If you cannot find many of Kenya’s top political leaders in Nairobi, don’t despair.

You can always try Uganda; more specifically, the campaign rallies of President Yoweri Museveni.

In the past few weeks, Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga; Kenya’s former Higher Education minister William Ruto (now threatened by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity); the gruff former president Daniel arap Moi; and lately Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka dropped in on Museveni.

Both Raila and Musyoka joined Museveni at his campaign rallies for next month’s elections, sparking debates that still continue about what their game plan is.

Ruto attended the launch of Museveni’s campaign manifesto last year.

Moi’s visit was the easiest to fathom. According to his aides, it was to do the South Sudan referendum that was weeks away and looked likely to unravel, thus creating a new regional crisis.

Though the Sudan peace agreement that ended decades of war was signed in 2005, it had been a pet project of Moi to which he is fully entitled to take credit.

While Kenya gave diplomatic support and sanctuary to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement and several refugees, Museveni was the sharp edge of the knife.

Not only did he pour arms into the south to support the SPLA, but frequently Uganda sent troops to fight on the Southern insurgents’ side.

Ruto is alleged to be operating a business in a mall allegedly owned by the First Family in Uganda.

There is no independent confirmation of this link. However, Kenyan media speculated that after falling out with Raila, he went to see Museveni, who is thought either to dislike or to fear Raila.

In 2008, radical youth in Kibera slum, in Raila’s Langata constituency, dug up the railway line and disrupted supplies to Uganda, to protest Uganda’s claim to the Migingo Islands in Lake Victoria.

In a typically reckless moment of Museveni-misspeak, during a lecture at Dar es Salaam at the height of the dispute over Migingo islands, Museveni unleashed a tribal rant against “those wa Jaluo” in Kenya.

Raila is a Luo. Matters were not helped by the claims that Museveni backed President Mwai Kibaki in the disputed December 2007 elections in which he faced-off in a bitter contest with Raila.

Kenya media was full of reports of Ugandan soldiers in western Kenya, and several Ugandan trucks and their drivers were attacked. Some drivers were killed.

Museveni’s attempt to mediate floundered fairly early, partly because Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) didn’t see him a neutral broker.

At that time, ironically, officials in Museveni’s contingent told this writer that Ruto was one of the most stubborn politicians on the ODM side.

Ruto himself is alleged to have “reacted sharply to what he perceived as a patronising attitude” by Museveni.

But anyone who knows Museveni, will be aware that he is not a man who is easy to trap in a political cul-de-sac (The East Africa will publish an insight into Museveni in two weeks’ time).

As one regional government official put it: “Museveni can be very pragmatic…that is both a strong and weak point, because he has turned pragmatism into an ideology,” a gentle way of saying the Ugandan leader has no principles.

Pragmatism

Nowhere is this Museveni pragmatism apparent than in his dealings with Raila.

If ever there was really any significant hostility between the two men, Museveni moved to downplay it immediately after Raila became prime minister in the post-election violence coalition government.

One reason has to do with South Sudan. John Garang, the charismatic and towering leader of the SPLA/M was a long-term and close friend of Museveni.

When he died in July 2005 in Southern Sudan while flying back home in Museveni’s presidential helicopter, the Ugandan leader’s tremendous influence with the SPLA/M slipped.

It did not help that to this day, conspiracy theorists in Southern Sudan believe that Museveni, somehow, plotted to assassinate Garang, a claim that does not make sense considering the setback Kampala’s influence in South Sudan suffered.

In any event, the beneficiary was South Sudan President Salva Kiir, who is seen as being closer to Kenya than to Uganda.

Indeed, Kenyan business have done a booming trade in the South in the past five years.

In any event, Kiir is known to be close to Raila, and the two meet often. Partly because of blood kinship, Kisumu has become the new spiritual Mecca for Southern Sudanese.

Museveni was quick to move to mend fences. When last year Raila went to Uganda on a private visit in Soroti with the local former MP Mike Mukula, Museveni threw him a diplomatic bone.

He invited him to State House, and allowed him to announce that Uganda had given up all claims to Migingo, and recognised that the tiny but emotionally significant island belonged to Kenya.

By so doing, Museveni enable Raila to return home as a hero of sorts with the Migingo crown in hand.

As he surveys the field, Museveni will be aware that opinion polls are showing Raila as the man to beat in the Kenya 2012, although only a mad man would take that possibility to the bank at this point.

Friends of both Museveni and Raila are reported to have been pushing them to put on a more united front for both South Sudan, and the future of the East African Community.

There have been suggestions that Raila’s most recent visit was part of a scratch-your-back-I-scratch-yours-too deal.

Museveni is going into the February election with his previous single largest political bloc, the southern Buganda region, having soured against him.

Even if, as is Team Museveni’s wont, they steal the election massively, without compensating legitimately for losses he is likely to suffer in Buganda, Museveni would still come up short.

