15/10/2025
RAILA ODINGA: THE TRUE PATRIOT
A Nation in Mourning
Kenya is today a nation in mourning. Its most enduring reformer, Raila Amolo Odinga, has died in Kochi, India, after a reported cardiac arrest. He was 80. The news, carried first by Indian and Kenyan media, fell on the country like a dark cloud. In every market, every matatu, and every newsroom, the same question floated in disbelief: How does a nation move on from a man who has carried its conscience for half a century?
Raila’s life cannot be measured in titles or offices held, but in sacrifices endured. Few leaders in Africa’s post-colonial history have paid a higher price for the freedoms their nations now take for granted. For over five decades, Raila lived not as a politician seeking comfort, but as a patriot haunted by Kenya’s unrealised promise.
The Price of Freedom and the Scars of Detention
He was his father’s son — Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s blood and courage ran deep in his veins. When Daniel arap Moi’s regime cracked down on dissent in the 1980s, Raila was among those who refused to bend. Accused of abetting the 1982 coup attempt, he was detained for nearly nine years — part of it in solitary confinement, part of it in darkness so deep it stole the sense of time itself. His wife, Ida, was hounded out of her teaching job. His children grew up in a house watched by the state. And yet, when he walked out of prison, he did not seek vengeance; he sought reform. “I have been in prison not because I stole,” he once said, “but because I wanted Kenyans to be free.”
Freedom for Raila was never an abstract word. It was hunger, torture, the slow decay of solitude. But it was also the stubborn refusal to let Kenya surrender to fear. In the 1990s, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia to demand multiparty democracy. They were beaten, tear-gassed, jailed — but they cracked the wall of authoritarianism. By 1991, Kenya had reopened the space for pluralism, and Raila had become the enduring face of resistance.
The Statesman and Peacemaker
He was not without contradictions. Ambitious, charismatic, and politically shrewd, he could inspire and divide in equal measure. But his greatest political gift was his ability to forgive without forgetting. In 2002, his declaration of “Kibaki Tosha!” ended KANU’s four-decade rule and ushered in an era of renewed hope. When betrayal followed, Raila did not torch the republic; he built the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) — a platform that would carry Kenya’s reformist aspirations for two decades.
The 2007 election remains the wound of his generation. The country burned, and thousands died. Raila, then the opposition leader, chose to share power with Mwai Kibaki rather than let Kenya collapse. That 2008 handshake was the act of a statesman — a reluctant peacemaker who understood that patriotism sometimes demands that one swallow injustice to preserve the nation’s soul. The Grand Coalition Government that followed birthed the 2010 Constitution, Kenya’s most progressive document since independence.
Building Bridges, Not Walls
When yet another disputed election in 2017 plunged Kenya into political paralysis, Raila reached again for peace. The Handshake with Uhuru Kenyatta in March 2018 defied every script of bitterness and ambition. “You cannot build a nation on hate,” he said on the steps of Harambee House. “We must build bridges, not walls.” The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) that followed may have failed politically, but it succeeded morally — it dared to imagine a Kenya that includes rather than excludes.
His critics accused him of compromises; his admirers called him a visionary realist. History may remember him as both. When the Gen Z protests erupted in 2025, challenging the government’s economic failures, Raila watched with cautious empathy. He understood rebellion — he had lived it — but he also understood the fragility of nations. As the protests waned and the broad-based government emerged, Raila’s counsel was sought once more. In the NODCO Report, his fingerprints were visible — a plea for dialogue over confrontation, for reform over rage.
The Perennial Protector
Even in his final months, he was a statesman without bitterness. Friends who visited him abroad spoke of a man at peace, reflective but not resigned. “Kenya must not be built on fear but on faith,” he once said. “Faith that every generation can make it better.”
His death leaves Kenya without its moral compass — a vacuum not of leadership but of conviction. Raila Odinga was many things: prisoner, liberator, prime minister, opposition leader, mentor, father, and husband. But above all, he was a patriot — one who refused exile, refused despair, refused silence.
He could have chosen the easy path — a life of exile, diplomacy, or business. Instead, he chose struggle. Like Nelson Mandela, he bore scars with grace; like Martin Luther King Jr., he turned pain into prophecy; like Gandhi, he knew that the most powerful revolution is the one waged in the conscience.
He was never Kenya’s president, but he was its perennial protector. When the story of this nation is written in full, it will record that Raila Odinga died not as a man defeated by politics, but as one vindicated by time. His life was Kenya’s longest campaign — for justice, for democracy, for dignity.
And now, as the country lowers its flags, it must also lift its gaze — to finish the work he began, to prove that his sacrifices were not in vain.
For Kenya, Raila Odinga’s death is not the end of a life. It is the beginning of a reckoning.
