Prof. George Wajackoyah has challenged former prime minister Raila Odinga to “face the nation” and justify his sudden enthusiasm for a shelved multibillion-dollar airport deal with India’s Adani Group.
“If he has decided that Adani is now a god, let him come on television and explain to Kenyans what’s in that deal,” Mr. Wajackoyah said on K24 Tuesday morning, accusing Mr. Odinga of an about-face since joining President William Ruto’s “broad-based” government earlier this year.
Mr. Odinga provoked the backlash four days earlier at a National Executive Retreat in Nairobi’s Karen suburb, where he lamented the November 2024 cancellation of the Adani contract to modernize and manage Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
“I was very disappointed when we were not able to move on with the airport contract,” he told senior officials, warning that without expansion Nairobi risked ceding its aviation crown to Addis Ababa and Kigali.
The abandoned plan, valued at nearly $2 billion, would have given the Adani Group a 30-year lease in exchange for building a second runway and new terminal at Kenya’s busiest airport. President Ruto scrapped the project on Nov. 21, 2024, after U.S. prosecutors unsealed bribery indictments against Adani founder Gautam Adani and seven others.
Even before the indictments the venture was wobbling. In September 2024 hundreds of aviation workers walked off the job at midnight, grounding flights and chanting “No to Adani” in the departures hall. Their union feared layoffs and an influx of foreign labor; a Kenyan High Court had already paused the contract for judicial review.
Mr. Wajackoyah argues that those events make Mr. Odinga’s new advocacy hard to square with his long-standing populist image. “Raila is my friend,” he allowed, “but on national issues I may not agree with him.”
Mr. Odinga’s allies contend he is taking a pragmatic view of infrastructure. They note that East Africa’s passenger traffic has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels and that JKIA handled 9.2 million travelers last year, two million above its design capacity.
Privately, government technocrats say they still need a private partner if Kenya is to keep pace with Ethiopia’s Bole or Rwanda’s Bugesera, though any fresh tender would now require parliamentary oversight.
Yet the political optics are delicate. Opposition figures such as Wiper Party leader Kalonzo Musyoka call Mr. Odinga’s stance “non-patriotic,” and civil-society groups that campaigned against the original deal vow to “torch any back-room revival.”
