An ex-police officer has described ODM leader Raila Odinga as very active and jovial during his childhood. Flumence Maghanga says in 1958, he was posted to Kisumu Central police station, before being moved to Bondo police station two years later where was tasked with protecting the home of first Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga when he (Oginga) and Kenyatta were making trips to the Lancaster House.
The Lancaster House conferences were three meetings (1960, 1962, 1963) in which Kenya’s constitutional framework and independence were negotiated. The first conference was under the chairmanship of Secretary of State for the Colonies Iain Macleod in January 1960.
”I was guarding their home at that time. His father, Jaramogi who was on trips to Lancaster together with Jomo Kenyatta, lobbying for the country’s independence. I was at Bondo police station and I remember Raila being a jovial and very active boy. He would bring me tea in a flask every morning,” Mr. Maghanga said yesterday.
The St Mary’s school alumni recalls working across all the former 8 provinces except Western Kenya. He was also among officers who were deployed to the Shifta War in 1962.
The Shifta War (1963–1967) was a secessionist conflict in which ethnic Somalis in the Northern Frontier District (NFD) of Kenya attempted to secede from Kenya to join Somalia. The Kenyan government named the conflict “shifta”, after the Somali word for “bandit”, as part of a propaganda effort.
The Kenyan counter-insurgency General Service Units forced civilians into protected villages. The war ended in 1967 when Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, Prime Minister of the Somali Republic, signed a ceasefire with Kenya at the Arusha Conference on 23 October 1967.
