Raila Odinga, whose bid to become Kenya’s president failed five times, may soon have a better alternative and finally bestride the whole of Africa. 

If he’s lucky this time around and everything goes according to plan, he will this coming February walk in the light of the grandiose halls of the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa as the new chairman of the continent. 

Such a win, which is at this point a possibility, not a certainty, would be Raila’s redeeming victory and could serve as the capstone to his long career. 

Raila’s leadership will also be a win for Kenya and for President William Ruto, whose government has rallied behind his candidacy in the stiff contest over the continent’s top seat. 

President William Ruto has officially endorsed Raila ‘as the most suitable person’ to become African Union’s chairman. He said he is ‘confident that he (Raila) will give his utmost and do all it takes to make Africa proud and powerful’.  He called him the ‘most capable steward’.

Ruto lauded Raila as a ‘visionary Pan-African, a bold and wise leader, a professional and technocrat, as well as a towering statesman and veteran mobiliser for positive change’. He said his government ‘unreservedly’ lines up behind Raila, whom he said ‘posses the requisite credentials’ and was committed to supporting his candidacy, vision and his leadership ‘wholeheartedly’.

Raila’s good chance

Other government officials were also effusive in their praise for Raila’s capacity to shepherd the continent. 

 Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi who doubles up as the Foreign and Diaspora Affairs Cabinet Secretary, described Raila a ‘peacemaker’ and ‘one of our most celebrated sons’. 

Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Singoei said there was no better name (in Kenya) to present to Africa than Raila. 

Despite the prevailing national self-flagellation and the unstinting critique by some online users about Raila’s AU candidacy, the team running the campaign for the opposition leader, who is also the East African region’s candidate, is optimistic. 

At least 20 countries are already considered as ‘very likely’ to vote for him and efforts to win over another 20 are in high gear, said Ambassador Elkanah Odembo, who co-chairs the campaign secretariat with Singoei. “Our goal is to secure the two-thirds majority (required to win the seat) in the first round of the voting,” he told The Standard.

A candidate has to get 34 votes to win. 

Odembo said he couldn’t name the countries that are sympathetic to Raila because the February vote would be cast in a secret ballot by the continent’s heads of state. 

But, there’s are early good signs, although it’s too early to draw conclusions and many things can change in the last minute. 

President William Ruto said the island nation of Mauritius, which initially fielded its own candidate, had ‘confirmed’ its support for Kenya’s candidate, Raila. 

Port Louis has since written to the AU’s Office of Legal Council in Addis to say that it no longer supports its candidate, but there was no confirmed information whether it had in fact withdrawn its candidate, Odembo said. Mauritius’s support came after President Ruto held a telephone conversation with the newly elected Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam. 

What happens in coming weeks, however, will be crucial. 

Public debate

On Friday, December 13, Raila is expected to take part in a public debate that the AU is hosting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The remaining candidates for the chairperson position, Djibouti’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mahamoud Ali Youssouf and Madagascar’s Richard Randriamandrato, were invited to the debate, which will be moderated by African journalists and broadcast live on public TV stations in all the 54 member states of the African Union. The debate will be translated into six languages spoken in the continent. 

The Kenyan campaign team “is upbeat, but it’s leaving nothing to chance,” said Odembo, admitting that one of the challenges facing Raila is reaching voters, who are in this case the heads of state. “It is all very labor intensive and requires a lot of travels,” he said. 

Raila has recently visited six countries in West Africa to seek their support. The foreign trip was a part of a grueling schedule he has been keeping since he officially announced his desire to vie for the AU’s chairmanship earlier this year. 

According to Odembo, Raila spends between two to six hours at his AU campaign office getting updates, making calls to various influencers around the continent and conferring with members of his 16-member advisory council. 

In a departure from Kenya’s 2017 AU campaign that was faulted for its poor strategy and little knowledge of the continent’s complexities, Raila’s team is tapping into the expertise of local and foreign experts, including Mahboub Maalim, former executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), former AU chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Kenya’s former Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and former candidate for the AU chairperson, Amina Mohamed, Somalia’s former Foreign Minister Fauzia Yusuf Haji Aden, a one time Raila’s rival for the AU position, and Frederic Ngoga, AU’s senior adviser on international partnerships. “We take this assignment very seriously and have entrusted it to our most capable steward,” Ruto said during the unveiling of Raila Odinga’s candidacy at State House on August 27. 

Ruto said Raila embodied ‘extensive experience and deep understanding of both African affairs and global dynamics, which are crucial for leading the African Union further into the centre of the global affairs and closer to the hearts of the African people’. “Our East African region, which is home to more than 500 million people rightly considers this moment to be its turn to offer leadership on the basis of the principle of inter-regional rotation,” said President Ruto. 

Raila’s campaign secretariat is made up of officials drawn from the office of the president, foreign affairs ministry and his own advisers. 

Ruto said this ‘pan-African moment’ must define the member states’ collective capacity to solve Africa’s various crises and turn its potential into ‘engines of sustainable growth and inclusive prosperity for present and future generations’.

