Raila Odinga, Kenya’s tenacious opposition leader and former prime minister, dies at 80
NAIROBI — Raila Odinga, the combative and charismatic politician who embodied Kenya’s long, bruising fight for multiparty democracy and remained the country’s most formidable opposition voice for decades, has died at the age of 80, a person in his office told Reuters on Wednesday. Immediate details were scarce. Indian daily Mathrubhumi reported that Odinga had been receiving treatment in the southern city of Kochi and suffered a cardiac arrest before being pronounced dead, but there was no official confirmation from his family.
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What we know
Odinga’s death closes a sprawling chapter in East African politics. He was Kenya’s most recognizable political figure outside the presidency—a five-time presidential candidate who never captured State House, but who helped pull the country into a new political era. He served as prime minister from 2008 to 2013 in a power-sharing government forged after a disputed vote plunged Kenya into its deadliest political crisis since independence.
Beyond the bare facts of office and opposition, Odinga—universally known as “Baba” to his ardent base—was a fixture on the nation’s streets and airwaves, turning mass rallies, court challenges and citizen protest into a parallel grammar of politics. His Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) grew into a national vehicle for dissent and reform, and his coalition-building reshaped alliances across ethnic and regional lines.
A towering, polarising figure
Odinga’s career contained multitudes: engineer, political prisoner, prime minister, perennial challenger. He was the son of Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president, and inherited both a famous name and the weight of a political tradition rooted deeply in the country’s struggle against one-party rule. Detained for years under President Daniel arap Moi after the failed 1982 coup attempt, Raila would later say that the prison years carved into him a stubborn conviction about the primacy of choice—Kenya’s right to choose its leaders, its laws, and its future.
That conviction powered two of the country’s most consequential democratic breakthroughs: the return of multiparty politics in 1991 and the adoption of a new constitution in 2010. The latter enshrined a bill of rights and devolved power to 47 counties, a redesign that still shapes Kenyan politics and budgets today.
But Odinga’s battles also left scars. He led street protests after the disputed 2007 election that spiraled into an eruption of violence. About 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The crisis ushered in international mediation and eventually the fragile “Grand Coalition” government in which Odinga served as prime minister under President Mwai Kibaki. That uneasy cohabitation nonetheless stabilized a vital regional hub and illustrated a hallmark of Odinga’s career: a willingness to cut deals in the interest of national calm, and then pivot back to critique when the moment demanded.
Relentless campaigns, unfinished quests
Odinga lost all five of his presidential races. Twice—2007 and 2017—he claimed victory had been stolen. Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled the 2017 poll, a rare legal thunderbolt in Africa, but a rerun held weeks later returned President Uhuru Kenyatta to office amid an opposition boycott. In 2018, in a surprise of Kenyan proportions, Odinga and Kenyatta ended their feud in a televised “handshake” that reset the political map. The handshake soothed markets and cooled tempers, but also disoriented parts of Odinga’s base, who saw the rapprochement as establishment compromise.
He ran once more in 2022 against William Ruto, again contesting the result after the electoral commission split publicly over the tally. The Supreme Court upheld Ruto’s win. Odinga returned to the streets in 2023 and 2024, rallying supporters over the rising cost of living and the shape of electoral reforms. To the last, he remained the North Star of Kenya’s opposition, at once revered and resented, impossible to ignore.
‘Baba’ and the making of a political culture
Odinga was an unmatched communicator. He spoke with the cadence of a storyteller, interlacing policy with proverb. On campaign trails from Kisumu to Kibera, he connected his personal narrative—detention, exile, endurance—to the demands of ordinary Kenyans. His sobriquets told their own story: “Baba,” a paternal nod from supporters; “Tinga,” the tractor, for his party symbol and his stubborn, grinding political style.
His base was strongest in Kenya’s west and along the lakeside city of Kisumu, yet he built coalitions that crossed geography and ethnicity. He mentored a generation of politicians who will now compete to inherit his vast political network. Whatever one thought of him, Odinga made national conversation unavoidable; he dragged it to the streets when the institutions lagged behind.
Regional resonance and what comes next
Odinga’s death will reverberate far beyond Kenya. He was, in recent months, openly pursuing the chair of the African Union Commission, a post that would have installed him at the nerve center of continental diplomacy. His long embrace of pan-African ideas and his ease in international forums made him a frequent interlocutor on regional crises, from Sudan to the Great Lakes.
At home, his absence opens a new phase for Kenya’s opposition—and for the government, which has defined itself in part by its rivalry with him. Who becomes the rallying point for discontent, the conductor of Kenya’s protest politics? Will his party cohere or fragment? How will his passing shift the country’s delicate balance between the demands of reform and the pragmatics of power? The answers will shape the run-up to the next electoral cycle and the future of devolution.
A legacy etched in reform—and contradiction
Odinga’s critics point to years of brinkmanship and the cost of protests that sometimes tipped into violence. His supporters argue he forced necessary reckonings: about how ballots are counted, how state power is wielded, and whom the economy serves. Both can be true. Kenya’s post-1990 story is, in many ways, a story of institutional catch-up with popular expectation—an expectation Odinga stoked, stewarded, and refused to let fade.
Kenya today is a young nation—median age under 21—wired, impatient, and pragmatic. Many of those young Kenyans knew Odinga less as a prisoner of conscience than as a permanent fixture of public life: the politician who never quit, who kept asking uncomfortable questions of everyone in power, including his allies. In a region where opposition leaders have often been erased—by exile, by prison, by assassination—Odinga’s staying power was its own kind of victory.
There will be time now for formal accolades and for an honest stocktake of the contradictions he leaves behind. For now, Kenyans confront the passing of a man who seemed always to be in the arena, gloves on, refusing an easy exit. He did not get the prize he sought most. But he helped change the rules of the contest for everyone who comes after.
Funeral arrangements and official tributes were not immediately announced. In a country where the public square is a living thing, they will surely come—noisy, heartfelt, and, in the way of Kenyan politics, unavoidably consequential.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
