Raila orphans: False spokespersons and heirs riding on death's back

The late Raila Odinga. [File, Standard]

Well, they are all at it now, aren’t they? Every person who was in any way connected to Raila Odinga when he was alive now appears to know exactly what his thinking was.

Enigma? No way. On the contrary, he was obviously an open book. Because they all know exactly what he wanted, what he didn’t want, what he would have wanted, what he could have wanted, what he might have wanted – possibly even what he still wants now he is dead, as if they continue some kind of celestial, cosmic connection.

It’s Baba this, Baba that, Baba the other – as if repeating the word imbues unquestionable legitimacy.

People apparently have no shame in using their own measly standing – in positions they could only have dreamed of without Raila’s protection – to puff out their chests and present to the world as rightful and entitled spokespersons or heirs 

Raila cannot be resting easy. He was exploited in his lifetime and he is still being exploited now. He must be turning in his grave.

So ‘spokespersons’ first. To go back to 2024 – it was a shock when Raila came out to support President William Ruto after the Gen-Z uprising in June that year. Raila was roundly criticised for it (including privately by me).

But it was a complicated issue. Gen-Z had specifically asked him not to interfere. Ruto was floundering and panicking. The military was out of its box and on the streets – something that’s difficult to pack back in if things escalate and armed personnel sniff the scent of power.

The age of military coups is far from over in Africa. Three days before Raila died, there was a coup in Madagascar. In the few short months since, there have been two other attempts, one successful in Guinea Bissau. Meanwhile, savage internecine warfare continues to lay waste to several other countries dangerously close to us. It is an ever-present threat, particularly in times of civil conflict.

There was doubtless a personal aspect too – though one might say there was little in Raila’s life that was strictly personal, as opposed to public and political. But if things had escalated to the point where a military coup had happened, Raila would have been one of the first to be placed at least under house arrest and confined for the foreseeable future.

He had long ago endured a nearly 10-year taste of that, and he knew it solved nothing. As the eternal pointsman for the opposition (and we are seeing this only too clearly now, as the opposition flails and thrashes without him) he knew his own neutralisation would not help free Kenya from the gluttons’ clutches.

So, he decided instead to give Ruto some rope – either enough rope to hang himself, or enough rope to put to good use in pulling the nation out of the mire and on to a truly progressive path. Ruto’s subsequent choices would directly influence Raila’s own, and this was something Raila himself made clear.

In a TV interview broadcast on July 19 last year, just three months before he died, Raila stated: “We have said we are in the broad-based government until 2027. We did not say we are going to work with UDA beyond 2027.” He added, “There is a red line. If it is crossed, we will make a decision … we will evaluate.”

Some are now blatantly trying to shore up their own lucrative positions by contradicting Raila’s own words and repackaging them to suit themselves. The self-seekers’ panic button now rests in clinging shamelessly to Ruto and fawning on him by any craven means.

Unfortunately for Raila, cruel fate was about to intervene. He was strong and determined in his resolve always to fight for Kenya but, as 2025 progressed, he was struggling physically, even though he always tried valiantly to project a picture of the kind of good health he sadly no longer enjoyed. For years, he had been staving off the debilitating effects of underlying conditions, keeping them at bay as best he could with a disciplined diet regime and rigorous daily exercise.

He knew he was elderly. Horizons narrow as you grow older. Worlds grow smaller, opportunities recede. Despite this, he never shied from the daunting possibility that he might once again be called upon to come out and try to lead Kenyans to the ‘Canaan’ he often referenced, even if, for now, the more pragmatic move was to support anyone verbally committed to taking the path to national prosperity. It didn’t matter who was banging the leading drum; it only mattered that the message be genuine.

And on that score, Raila clearly already had some fear that things were not necessarily going to turn out well under the current administration. And he always hedged his bets. While encouraging close allies to follow his lead in co-operating with the government for the time being, he also quietly suggested that they never utter the phrase “two terms”.