Ruto has a personal reason to root for Raila. A Raila chairmanship will be a windfall for him, as it will take the opposition supremo out of contention for the 2027 elections, which Ruto is certain to vie for.

Raila could also bequeath his supporters to Ruto, although the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) has recently said it would field its own candidates in all elective positions. 

Any new AU chairman will have the daunting task of tackling Africa’s multifarious ills: Poverty, debilitating debt, insecurity, poor education and lack of access to electricity and proper health, among others. 

According to World Bank figures, the number of people living in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased by almost 200 million, rising from 282 million in 1990 to 464 million in 2024, with Burundi and Malawi, for instance, suffering extreme poverty levels that are above 60 per cent. The bank says 40 per cent or more of the population is deprived of access to electricity and sanitation. 

For its part, the African Development Bank said in its 2024 report that around 85 per cent of the continent’s 1.4 billion people either live in or share land borders with a conflict-affected country, and key drivers of fragility—abject poverty, youth unemployment, and adverse climate change effects are increasing across the continent. 

To fix Africa’s problems, the continental body came up with Agenda 2063, whose aim is to transform Africa into a global powerhouse through inclusive social and sustainable economic development, continental integration, democratic governance and peace and security, among other issues. 

New dynamics in Africa 

Raila’s candidacy is facing its biggest threat from the Djiboutian candidate who has the backing of Muslim and Arab countries in the continent. He is likely to benefit from the new dynamics in Africa, where pan-Africanism is increasing and attempts to shed the legacies of the past, which has so far toppled several governments in West Africa, a stark contrast to a time when Europeans, especially the UK and France, deeply influenced internal and external affairs of African states. 

“In the honorable Raila, we have a compact and complete leadership package that is founded on teamwork, boldness in decision making, pan-Africanism and responsiveness to the collective and unique aspirations of each member state of the African Union,” Mudavadi told AU’s permanent representatives and international partners at a luncheon held in Addis Ababa. 

Raila’s vision for Africa 

In a speech during the launch of his manifesto in Addis Ababa, the seat of the AU, Raila talked of unity, open skies, reliable infrastructure, agricultural transformation, empowering youth and women, and making free trade in the continent a reality. He also promised to implement decisions made by African leaders during their summits, which is currently a bureaucratic talking shop where resolutions are hardly acted upon.   

“I can tell you without fear of contradiction that 93 per cent of these resolutions, which are passed here are never implemented,” Raila told diplomats and other dignitaries, vowing that he would make sure that they are ‘properly implemented’.

Raila said he would push for the removal of aerial barriers in Africa, where each country has its own air control and travel through the continent is more expensive than it’s in Europe. “In Africa, you have to wait days to be given a clearance,” he said, recounting two instances when he was held up in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for hours to get a clearance from several countries before he could fly to his destinations. 

“These are self-imposed restrictions on our continent,” he said, adding that removing the intra-Africa air restrictions is a ‘lower hanging fruit’ that could be harvested ‘without a problem’. He said these barriers in Africa ‘make us look stupid’. “Europe has become a village. Why can’t we do that in Africa?” he posed, pledging to introduce an Africa-wide visa, like the Schengen visa in Europe. 

He termed Africa’s youth the ‘biggest asset’ in the continent, where about 70 per cent of its population is below the age of 25. “This can be an asset or can be a challenge,” he sai, adding, “Because if the youth are not empowered, they can become a drag on the economy. They become drug addicts.” 

Raila said he would put the youth at the center of his policies and make them the force driving change and innovation. “It’s a big shame that we’re losing young, energetic people because of poverty in our continent,” said Raila,79. The solution lies in creating proper economic opportunities inside the continent, so that the youth could stay in their countries, he said. 

“I envision a continent whose progress is driven by its own people,” Raila said, urging Africans to ‘imagine Africa as a continent bursting with potential and brimming with possibilities’.

The chairperson is the AU’s CEO, who’s also the body’s legal representative and the Commission’s chief accounting officer, is elected by the Assembly for a four-year term, renewable once. 

He has the power to appoint and manage the Commission’s staff and acts as the depository for all AU and OAU treaties and legal instruments.  “Africa’s unity is sacred to me. We must return unity to the top of our priorities, as Tanzania’s Julius Mwalimu Nyerere, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah did,” Raila said. “Without unity in a fast-consolidating and changing world, Africa will continue to be marginalised, exploited and irrelevant,” he continued.

He said Africa is ‘the richest continent on Earth in terms of strategic materials, but the paradox is that the richest in terms of resources is the poorest in terms of living conditions of its people’. “This is what we need to change so that the African people can be rich people,” he said. An economically transformed continent should be ‘thriving on the richness of its resources’ to become a powerhouse of global trade, he said. 

Raila said he is an Afro-optimist and believes that Africa can’t be developed by foreigners, who usually come to invest to make money. The energy and brains of African people can only develop Africa, he said. 

“Africa has the knowledge and ability to turn all this wealth into prosperity and to leverage its people and make them rich and powerful and claim the 21st century as the Africa century,” he said. 

If elected for the position of the chairmanship of the African Union Commission, Raila said, he’s committed to turning this vision into a reality.