President Mwai Kibaki's tour of the north rift yesterday, whose main aim was to jumpstart peace and reconciliation in the region eventually turned out to be an ideal platform to launch a new political direction for the people of rift valley, and a grand departure from the political vehicle they boarded in the run up to the 2007 general election. It was a forum for the political players pushing for a generational overhaul of the country's leadership to state their case, with the hope of an endorsement from president Kibaki. But as Francis Gachuri reports, the public rally and the coded political messages were the clearest signal yet to Prime Minister Raila Odinga, once a political darling of the rift valley, that the ground was no longer rosy for him.