Kenya After Odinga

Ihad been back​ in Nairobi for a few days when I heard that Raila Odinga, the towering opposition figure who played a crucial role in Kenya’s return to multi-party democracy, had died at a clinic in India, aged eighty. Odinga, affectionately known as Baba (Swahili for ‘father’) by his supporters and political rivals alike, was a fixture of Kenyan politics. While he never became president, his ability to move between opposition and establishment was legendary. From 2008 to 2013 he served as prime minister, a position he occupied as naturally as he did that of opposition leader. His advocacy for the 2010 constitution helped it gain mass support, and it was passed in a referendum that year by a large majority. The new constitution curbed the near absolute power of the presidency, devolved power to Kenya’s 47 counties, enshrined rights to gender equality and a clean environment, and empowered members of the public and a Human Rights and Equality Commission to challenge human rights abuses. Most important, perhaps, it enabled Kenya to avoid a repeat of the ethnic violence that erupted after the disputed election in 2007.

Odinga shaped a series of Kenyan presidencies and played a sometimes controversial role in mediation efforts across the continent, from Côte d’Ivoire to South Sudan. Critics will remember him most for his ‘handshake politics’: the subtle art of negotiating power-sharing agreements with bitter rivals, often to great personal and political benefit. In Kenya, the handshake symbolises an elite-driven politics of compromise, designed to appease the base while ensuring that nothing fundamentally changes for working people. Successive ‘handshakes’ with Daniel arap Moi, Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta brought peace and stability but did little to alleviate inequality, even in Odinga’s political stronghold of Luo Nyanza. Many young Kenyans saw Odinga’s decision to enter President William Ruto’s ‘broad-based government’ in 2024, in exchange for Ruto’s endorsing his bid to become chair of the African Union Commission, as a betrayal. (Odinga later lost the AUC election to Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the former foreign minister of Djibouti.) But everyone I spoke to in the days after his death expressed deep admiration for what he had achieved.

Odinga’s body arrived in Nairobi on 16 October. The plan was to transport the coffin from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to parliament, where his body would lie in state. A state funeral at Nyayo Stadium was scheduled for 17 October, then another public viewing in Kisumu before burial at Odinga’s ancestral home in Bondo. When the delayed Kenya Airways flight from Mumbai arrived (having changed its flight number to RAO 001 in Odinga’s honour), it was greeted by huge crowds of supporters. Flights were suspended for two hours as people made their way onto the tarmac, sporting the colours of Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and waving green branches – a symbol of grief, cleansing and continuity in Luo culture. It took several hours for the coffin to make the short journey to parliament, as thousands walked alongside the motorcade.

The crowds were so large that the public viewing was moved to Kasarani Stadium. But the event quickly descended into chaos. People streamed into the stadium to get closer to the coffin. Unable to keep the situation under control, the police resorted to their usual methods: tear gas and live bullets. Four people were killed and several more injured. The ceremony at Nyayo Stadium the following day was calmer, though two people died in a crush as they were leaving the venue. In his eulogy, Ruto described Odinga as a ‘mentor’ and ‘unifier’ whose political journey and patriotism had culminated, conveniently, in their political pact last year. Uhuru Kenyatta fondly remembered moments of laughter with Odinga. You wouldn’t have guessed that both men had fought him in disputed elections.

In the hours after Odinga’s death, Ruto signed into law several controversial bills, including amendments to the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act of 2018. The amendments give the National Computer and Cybercrimes Coordination Committee, mostly made up of former security officials, the power to block websites and applications, and criminalise any online ‘communication’ that harms another person’s reputation, privacy or mental wellbeing. Those convicted face up to ten years in prison and a maximum fine of twenty million Kenyan shillings (around £120,000), far exceeding the punishment for fraud. Some key provisions of the cybercrimes act have been blocked in the courts, pending a constitutional petition challenging its legality. (The legislation was tabled only a few days after last year’s ‘Gen Z protests’ against the Finance Bill, which were organised on social media.) Across the border in Tanzania a similar law, passed in 2015, has been used to silence critics of President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi party. (Hassan has herself taken an increasingly autocratic turn; hundreds of people were reportedly killed during anti-government protests following the election on 29 October, and the government shut down the internet for several days.) Kenya’s Privatisation Act, also signed into law last month, gives the president power to privatise national assets, raising concerns about the looting of public resources. These laws threaten the constitutional freedoms Odinga spent a lifetime trying to protect.

There has been some speculation that Ruto’s government could face UN sanctions, following a letter from four Special Rapporteurs accusing the government of human rights violations during the crackdown on demonstrations against the finance bill, including the killing of protesters and the detention of human rights campaigners. Meanwhile, Ruto’s standing in the region has been hurt by a meeting in Nairobi last month between Congolese opposition politicians including Joseph Kabila, the former president, who was recently sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes and treason. And earlier this year, the Sudanese Armed Forces accused Kenya of violating Sudanese sovereignty by hosting a meeting of the Rapid Support Forces, which have been accused of committing genocide in Darfur.

Under Ruto, Kenya has taken a more ambiguous stance on the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (which claims Western Sahara but only controls a fifth of the territory), supporting Morocco’s plan for autonomy instead of calling for full Sahrawi self-determination, as previous governments have done. In his approach to diplomacy, Ruto stands in sharp contrast to Odinga, who was respected across the continent. But Odinga’s mediation efforts were often ineffective, and his decision to quietly align himself with the Ruto administration on the issue of Sahrawi independence has tarnished his reputation as a Pan-African statesman.

