Tracing the bad blood between Kenyatta and Odinga dynasties

Tuesday, June 11th 2013, By Standard Reporter Kenya: Less than a month after independence, Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta was convinced his Home Affairs Minister Oginga Odinga was planning to overthrow him.

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Western intelligence agencies had been filling his ear with talk of a radical plot to remove him from power by force.

And when Kenya Army (former King’s African Rifles) soldiers in Lanet mutinied in January 1964 demanding better pay, Kenyatta reacted to the crisis by first calling Odinga and ordering him to remain at home until it was solved. Kenyatta and his allies feared Odinga would exploit the situation politically or, worse, was planning a coup.

He then asked the British to send in troops to quell the mutiny. The PM sought British military help on a few more occasions to handle crises caused by Odinga, later his Vice-President.  
Crates of arms
A search of the Home Affairs Ministry on April 8, 1965, allegedly unearthed crates of arms, including grenades and machine guns. Other weapons were found in other parts of Nairobi, the East African Standard reported.
The President (as Kenyatta was from December 1964) believed his VP was working with fellow Cabinet colleague Paul Ngei, who had a great deal of influence with the military, in which the Kamba were a dominant group. He was so convinced of this that he sent Attorney General Charles Njonjo to the United Kingdom to seek help defending his Government from insurrection.
On April 14, 1965, the British agreed, committing themselves to provide two infantry battalions and aircraft to secure key installations, freeing Kenyan soldiers to fight the radicals if a coup d’etat was attempted. An SAS team already in the country training the police would also be redeployed to provide Kenyatta with personal security in the event of an attempted coup.
The General Service Unit was dispatched to Nyanza to seek out weapons allegedly hidden in homesteads there. Not much news of their brutal search emerged until MPs complained in Parliament weeks later.
It was, however, quickly overshadowed by news of the Fizik Lebedev, a freighter full of Russian arms making its way to the Port of Mombasa. The weapons included tanks, artillery, mortars and ammunition. Odinga, who arranged the shipment, allegedly only told other ministers about it when the ship was already at sea.
Rumours sprang up that the Fizik Lebedev cargo was intended to support overthrowing Kenyatta, rekindling memories of a cache of weapons from Czechoslovakia in 1964 linked to Odinga. As before, Security Minister Njoroge Mungai denied this was the case.In later years, Odinga would insist the weapons were meant for Kenya’s military and were only rejected when the secret import became public, drawing pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom. Both countries sent warships to dock in Mombasa and await the Russian freighter. At about the same time, a KGB general led a 17-man delegation to Nairobi.
With Cold War tensions ratcheted up to the level of an international incident, the Fizik Lebedev sailed past Mombasa to the Port of Dar-es-Salaam where it apparently offloaded some of its cargo before heading back north to Kenya. 

Weapons inspection
On April 28, President Kenyatta met with the KGB team to discuss the ‘gift’ aboard the Russian ship. UK and Kenyan military officials had briefed him to insist on the weapons being handed to British troops. The Russians asked to be allowed to train Kenyan soldiers on how to use the weapons, but Kenyatta refused.
He then asked to have the weapons inspected to determine whether Kenya needed them before they were unloaded. Three Cabinet ministers and army commander Brigadier AJ Hardy inspected the weapons under tight security. They concluded they were either useless without Soviet training (which Kenyatta had rejected) or duplicated weapons Kenya already had.
“When this was reported back, there was an intense argument between Odinga and Kenyatta, which nearly ended in blows,” writes Charles Hornsby, author of ‘Kenya: A History Since Independence’.
The rejection of the Russian arms damaged the relationship between Kenyatta and his VP irreparably. It also embarrassed Odinga with his Russian and Chinese allies so badly, he could no longer count on their support in the same way he had in the first year after independence.
There was talk that some of the weapons offloaded in Dar es Salaam had found their way to Nyanza. The Kenyatta camp continued to crack down on Odinga and the radicals in Kanu. Frustrated with this, Odinga left the party in 1966 to join the opposition.