Raila Amolo Odinga
Raila Amolo Odinga was born at Maseno in Nyanza Province , the second son of nine children of the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Mama Mary Emma Odinga. 
After attending the Kisumu Union School, Maranda High School and the Herder Institute, Odinga spent 1965 to 1970 at the Technical University (Otto Von Guericke), Magdeburg in Germany leaving with a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering (Special field: Production Technology).
Returning to Kenya , he joined the University of Nairobi – Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he taught until 1974.
In 1975, he was appointed Deputy Director of the Kenya Bureau of Standards, a post he held until 1982 when he was arrested and subsequently detained without trial by the Govemment.
He has also attended courses at the British Standards Institution in London , the National Bureau of Standard, Washington D.C. and the University of Denver in Colorado , and has several publications both technical and political to his credit.
In the dark days of political repressions in Kenya , Raila was detained three times without trial for a total period of 8 years. In 1991 at the height of the struggle for democratic change, he had to briefly seek asylum in Norway in order to escape a fourth detention.
After the re-Introduction of multi-party politics, Raila vied for the Lang’ata Parliamentary seat, a multi-ethnic constituency within Nairobi City and won.
Following disagreement however, within the leadership of the Party, he in December 1996 resigned from both FORD-Kenya and Parliament, and joined the National Development Party of Kenya (NDP). He contested the ensuing by-election in his former constituency on an NDP ticket, in March 1997. and retained the seat.
Raila was elected the Party Leader of the NDP and was the Party’s Presidential Candidate in the 1997 General Election, coming third in a field of fifteen (15) candidates.
The ill fated merger between NDP and KANU of March 18, 2002, lasted for three months before cracks emerged. Raila who had been elected as Secretary General along with a number of colleagues disagreed with KANU and teamed up with others in the opposition to form the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which won the 2002 General alection with a big majority.
He is currently the Prime Minister of the Republic Kenya.
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
I SUPPORT political and economic reforms that are in line with liberal democracy tinged with social market economics;
I BELIEVE that we all owe a duty to each other as well as to ourselves, for human life is a network of social relations.
I believe human beings must avoid destructive competition which leads to greed and deception;
I am commtted to building strong communities as cornerstones of Kenya ‘s national unity
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