Kenya’s former Prime Minister, who died on October 15 and was buried on October 19, rewired the country’s politics in ways few leaders ever have.
A leader loved and feared
In life, Raila Amolo Odinga was loved and feared in equal measure – proof that true leadership is rarely smooth. Flawed like any human but formidable in conviction, Odinga was a peacemaker who offered his hand in reconciliation and a disruptor who raised his fist when principle demanded.
He never wore the presidential sash, yet he carried a presidential burden. ‘Hard times don’t create heroes,’ he once reminded us. ‘It is during hard times that the hero within us is revealed.’ And in our hardest moments, Raila kept showing up.
A statesman without a crown
Odinga never became president, but he became something rarer: the people’s president. Kenya’s politics bent around his presence.
Before and after protests, clergy, diplomats, journalists and wananchi (ordinary people) alike waited to hear what he would say. A single press conference could stall a reckless agenda; a single handshake could restart a national conversation.
And he shook hands – famously: with Mwai Kibaki after the bloody election violence of 2007/2008; with Uhuru Kenyatta in 2018; and later, with William Ruto when the nation’s stability required dialogue over division. These were not betrayals of the opposition but acts of statesmanship – gestures from a leader who knew that legitimacy requires both pressure and peace.
Raila was oppositional enough to be a thorn, patriotic enough to be a stitch. He steadied the table even as he rattled the cutlery. Power never softened his insistence that democracy must include more voices, especially women’s.
Champion of women’s leadership
Among his enduring legacies was his belief in gender equality, not as tokenism but as governance. Odinga helped embed gender parity in the 2010 Constitution’s two-thirds principle and kept pressing Parliament to implement it when politics stalled.
In 2022, he chose Martha Karua as his running mate – the first time a major coalition placed a woman that close to State House. Under his party, ODM, women rose from candidates to commanders. Gladys Wanga’s election as Homa Bay Governor – and later as ODM’s National Chairperson – signalled that women were now steering party strategy, not just appearing on its posters.
‘Those who say women cannot lead are fools,’ he said in 2024. ‘We must give women leadership opportunities and respect them so we can prosper as a country.’
He also understood that representation without safety was a broken promise. As gender-based violence surged, he condemned it forcefully, calling for survivor-centred services, professional policing and zero tolerance for political intimidation.
Equality at home
Equality, for Raila, was lived as much as legislated. Speaking at a wedding in 2025, he said: ‘A husband is not a leader to the wife; they are equal partners in marriage.’ It was simple – and seismic.
His home reflected that belief. Ida Odinga was not a shadow beside her husband but an educator, organiser and advocate in her own right. His daughters – Winnie at the East African Legislative Assembly, Rosemary in Kibra politics – and his sister Ruth, former Kisumu Deputy Governor, embodied a family tradition of public service not reserved for sons.
Raila taught that opposition was not destruction; it was instruction. You can hold a nation together with one hand and push it forward with the other. He believed leadership was measured by how one treated those with the least power.
He did not always get it right. No one does. But he shifted Kenya’s expectations: of whom can lead, how loudly citizens may speak and how democracy should perform. Under his influence, women’s inclusion became baseline, not headline; freedom of speech felt less like privilege and more like oxygen.
After the king
Kenya has been grieving. The region has paused. The world has taken note. Odinga was loved and hated, too.
Without his gravitational pull, what trajectory will Kenya take? What becomes of the Luo community’s political future now that the king is gone? Crowns, after all, are not buried – they are inherited, contested, reinvented.
His clearest legacy endures in the progress of women and the insistence that democracy be practised daily. He taught us that nations, like homes, are built on partnership, not hierarchy.
Raila Odinga was a statesman who never ruled officially yet lived like a king. He was granted a presidential farewell because the nation knew what it owed him because of his courage – a thorn in the side of complacency, a lighthouse in the fog of our politics.
Kenya will move on – as it always does – but it will not forget who taught it to move forward. There was no one like Raila Odinga. Perhaps there never will be.
Merceline Odhiambo is Founder of Grassroot Women and Politics in Kenya.
