STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESS BY HON RAILA ODINGA

JANUARY 5, 2016:

Fellow Kenyans

As we begin this year 2016, we would like to wish you all a much better and happier year.

We make these wishes well aware that many problems face our nation which the current government is very unlikely to deal with. We say so because of the experience we all have had with this government since it came to power three years ago. It has been a sad, unfortunate, disappointing and painful experience. It is an experience which could have been avoided if this government had the intention of serving its people and not of stealing from them for purposes of self-enrichment and of retaining political power through corruption, fraud, theft and bribery.


Before our eyes as Kenyans the Jubilee regime has brought down the House called Kenya that it inherited intact in 2013.
Jubilee came into office on the back of Kenyans ‘believing’ its many promises: three years later the free laptops for primary school entrants remains a pipe dream; the stadiums in the Counties remain unbuilt; the 5,000MW of electricity a cynical ploy; the promise to fight corruption one of the worst jokes ever visited on an expectant population.

Indeed, grand theft on a scale unprecedented in East African history has become the new normal for Kenyans. A spree of blatant, unapologetic theft is underway and the economic repercussions are already being felt by all Kenyans especially the poor majority watching the conspicuous consumption and gorging of the tiny elite that’s doing the stealing while all others are made to wait for hand-outs.
Having failed to deliver on all its promises, and realising that Kenyans have now began to appreciate this in the most painful way possible, Jubilee is laying the groundwork to steal the 2017 elections.

Ordinary Kenyans have realised they are being robbed. Jubilee supporters themselves no longer pretend that thieving has been normalised – they respond saying, the opposition wouldn’t do any better. Well, we would like to tell you all my dear Kenyans that we shall. Not only because we want to but because we have an urgent moral duty to. We shall be speaking on this subject in greater detail in the weeks to come.

Jubilee has also embarked on a systematic rolling back of the gains made over the years and is trying to recreate the old Kanu states to create the old imperial presidency with scary dictatorial powers.

In terms of rights and basic freedoms; political bribery; authoritarianism and the exploitation of ethnic differences for political gain, Kenya today feels like the Kenya of 1991. Jubilee has managed to take Kenya through its most significant political, economic and social regression since the early 1980s when the KANU government implemented a series of measures that turned the country into a one-party kleptocracy with a stagnating economy and political oppression on an unprecedented scale.

The top Jubilee leaders are reinventing the chain of events their fathers and benefactors, from the 1960s all the way to 2003 when we managed regime change. This is part of the attempt to steal authority and power using stolen money come 2017.
We are back to the 1990s when MPs were paid heftily to defect from Opposition to the governing party. Harambee as a tool for control is being perfected once again and spearheaded by the President and the Deputy President, using stolen public money, against express provisions of the Constitution that public officers shall not engage in harambees.

As happened soon after independence, Jubilee is using its numbers in Parliament to muzzle independent institutions and offices in the name of giving the President powers to govern. The President has given himself the powers to appoint and dismiss the Inspector General of Police and the Chief Justice, against provisions of the Constitution. With that, we are back to the era when the President would dismiss or appoint head of Police or head of Judiciary through a 1 PM radio announcement. The Auditor General is losing his independent powers. To recreate the imperial and dictatorial presidency of the past, Jubilee is laying the ground for the creation of a single party monolith, buying off Opposition MPs and co-opting other parties, all in the name of creating national unity. That is what Kanu did from 1960s all the way to 1990s.

Trade Unions, just like independent media and civil society are targeted for silencing. Jubilee has sworn to remove the vocal leadership of two giant unions, KNUT and the Dock Workers union in a bid to create a compliant labour movement, just as Kanu did, killing the Kenya Federation of Labour and Labour Congress to create a pliant COTU and Maendeleo ya Wanawake.

Every crisis is being used to create repressive and retrogressive laws that strengthen the dictatorial hands of the President and weakening the citizens. When terrorism has struck, Jubilee has responded by attempting to introduce restrictive laws in the name of fighting terror. That is not new. It is was done in the 1960s and 1970s, with the introduction of the Public Order Act to restrict the Opposition and contain dissenting voices in the name of fighting the Shiftas and consolidating national unity and development.

