The handshake between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga was engineered by the financial crisis the latter was facing, it has emerged.
Contrary to expectations of many, Uhuru and Raila had a truce in March 2018, that saw the Building Bridges Initiative committee formed and several political realignments witnessed.
ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi, who was Odinga's Chief Campaigner in 2017, now says Mr Odinga and his ODM party were undergoing serious financial challenges.
The ANC leader also suggests that the numerous litigations against a number of NASA supporters and “other allied pressures” – which he doesn’t name – might have been too much for Mr Odinga.
“We learnt that the financial capacity to handle these cases was not there. Basically the situation was becoming unbearable,” Mudavadi's words are quoted in 'Soaring Above the Storms of Passion', a book authored by Amani National Congress party Secretary-General Barrack Muluka.
In his frequent speeches about the Handshake, Mr Odinga has often insisted that he decided to work with Uhuru for the sake of unity. Also, Mudavadi claims that Mr Odinga was facing pressure from Western nations, some of which had issued him with travel bans.
“Raila also mentioned to us at this meeting that he had received letters of cancellation of his visas by various foreign missions in Kenya. He showed us a copy of one such letter he had received from a leading western mission,” Mr Mudavadi writes
The handshake has since yielded the Building Bridges Initiative report, which could pave the way to radical constitutional reforms in the country.