Fresh details have emerged on the intrigues that led to Raila Odinga’s intervention that finally saw his family strike a rapprochement with daughter-in-law Lwam Bekele over a high profile dispute involving the administration of his late son Fidel Odinga’s property.
With the much publicised court tussle assuming an embarrassing dimension, Raila is said to have persuaded his wife Ida, daughter Winnie and Fidel’s widow, the parties involved in the court tussle, to exploit the possibility of an out-of-court process to spare the family from public ridicule.
Ida and Lwam
Compounding matters even further was Raila’s involvement in negotiations at the top level of the country’s political leadership, his famous March 9 2018 handshake with Uhuru Kenyatta that was supposedly aimed at healing ethnic intolerance.
Raila therefore feared that political rivals led by William Ruto would have made maximum capital out of the Ida-Lwam litigation to mock Raila for ironically failing to bring peace to his wrangling family, even when he was leading peace initiatives at the national front.
The late Fidel Odinga with his Wife, Lwam Bekele
Essentially, concerns were rife that Ruto’s Tanga Tanga brigade was just waiting in the wings to use the Ida-Lwam legal battle to besmirch Raila ahead of 2022 election campaigns.
Raila is also partly credited for spearheading reconciliation efforts between South Sudan leader Salva Kiir and his foremost nemesis, rebel leader Riek Machar, although there are still simmering differences.
With High Court judge Aggrey Muchelule now giving Ida and her daughter-in-law two weeks to reach an agreement, Raila hopes to nip his detractors’ designs in the bud.
Appearing before Justice Muchelule last week, the two parties revealed they had been holding discussions with the intention of amicably settling the matter out of court. The family is embroiled in a dispute after Ida and her daughter Winnie accusing Lwam of sidelining the twins Fidel allegedly fathered with another woman, Phoebe Akinyi Gweno.
Maintaining Lwam was aware of the existence of the children, Ida and her daughter Winnie contend she has chosen to sideline them, a contention that saw Muchelule order a DNA test to establish the children’s paternity.
Raila and Lwam
But in an interesting turn of events, Gweno, the twins’ mother, appeared to disown the Railas’ standpoint when she cast her lot with Lwam. She has since been enjoined in the case as an interested party.
Gweno had said in an earlier petition that she was keen on stating her position to clear the air as well as protect her children’s interests, arguing she had, together with the twins, been left in between the Ida-Lwam dogfight.
Bidding to protect the interests of other parties including the twins, Ida contends Lwam had secretly filed the application for the control of Fidel’s assets which she says her daughter-in-law had failed to furnish them with respective papers.
On her part, Lwam argues the 4-year-old twins in contention were born six months after Fidel’s death, hence the discord that is their contested affinity on the one side, and dependency claims on the other.
It is worth mentioning that Lwam had applied for a grant of representation to allow her to run a multimillion estate left behind, after the death of her husband on January 4 2015. Fidel died without a will.
The property in question includes Fidel’s Karen home, three parcels of land, two Range Rovers, a Nissan Sunny and a Mercedes Benz and seven bank accounts. According to Ida and her daughter Winnie, Lwam cut communication with the family after she fled her matrimonial home in Tipuana Park in Karen immediately after the deceased was buried.
But the widow claims the Raila family is not supporting her son and disputes claims he has dropped from school, adding she co-owned the property in question with Fidel.
She has, however, said she does not have a problem accepting the twins as beneficiaries of her late husband’s estate if it is proved they are his children.
As if to attest to the veracity of the matter, the prominent Raila family first went out to gag media coverage of the high profile matter. The family’s gag plans against the media flopped.
Fidel was found dead on January 4 2015, aged 41 after a night out drinking with friends. He was found unresponsive in the morning inside a spare bedroom at their Karen home, leaving behind one son, Allay Raila Odinga.
Lwam and Fidel were said to have been sleeping in separate bedrooms. Surprisingly, postmortem results were never made public, fuelling speculation on what might have caused the death of Raila’s firstborn son.