True to his own word, Raila himself never did, never asserted that he would support Ruto in the next election. He was just biding his time, waiting and watching, as was his way.

He was supremely strategic and always played his cards close to his chest until the very last moment, as a number of significant past events demonstrate – his decision to strike a deal with Daniel arap Moi and Kanu, his declaration ‘Kibaki tosha’, his ‘handshake’ with Uhuru Kenyatta and so on. When he felt important decisions were going to cause seismic shudders across the nation, he made sure those decisions always came as massive surprises and were already faits accomplis.

So, people like Makau Mutua, who asserted in a recent piece published in another newspaper that “Baba” (of course!) “confided in me… that he had decided to strike an agreement with President Ruto to support him in 2027”, succeed only in demonstrating how little they knew or understood Raila Odinga.

Political instinct

Such people just don’t have the political nous or instinct to realise that the last thing Raila would have done, a full two years ahead of a general election, would be to voice or even hold such firm intentions, let alone confide them to the likes of Mutua. Such people can’t even concoct a story that sounds remotely plausible. 

All too soon, though, and unexpected as it was to most, came the event that would irrevocably decide Raila’s future. He had unknowingly reached the final few days of his life, but during those last days in India he had taken advantage of the peaceful environment away from the usual hurly-burly to engage in some deep reflection on securing Kenya’s future. And it seems that some half-formed resolutions were rising to the surface.

Just after midday on Sunday, October 12, 2025, three days before he died and when he had been in India just over a week, Raila telephoned one of his closest and most trusted friends.

He asked that person to begin thinking about and assembling a list across a spectrum of academics and proven people with whom he might work in the event of his running for the presidency in 2027.

One of his final actions thus gives the lie to all those self-regarding false ‘spokespersons’ trying to ride on death’s back. True to his own publicly stated words, Raila was still watching Ruto juggling the rope, still watching a man he was yet to finally judge for his achievements or failures in office. At the same time, he was clearly still determined, despite his frailty, to stand ready once again, ready to offer his all, if necessary, to save Kenya.

Would that he could have.

So now we come to the ‘heirs’. This is the first time I’ve heard of the ‘heir’ paradigm going upwards, rather than downwards, but I’ll start with a question for Raila’s older brother, Dr Oburu Oginga: “Oburu, what in heaven’s name do you think you are doing?”

Oburu, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s eldest son, had one chance to be heir to the Odinga dynasty. That was when Jaramogi died in 1994. It didn’t happen, because the eldest son had no instinct for politics. Oburu is an economist by education, and by inclination has always been a relaxed, ‘take-the-easier-path’ kind of fellow. Unlike his younger brother, he didn’t have fire in his belly.

People don’t change as they grow older, they just become more like their intrinsic selves. Oburu, despite having served in various political capacities, is still not a politician. And that is painfully obvious in the way he is blundering through these post-Raila days, putting his foot in it at every turn. If ODM needed a death knell, they got it the day someone decided that putting Oburu in the top job was a good idea.

From demanding the post of deputy president, to imperturbably announcing with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer that he would automatically be the next ODM presidential candidate, and then engaging in a very public fight with the next generation of Odingas, in particular Raila’s daughter Winnie, and other younger members of ODM, Oburu has shown himself to be absolutely deaf and blind to the requirements of the position into which he has so unfortunately and so unsuitably been thrust.

His are all dreadful, crass decisions, actions that would never have been countenanced by Raila. But there’s no point in dwelling on comparisons with Raila. Oburu just can’t hack it, and he would be a wise man if he now ceded his custodianship and bowed out gracefully, while that still remains a possibility.

That brings us to the younger Odinga generation, and in particular Winnie. Winnie was a grumpy, unsmiling little girl the first day I met her, aged two. By all accounts, she is still pretty grumpy, as well as being haughty, arrogant and quick to criticise and lord it over people, exhibiting none of the compassionate, charismatic nature and charm of her father.

