Kenya is in mourning. The nation has lost a part of itself, and the republic a portion of its soul. Gone, now, forever, is the former Prime minister and powerful national leader of many Kenyans—Raila Amolo Odinga.
When the failed coup attempt in 1982 shook Kenya, he was arrested, detained without trial for six years, and tortured in Kamiti. Those were years of darkness, where every sunrise felt like a betrayal, and yet something deeper in him held, unshattered.
After release, he pressed onward: challenging the one-party state, leading in the struggle for multiparty democracy in 1991, going into exile and returning in 1992 to win a seat in the National Assembly under Ford Kenya. From that chamber he kept pushing — for accountability, for ballots that counted, for a voice for those who had only ever been answered by silence.
In 1997 he stood for president, and again later, each time carrying more than candidacy: a hope that one day power would answer to justice. He formed the NDP, he later joined Kanu in 2001 to become Energy minister, a calculated move among others, working always in the field where change might grow.
The election of 2007 ravaged the land. Violence exploded in homes and markets and churches. Nearly 1,300 lives were taken; hundreds of thousands displaced. The wounds cut deep. Then, the peace brokered, the power sharing with Mwai Kibaki, Raila took office as Prime Minister in 2008. Those days he walked between treacherous corridors and broken promises, seeking to steady the ship of a nation that seemed forever listing.
During that tenure he supported, campaigned and saw through the passage in 2010 of a new constitution: devolved power, counties empowered, a structure meant to touch the far-flung places, not only the capitals. In 2018 he held out a hand to Uhuru Kenyatta in the Handshake, seeking to calm tempests, to forge some fragile unity. Curiosity, betrayal, hope mingled in people’s responses.
He ran again in 2013, in 2017, in 2022. Each campaign saw new faces, new hopes, new accusations of unfairness. Each loss carved him deeper into the life of the republic as one who would not give up on fairness. He challenged election results in courts, demanded reform, urged transparency, called for accountability.
He took roles beyond opposition: when Kenya’s voice was needed abroad, he went. In 2025 he was sent to South Sudan to help mediate intensifying conflict. He saw the dangerous edges of governance, of broken peace pacts, of wounded trust.
He married Ida Odinga; they raised children: Fidel, Rosemary, Raila Jr and Winnie. He held his family under the weight of political storms, under the glare of both adoring crowds and hostile scrutiny.
There were moments he stood in open sky and shouted for the constitution, for equal voice. There were nights alone in cellars of power, nights haunted by betrayal. There were days when he was lifted by the cheers of the marginalised, the elderly, the farmer, the youth who saw their face in his words. The crowd that believed in him, even in defeat.
Now the land is hushed. Kenya looks for its captain like Walt Whitman in his famous elegy looked for President Abraham Lincoln, in empty cyber rooms, in silent halls of patriotism. His voice, once raw with protest, now echoes in court decisions, in architecture of the new law, in every ballot box pressed by human hands and sinister digital ones.
And in those echoes the nation remembers not only the ends he sought, but the way he sought them: with persistence, with dignity, with willingness to bear both love and sacrifice. He lived in wars of words, in battles near midnight, in the slow work of change. He carried trauma, he carried hope. His life was biography and elegy joined.
The nation has lost a part of itself, the republic a portion of its soul. The years will mourn him, each grain of soil of the motherland will carry his scars. But what he built for us progeny of the founding mothers and fathers of this great motherland, I mean law, voice, constitution, yearning, will not easily be undone. Never. Ever. His legacy rises in every whisper: democracy, justice, peace. Jowi! Jowi! Jowi! Raila eeeh. A luta continua.
Lecturer, Kenyatta University
