OPEN LETTER TO RIGHT HONOURABLE RAILA AMOLO ODINGA-
In case you are wondering when the rain started beating you I have a few suggestions.
When you become PM you put the 2013 elections on the back burner and concentrated on affairs of state. That's why you never took Ruto seriously when he collected his RV votes and left. If you were seriously planning to run again you should have known RV vote basket is irreplaceable. Up to the last minute I was waiting for you to pull the rabbit out of the hat for RV to no avail. I came to the realization ODM slept and never had a strategy for RV all along.
You also forgot the person you were dealing with in the name of WSR. Ruto is an ambitious politician taught by the best in the business. After his introduction to the big league in YK 92 he become a protege of Moi, and did his the old man's leg work in selling the Uhuru candidacy in the RV. After he joined you to campaign for the 2005 Referendum campaigns you gave him a Masterclass in underdog politics and propaganda, a specialization in which you are the foremost authority. In the 2007 ODM elections you offered him advanced studies in mobilization techniques. By the time you become PM he was as good as you were, only you never realized or dismissed it. That's why in the 2010 referendum he convinced the Kalenjin to go against the rest of the country. Kijana alikuwa ameiva.You never treated him with the seriousness he deserved.
Your campaign team never saw the concept of 'Tyranny of Numbers'. The only point you could change the outcome of these elections was during voter registration period. When IEBC released the figures a week to the closure of the exercise, your team should have dropped whatever you were doing and rally your generals to get out your troops to register. You only realized it when an American intelligience assesent was circulated it. That is why you were so agitated with Mutahi Ngunyi's pronunciation, it was too late.
You never re-engineered your campaign and image . You just carried out from where you left off in 2007. You left the wazees to run things and these wazees have a lot of intrigues that belong to another generation. You ignored the clock work precision of the Jubilee secretariat, run private sector style by proffessionals. Just see how they run the manifesto launch and compare it with CORD's which had more entertainment than substance. See how the effectively they handled nominations compared to CORD. Didn't you smell a rat when strong candidates were jumping ship. Your body language showed someone unperturbed. Couldn't someone figure out that when Oburu and Ruth stood, questions would be asked given charges of Odingaism leveled against ODM? Your brand suffered for it amongst swing voters and I still don't believe how lethargic you were.
Your team was evidently not very competent that's why it never crossed their mind the strategic importance of having the last rally at Uhuru Park and that's why they were caught napping. That's why they could send the head of strategy Odour Ong'wen a rather dull, inarticulate and unphotogenic academic type to slug it out with the feisty Rachel Shebesh and razor sharp lawyer Ahmednassir Ahmed on a such a key campaign issue as land. It's tv baby,image is everything. Oduor was mumbling mambo jumbo at the end of it all, not the best image CORD could put forward.
Your TV spots were winding and not very original, the targetting, packaging was poor meaningr research was poor. Maybe the music was a bit ok.Your image wasn't vibrant enough...For crissakes Musalia's ad was a thousand times better.
And most crucially you forgot Uhuruto was not a laid back Kibaki looking for a last term. These were younger, energetic, monied and ...desperate opponents who were clutching at straws. The ICC case threatens to not only end their politcal careers but possibly put them away for a very long time, take a way their property and so on. In other words it was do or die. They would throw everything at him including the kitchen sink. He should have taken them a lot more seriously.
But the dye is cast. It's an irony that you have become a victim of what you fought for so hard - democracy. You are a lion in winter. Graciously accept defeat so that you can help us adjust to the tragedy of a Uhuruto presidency.
And, as PK, Martha Karua et al have learnt our democracy is still in primitive stage of development. Forget lofty idealism.That's why PK had 200k likes on his page and how many votes again?Oh and what you needed was not ODM reloaded but Raila reloaded.