That’s fine. Not everyone can present as a charming, gentle, friendly person, and that doesn’t make them a bad person, or an incompetent person. But personal appeal is very important in politics. What daddy and grandaddy did, or what they were, is not, or never should be, a passport to prominence.

Winnie has as good a chance as the next person to make it as an effective politician. She has every opportunity to prove herself – and prove herself she must, even moreso than some others of her generation, given that she got her EALA position because of who her father was. Perhaps she could start by telling people what she has achieved there.

She and some others in her generation are, in fact, all where they are because they are nepo-babies, celebrity kids, lavishly indulged offspring who have been showered with all they could have desired throughout their lives.

They have had everything, lived the high life – fully funded foreign educations, free-ranging travel, fun-filled holidays in the finest hotels in far-flung places, fertile farms, fabulous houses, flamboyant cars, high fashion and phenomenally expensive fancy-goods, free passports to everything everywhere in the world. That is, to everywhere in the world except the world where the majority of Kenyans face a daily struggle for survival.

People are at liberty to bring up their children with whatever values they choose. But none of that entitles those kids to any kind of public position.

If Winnie truly believes in herself, she needs to start at the bottom, to be just another young person in ODM, equal to all the others, with nothing more to protect her than a solid determination to right the wrongs in Kenya’s world.

In particular, and as an urgent first step, Winnie needs to categorically disown and reject the recent reckless and appalling call for a “special position” to be “created” for her in ODM.

What on earth are the ODM perpetrators thinking? One lot wants to perpetuate old codgers like Oburu, and the other lot wants to anoint a pampered princess. And then the two competing Odinga sides are in the public arena like gladiators, fighting it out between themselves right in front of our eyes. Lord save us.

Oburu has no chance and will soon become an irrelevance. Winnie does have a chance to make her own future, but it will not come through entitlement. I understand that social media – youth’s life and breath – has been scathing in its rejection of the idea of her coronation. If Winnie doesn’t want this widespread dislike and resentment to harden into real hatred, she needs to act now.

And the larger picture is this. A family, the departure of whose amazing, unique, unrivalled son has left a huge void that cannot be filled by anyone, must now take a long hard look at themselves.

They are occupying public space with private arguments over futile concepts. They are selfishly taking up Kenyans’ time with personal family quarrels, to the detriment of the country.

In continuing as they are, in this messy, embarrassing public way, they are also destroying something painstakingly built by Jaramogi and by Raila – Jaramogi who demanded nothing for himself, refusing even the offer of the prime ministerial post while Jomo Kenyatta was not free; Raila, who endured years of detention and torture and marginalisation, and who still demanded nothing for himself, but worked decade after decade, suffering disappointment after disappointment but never giving up.

The surviving family members are showing nothing of this dedication, moral conscience, self-sacrifice or sense of duty. Instead, their personal advancement, in any way it can be achieved and at any cost, appears to be the name of the game.

While this is negatively affecting public discourse across the nation, closer to their own home it is also having the insidious effect of keeping Luos haplessly and confusedly in bondage to something that cannot help them.

As part of the introspection they need to engage in, Odinga family members need to consider their own wider community – not as docile, adoring, subservient, feudal captives held in thrall, but as real individuals, with real needs, real tragedies, real triumphs, real dreams, real lives. The time might well have come for the Odinga family to release the Luo community from its grasp.

The family needs to confront what will be very uncomfortable and challenging but inevitable real-world truths. Raila has gone. No one can replace him. Nothing will be the same. The old order is crumbling.

They have one choice. All ‘spokespersons’ and ‘heirs’, rather than endlessly bleating about ‘Baba’, must chart a new course.

It’s either that, or go down with the ship.

Sarah Elderkin is a former (1983-1992) managing editor of The Weekly Review, and co-author of Raila Odinga’s autobiography The Flame of Freedom