The one area of contention, where the vote has grown in recent years, and Museveni had been deeply unpopular in the past, is northern Uganda.

At the height of the war, Museveni was so hated in the north, the opposition used to sweep all the seats.

However, pressure from the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) eventually confined the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony to Southern Sudan.

Joint operations between the SPLA and UPDF pushed the LRA out of Southern Sudan into the Democratic Republic of Congo, partly because the LRA was seen as a mercenary force in the region hired to disrupt the peace accord and make last week’s referendum impossible.

The five-year peace in the north has improved the ground for Museveni, and a massive political push in the past few years have made him, according to independent observers, “fairly competitive.”

In the Luo north, the next most revered family after former Uganda and Uganda People’s Congress president Milton Obote’s, is easily the Odinga family.

The Odinga family have links to Obote’s late 1960s radical politics.

And during the Museveni bush war against Obote, when even his former bossom ally (then Tanzania President) Julius Nyerere seemed to abandon him, one confidant spoke of Obote “being besieged by Bantu hordes.”

Several mercenary elements from Nyanza came to Uganda to help a “Luo brother” and, soon formed the inner core of a paranoid Obote’s bodyguard.

There are many in the north who are still grateful for the solidarity.

A Raila appearance at a Museveni rally, would therefore, do the Uganda chief a lot of good. But ever-calculating, Raila sought to eat his cake and have it.

Sources familiar with Raila’s foray in Uganda, said he told Museveni he was happy to appear at his rally, but it had to be in a “neutral” part of Uganda, ie one which is not populated by Ugandan Luos and where the two candidates from the north, UPC’s Olara Otunnu and Democratic Party’s Mao Norbert, were not entrenched.

Third, that he would not expressly endorse Museveni.

To Museveni, it probably didn’t matter what Raila said — the triumph was in the photo opportunity.

But what was in it for Raila?

Though he now runs East Africa’s most open free-market economy, Museveni still likes to wrap himself in his old leftist Marxist robes, and to portray himself as pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist.

In that sense, he feels he is kindred spirit with Raila, also an expired leftist.

Among all possible future Kenyan leaders, Raila is probably the one who will most buy into Museveni’s obsession with an East African political federation.

Indeed, our sources said Raila indicated to Museveni that he was sympathetic with his thinking on East African federation.

Museveni then, allegedly, dropped a bombshell. He allegedly told Raila if the East Africa political federation were to become realty before his next term (which he is “confident” of winning) expires in 2016 — he would consider stepping down and “playing a role in East African leadership.”

In short, Museveni doesn’t want to retire and go back to his Rwakitura village to tend his cattle. He would like to be a titular East African president.

Masterstroke

It was a masterstroke from Museveni, because Raila’s real friends in Ugandan politics are among the opposition leader.

So if he wanted to help them come to power in future, then he would have to make it possible for Museveni to step down, by supporting the idea of an East African federation.

And if he was open to pushing East African federation, then Museveni would do what he could to help him become president in 2012.

We have not been able to confirm this beyond doubt, but it presents a fascinating scenario.

This is the Uganda into which VP Kalonzo waded. Like Raila, he addressed Museveni’s rallies.

However, The Daily Monitor reported that he made three campaign appearances — and they were in the Museveni stronghold of western Uganda.

This suggests that Kalonzo’s visit was not loaded with a personal political agenda for the 2012 elections, but he was probably actually seeking Uganda’s support in extricating Kenya from the jaws of the ICC, which has fingered five senior officials and a journalist, for their possible role in the post-election that left 1,300 people dead, 400,000 displaced, and thousands of women raped.

On the face of, Uganda — and South Africa where he was before he came to Kampala — would seem the wrong place for Kalonzo to seek support against the ICC.

One of the political coups for Museveni, was having LRA leader Kony and several of his top commanders indicted by the ICC.

It helped militarily too, because the LRA was forced to operate in even more remote areas where its leaders were unlikely to be arrested and carted off to the ICC.

But, most importantly, because Museveni himself had been accused by northern critics and some international human rights groups of war crimes in the north, the fact that he was not named by the ICC ala Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir was taken as proof of his innocence.

That is why, despite the official Africa Union on the ICC and in support of Bashir, Kampala refuses to take a hardline stance against The Hague.

The same is true of South Africa, where the memories of apartheid, and the Bishop Desmond Tutu’s world-famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission are still fresh.

If South Africa swung sharply against the ICC, it would be vindicating the crimes of apartheid.

However, for those same reasons, supportive noises for Kenya’s “Hague Six” from Kampala and Pretoria are more likely to carry more weight than if, for example, they came from Libya which daily rants against western imperialism and the UN.

Whatever the outcome, the queue of Kenyan leaders outside Museveni’s door, should surely be flattering his image of himself as East Africa’s elder statesman.

And, who knows, it might even make him a less bellicose neighbour.