Member of Parliament for Langata
Raila Odinga has dedicated his life to public service, first as a university lecturer, then in establishing the Kenya Bureau of Standards, always as a civil rights activist, and finally as a member of parliament.
Raila became MP for the cosmopolitan constituency of Langata, Nairobi, in the general election of December 29, 1992, and retained his seat in subsequent general elections in 1997 and 2002. The first nine years were spent in opposition, first in Ford-Kenya and then in the National Democratic Party, but in 2001, Raila was appointed minister for energy in the Kanu government. Later, as member of the Liberal Democratic Party, he was part of the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) that won the 2002 general election and broke Kanu’s stranglehold on power since Independence in 1963. Raila was thereafter appointed minister for roads, public works, and housing. He was replaced in the cabinet at the end of 2005, after his opposition to doctored constitutional reforms led to a referendum victory against the government.
During his four years as a cabinet minister, Raila effected extensive reforms in the ministries he served. But he is perhaps better known for his persistent and dedicated opposition to all that is corrupt, to decisions made on the basis of ethnicity, and to the accumulation of wealth by a few at the expense of the many. His opposition to successive governments that have looted his beloved Kenya has led him into three periods of detention without trial. He was detained for a total of eight years, six of them spent in solitary confinement. No matter the personal cost, Raila shuns any option that involves compromising his own or the nation’s integrity.
As the MP for a constituency that houses a large number of Nairobi’s urban poor, Raila has initiated several poverty-alleviation and education projects, including Kibera slum upgrading and the Raila Education Centre. His aim is to ensure good quality of life and education for all.
Raila is a loving family man and he and his wife Ida have four children. They are Fidel, who is a business executive, Rosemary, who is a Marketing consultant and has been married to Amos Akatsa for two years, Raila Jnr, who is a banker, and Winnie, who has just finished her secondary education in Nairobi.
Raila Amolo Odinga was born in Nyanza Province on January 7, 1945, at Maseno Church Missionary Society Hospital, the second son of Kenya’s first vice-president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and his wife Mary. Raila graduated from Otto von Guericke Technical University, Magdeburg, Germany, in 1970, with a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering, following which he returned to Kenya to take care of the Odinga family after his father’s detention without trial in 1969. Raila was an assistant lecturer at the University of Nairobi before joining the nascent Kenya Bureau of Standards and being asked to oversee its establishment. He had already established his family business, which manufactures liquid petroleum gas cylinders.
The increasing repression by the state in succeeding years led to Raila’s wider political participation against the evils he has seen desecrate his land. Today, Raila continues to work for the third liberation of Kenya – liberation from the corruption and ethnic favouritism that has bedevilled the nation’s social and economic progress for more than 40 years.
