ODM leader Raila Odinga appeared a lonely man who was unable to make proper judgments after the nullification of President Uhuru Kenyatta's victory, Musalia Mudavadi has claimed.
In his new book titled "Soaring Above the Storms of Passion", the ANC leader appears to paint Raila, whom he acted on his behalf as NASA agent, as a man who made unsound decisions.
Days after the nullification of the polls, Mudavadi argues, Raila pulled out of the repeat poll without consulting his fellow NASA principals.
This, Mudavadi says, was anchored on the fact that it was him and Uhuru who were to participate. Pulling out would have meant that elections would not go on.
However, a court ruling which reinstated all other candidates into the race, Mudavadi adds, caught NASA off guard. It's at this juncture that Raila promised to make an announcement.
“I did not know what this earth-shaking message was. I established that none of the other three principals knew (it). And so like the rest of the country, we waited for October 25, 2017,” Mudavadi writes.
“It would be dishonest to say that this situation did not throw us off balance. We may have put on brave faces in public but internally we knew things were not good at all,” he writes.
A day to the runoff, Mudavadi recalls, Raila's announcement turned out to be that he intended not to recognise President Uhuru Kenyatta's victory, a statement he had made severally before.
“We had remained patient all the time when he (Odinga) told us to wait for the right time to know the message … Amid mouthfuls of tea and peanuts he announced that he would tell Kenyans that we would not recognise Uhuru after the repeat election to be conducted the next day,” adds Mudavadi.
When he made the announcement at Mudavadi's house, Bungoma Senator Moses Wetang’ula interjected: “But Tinga, that is what we have been saying all along. What is new about that? That cannot be the big announcement that we have been promising the world.”
From the talk of secession and storming of State House that some of NASA supporters had been pushing for, the ‘big announcement’ was becoming a big disappointment, Mudavadi reveals.
Afterwards, Mudavadi came out with the idea of civil disobedience, which gave birth to NRM that was steered by Miguna Miguna. Uhuru went on to reconcile with Raila months later.