens, join me on this journey for peace and prosperity! We have climbed many hills together.
I can see the hill ahead and together I know we will conquer it!
Thank you.
God Bless you, and God Bless Kenya.
