“(President John Pombe) Magufuli is my friend; I will speak to him and ensure that this border is opened,” Mr Odinga said at the Namanga border post yesterday from where he started a series of roadside campaigns in Kajiado County.
National Namanga. National Super Alliance (Nasa) presidential candidate Raila Odinga has said that if he wins in the forthcoming elections movement across the Kenya-Tanzania border will be easier because he and Tanzanian President John Magufuli are friends.
“(President John Pombe) Magufuli is my friend; I will speak to him and ensure that this border is opened,” Mr Odinga said at the Namanga border post yesterday from where he started a series of roadside campaigns in Kajiado County.
He claimed that the current frosty relations between Kenya and Tanzania were caused by “insults hurled by people in Jubilee government”.
Mr Odinga was referring to the current situation at the border town, where Kenyans were thrown out of Tanzania for lack of work permits.
Mediation
Some Kenyans had been locked up and charged in Tanzanian courts for being in the country illegally. The action by the Tanzanian government led to riots and protests on the Kenyan side of the border.
When mediation efforts failed Kenyan immigration authorities in Namanga responded by asking Tanzanians working in Kenya to go back to their country.
This was not the first time Mr Odinga is using President Magufuli’s name in the campaigns. He has been saying in several campaign stops that if elected he will launch an anti-corruption drive just like President Magufuli did in Tanzania. That Mr Odinga, opposition’s presidential flagbearer in the Kenyan elections, is ready to use his friendship with President Magufuli to attract voters speaks of how popular the Tanzanian President is in Kenya.
He gained popularity when he started the war against corruption, embezzlement and laxity in government, just a few days after he was sworn in.
Friendship
The two are long-time personal friends. They became close in the early 2000s when both were ministers of Works in their respective countries.
Magufuli was appointed deputy minister for Works in 1995 and became full minister in 2000. Odinga served as minister for Roads, Public Works and Housing between 2003 and 2005. As their friendship grew the two started exchanging family visits. Magufuli, as minister for Works, attended the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)’s national conference in December 2012 that endorsed Odinga as the presidential candidate for the 2013 elections.
Speaking at the conference he urged Kenyans to elect Odinga as he was a transformative candidate. But Magufuli’s attendance in the conference prompted an angry reaction from the Tanzanian opposition that said it was diplomatically inappropriate for a cabinet minister in one country to publicly support an opposition candidate in another country.
Magufuli also attended the burial ceremony of Odinga’s son Fidel in Kisumu in January 2015. Mr Odinga attended President Magufuli’s swearing in ceremony in November 2015 as a special guest. And five months later the two and their wives spent three days together in President Magufuli’s ancestral home in Chato, Geita Region.
Controversy
The closeness of the two have led to controversy and allegations from Mr Odinga’s opponents about plans to rig the Kenyan elections.
Several politicians from the Jubilee party have claimed that Nasa have opened up a tallying centre in Tanzania which will be used to hack the Kenyan electoral commission’s tallying centre and rig the elections. The Tanzanian State House and the ministry for Foreign Affairs have, repeatedly, denied the allegations. “Tanzania has neither the intention nor the plan to interfere in Kenyan elections. Reports to the contrary are meant to taint the good diplomatic relations between the two countries,” Foreign Minister Dr Augustine Mahiga told reports last week in Dar es Salaam.
Mr Odinga and other Nasa officials have also downplayed allegations of President Magufuli’s intereference in Kenyan polls. “Leave Magufuli out of Kenyan polls,” Mr Odinga told his opponents in one of his campaign stops.
