Documents published by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) indicate that former Vice President Jaramogi Odinga was a threat to the presidency of the founding father of the nation, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.
The documents highlight that Kenyatta was unsettled whenever he jetted out of the country to attend official meetings in Cairo and London.
Kenyatta would name Joseph Murumbi as the designated Deputy Prime Minister because he felt that Jaramogi was not trustworthy.
Kenyatta feared that Jaramogi's contacts with Russia and China could cost him the seat. In his book Not Yet Uhuru, Jaramogi, however, argued that he was not planning to overthrow Kenyatta from power as suspected by his allies.
He writes that he only wanted to learn more about the economies of these nations but Kenyatta felt insecure whenever he left for China and Russia.
He also said that he was curious about the way the Chinese and Russian rulers conducted themselves as far as development matters were concerned.
“They showed me factories, communes, cooperatives; they showed me their plans for housing, for dealing with unemployment, how they organised farming and small industry, how the government worked at village level; how plans for factory and agricultural production were worked out. It was impossible not to be impressed with life in China. So many of the problems of poverty and illiteracy were those of our people and these were being overcome at an impressive rate,” Jaramogi wrote.