Since it emerged out of the grassroots movement for constitutional change in 2007, the ODM had come to rely entirely on Odinga for direction. So far, there is no clear successor in the Odinga family, and his old Luo allies lack a national base. Odinga’s older brother Oburu has been appointed interim leader of the party, while younger members such as the MP Babu Owino and Edwin Sifuna, senator of Nairobi county and secretary general of the ODM, have positioned themselves as potential successors. The party is at risk of a split between those who would prefer to remain in Ruto’s government (among them Gladys Wanga, chair of the ODM) and others (Sifuna and Owino) who want the ODM to field its own presidential candidate in 2027. The ‘United Opposition’ formed around disgraced former second deputy president Rigathi Gachagua and former vice president Kalonzo Musyoka is unlikely to pose a serious threat.

A few days after Odinga’s death, the journalist John Kamau published a tribute in the Daily Nation. ‘The House of Jaramogi has always lived in that uneasy space between power and its edges,’ he wrote. ‘They’ve shaped power from the outside, cut deals to sit inside, and left their fingerprints on every regime without ever wearing the crown. It was a dynasty without the throne – yet never far from it.’ Odinga’s father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was the first vice president of Kenya. He was part of the left opposition in Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya Africa National Union, which split from the party in 1966 over Kenyatta’s anti-communism. Jaramogi was dismissed as vice president and soon founded the short-lived Kenya People’s Union, a socialist party that challenged the growing corruption and authoritarianism within KANU. Other questions that exercised the left at the time were the distribution of land after independence and the continued domination of the Kenyan economy by foreign interests.

The Odinga name soon fell into disrepute. Jaramogi’s close ties to Moscow and Beijing made him a target of Britain’s intelligence agencies, which put out propaganda undermining him. As Jaramogi and the KPU faced increased government repression, Raila went to study in East Germany. He returned to Kenya in October 1969, days before the Kisumu massacre. During a visit to Kisumu, the de facto Luo capital and a KPU power base, Kenyatta had threatened to detain Jaramogi and crush his supporters ‘like flour if they play with us’. The crowd responded angrily, and as Kenyatta’s motorcade sped off, police and members of his security detail fired on them, killing at least 59 people. The massacre, which took place only a few months after the assassination of the moderate Luo politician and Kenyatta ally Tom Mboya, led to one of the biggest political crises in Kenya’s post-independence history. The government imposed a curfew, banned the KPU and arrested all of its MPs. Jaramogi was detained until 1971. Raila was left to deal with Jaramogi’s many responsibilities and dependants. He chose not to pursue a PhD in East Germany as he had planned, and lectured at the University of Nairobi instead. At first, according to his close friend James Orengo, Odinga seemed uninterested in campus politics. But once the KPU leaders were released from detention, he was drawn into private discussions about the future of the opposition and how it might challenge Kenyatta. In the early 1970s, Odinga joined the Kenya Bureau of Standards and started a business. But behind the scenes, he was beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Raila Odinga’s life spanned Kenya’s long history of political violence. He lived through the country’s high-profile assassinations: Pio Gama Pinto (1965), Mboya (1969), J.M. Kariuki (1975), Robert Ouko (1990) and Odhiambo Mbai (2003). In 1982, the Moi regime (which lasted from 1978 to 2002) arrested him for alleged involvement in a coup attempt. He spent six years in detention, during which he was tortured. After his release, he became the leading voice of the pro-democracy movement in what was then a one-party state. In 1992, only a year after the reintroduction of multi-party democracy, he was elected to parliament as a member of the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy – Kenya, the party Jaramogi had founded when the KPU was banned. (In 1993, a year before his death, Jaramogi made a pact with Moi’s KANU – the blueprint for the ‘handshake’ in Kenyan politics.)

But the political system designed by the Kenyatta and Moi regimes, in which state funds were distributed to the president’s ethnic or regional base, proved divisive and undermined Kenyan democracy. At first, the formation of a united multi-ethnic government seemed possible. In 2002, Odinga helped Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, become president as part of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC). During the campaign, his endorsement – ‘Kibaki Tosha!’ (‘Kibaki is sufficient’) – rallied the opposition behind Kibaki, eventually ending Moi’s 24-year rule. But soon after, Odinga and Kibaki fell out over Kibaki’s refusal to make the transition from a presidential to a parliamentary system as set out in their coalition agreement. And in 2007, Kenya experienced the worst outbreak of political violence in its postcolonial history. Odinga used his influence to end the fighting and secure the position of prime minister. The handshake with Kibaki, whom he had accused of ‘stealing the election’, was his most consequential. But although he had finally negotiated a seat at the table, the social justice and redistribution he had promised remained elusive.

Odinga has left a complicated legacy. Like Kariuki, who held a number of positions in Jomo Kenyatta’s government, he was able to amass vast wealth while retaining his image as a champion of ‘ordinary Kenyans’. He built a popular base that included the elite as well as the working classes, while gaining a reputation as a shrewd reformer who pushed for compromises that would in the long run benefit the whole country. But his left-wing politics were mostly symbolic; for all his idealism, pragmatism always won out. He aligned himself with the political establishment when it suited him, while benefiting from the left-wing credentials of his family name. The brand of politics that Kamau has called ‘Odingaism’ relied on the threat of unfinished revolution: governments knew that if they refused to negotiate with the Odingas or to offer limited reforms, they might face collective resistance. Now, for the first time in more than three decades, the president will have to look beyond the Odinga family to build a new political consensus and appease young Kenyans, who are demanding genuine political change.