Kenyans need to know that the children of Kanu are beginning to reintroduce the things we went to war against their fathers for.
This government is over. It is irredeemable. It is incapable of anything good. The Jubilee administration has failed. It has not delivered on any of its pledges. They have not delivered on laptops, their flagship pledge — they lied to children.
The sports facilities they promised are nowhere to be seen.—they lied to the youth. They have not delivered on food security and bringing down the cost of living—the Galana-Kulalu mega irrigation project is turning out to be another white elephant. Instead, they raised taxes on essential goods—they lied to all o

This is the most corrupt administration in our history— and that is no mean feat. They have borrowed billions which they have squandered and stolen. On the Eurobond alone, which they are unable to account for, we have already paid over Ksh. 25 billion shillings interest, yet they are unable show a single project that the money went into.

The only thing it is capable of and is doing now is to set up the machinery for stealing elections. We are where Nigeria was just before elections last year. Just like Goodluck Jonathan’s government in Nigeria could not trace the abducted girls, Jubilee cannot trace billions of our lost money.

OUR RESPONSE:

We are here to do two things. First to send a message to President Uhuru Kenyatta. Secondly, to call Kenyans to arms.

Message to President Uhuru Kenyatta.

My brother, you took over an optimistic country whose main agenda was to implement our new constitutional dispensation, a constitution that we have struggled for decades to achieve, so that we can secure peace, freedom and good governance.

You swore to defend this constitution, but you say one thing and do another. You have given thugs and thieves free reign.
You are standing by issuing idle threats as the Government transforms into a bandit state in front of our eyes.

Kenyans have bent over backwards to support you, pleaded with you and even offered to assist you to address the challenges facing the nation to no avail. We are now compelled to conclude that you are incapable of providing the leadership that the country needs. You are clearly determined to hang onto power by whatever means even when you cannot deliver. What will you do that you have not had opportunity to do already? The path you are on is well-trodden; Laurent Gbagbo went before you, your friend Goodluck Jonathan too.

You have a small window of opportunity to turn your Presidency and our country around, but it is closing and closing fast. You are drowning in corruption and suffocating the entire nation. Can you muster the courage to confront the beast? Can you muster the courage and take us forward and not backwards?

My brother, you must know as we all do that the IEBC has a serious legitimacy deficit. You must know, as we all do, that this country cannot and must not risk another election that does not enjoy the confidence of all parties. Yet you refuse to come to the table to discuss how to ensure that we have a level playing field and a referee we can all trust. What are you afraid of? Unaogopa nini?

To fellow Kenyans.

Fellow Kenyans, time has come for us to stand up and defend our Constitution and our fundamental rights that we have enshrined therein.

We have a right to demand that government account for our taxes and money borrowed in our name.

Every Kenyan who has attained the age of majority has a right to vote in free and fair election. We have a right to demand that the Government delivers on this. We urge all young people who have attained the age of 18 and who have not been issued with ID cards to demand to be issued with IDs without delay. It is your right.

Fellow Kenyans, corruption is destroying our country— we all know that. What we have failed to do is take responsibility for creating the social environment in which corruption thrives.

By accepting, indeed soliciting, harambee donations for our churches and mosques from the corrupt. By selling our vote to the highest bidder. Above all, by succumbing to tribalism, seeing, hearing and speaking no evil when our tribesmen and women are “eating” and shouting from the rooftops when it is others, rallying behind our corrupt tribesmen and women when they are caught eating and screaming that we are being finished.

We are the authors of our predicament. We have to change, or perish. Change begins with me and you.

We as CORD will do our part. We will not sit by and let the Jubilee administration undo all we have struggled for, a struggle in which many lives have been lost and many years of freedom lost in KANU’s political jails. We are not going back to Egypt.

Our agenda:

We shall fight the retrogressive laws in the courts.
We will vigorously pursuing the OKOA Kenya referendum.
We will pursue accountability for and recovery of the proceeds of the Eurobond.
We will not accept anything less than a free and fair 2017 election.
Let us roll up our sleeves and confront the beast from this day.

God bless you. God bless Kenya.

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