How Raila’s ODM Party Has Used, Dumbed, Isolated and Neglected Norman Magaya

By Social media user Seth Odongo

Many of you may have read that Norman Magaya, the former head of NASA Coalition Secretariat, collapsed at Bomas of Kenya in August 2017 during the verification of presidential votes. Here is an article that reported the incident.

Many of you may not know, however, that Mr. Magaya has been battling a heart condition arising from that incident, sometimes spending months in the hospital, his condition improving only to deteriorate again.

Magaya served NASA at a time the opposition front needed someone with his courage, tenacity, and loyalty.

Long before the handshake, it was actors like Norman Magaya who the system singled out to torment – and torment the system did – to stop the pressure and the agitation.

The Bomas incident is well known to the people who should know, and it is generally understood that it was not natural. Magaya must have been poisoned. Or something more terrible happened there.

Right now Magaya is so weak and thin; the body wasted by whatever it is that happened to him at Bomas, the spirit stung by the disloyalty, the isolation and the neglect by the political class he dutifully served.

Raila Odinga at Nairobi Hospital where he visited Norman Magaya Photo|ODM party

Now, long before Magaya there was another case. That of Kenyatta University students whom Olive Muganda suspended/expelled after a 2013 vote stuffing scandal that students unearthed at Kenyatta University’s main campus, leading to chaos.

These students were seeking the then CORD, and specifically ODM, and particularly ODM Leader Raila Odinga, to intervene and have them return to school and complete their studies. They’d been processed quickly through university disciplinary mechanisms and punitively condemned.

I remember this case because when we pushed so hard and @silasjakakimba managed to fix an audience between these students and Mr. Odinga, he called the then ODM Executive Director Magerer Langat to follow up the issue with Prof. Mugenda.