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I first heard Raila Odinga’s name around 1992, when I was six. My father was running for a councillor’s seat, and politics was the soundtrack of our home. Raila’s name hovered constantly, uttered sometimes in admiration, sometimes in frustration, but never with indifference. Even then, Raila was already a fixture in Kenyan politics: the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, heir to a lineage of dissent.
For my generation, Raila was both symbol and lesson: a symbol of defiance against authoritarianism and a lesson in how messy liberation could become once it succeeded. To grow up politically aware in the 1990s and 2000s was to witness the arc of his career – from detainee to minister, opposition leader to prime minister, and reformist to establishment insider. Raila embodied both the triumphs and the contradictions of Kenya’s democratic experiment.
Raila’s gift and burden was moral charisma. He carried the aura of resistance, the energy of unfinished struggle. Even his opponents conceded his tenacity; they just doubted his compass. To his supporters, he was the conscience of the republic, to his critics, proof that revolutionary zeal can harden into entitlement. Both readings contain truth.
The paradox of endurance and the cost of deferred hope
Raila Odinga’s politics outlasted the cause that made him necessary. The struggle against one-party rule ended, a new constitution was passed, and multiparty elections became routine. Yet he remained a fixture in every political season. The longer he endured, the harder it became to distinguish conviction from habit. Was his persistence an act of faith or a refusal to surrender the stage?
By the time of the 2018 handshake with Uhuru Kenyatta and, later, the uneasy alliance with William Ruto, Raila had become a more complicated figure. To older Kenyans, he was still the symbol of resistance; to younger ones, he was part of the establishment he once defied. Whether the handshake healed or merely managed national tension, it blurred the line between opposition and power. His instinct for survival mirrored Kenya’s own rhythm of reform and retreat: defiance giving way to accommodation, ideals tempered by compromise.
That rhythm has defined Kenya’s democracy. The state adapts without transforming and absorbs critique without reforming. Raila’s long career is the story of that endurance – how moral struggle can keep hope alive yet also sustain the system it seeks to change.
Each election Raila contested became a referendum on the country’s belief in itself. His defeats were not just personal but civic reckonings, reminders that faith alone cannot mend broken institutions. The 2007 violence exposed the fragility of Kenya’s democratic rituals, and the 2010 Constitution sought to redeem them through rights, devolution, and representation. Yet institutions cannot animate themselves. Subsequent elections reopened old wounds, and the 2017 rerun after a historic Supreme Court annulment ended in anticlimax.
The handshake that followed offered calm but emptied opposition politics of conviction. The Building Bridges Initiative promised unity but collapsed under elite ambition. Devolution, the Constitution’s greatest promise, remains uneven: counties depend on Nairobi’s purse, corruption persists, and power has been dispersed without accountability.
This long waiting has shaped Kenya’s civic temperament. Raila’s loyalists, those who marched, voted, and endured five defeats, carry a fatigue born of love for a country and a leader they refused to abandon. It was a love that, over time, blurred into obsession, a faith so enduring it began to substitute for the reform it demanded.
Younger Kenyans, raised on Raila’s legend but not his victories, see politics differently. Educated yet jobless, connected yet excluded, they have learnt pragmatism where their parents practised faith. They reject romantic suffering and the politics of perpetual resistance. Their demand is simple: a democracy that delivers, not one that merely endures.
Hope deferred reshapes a nation quietly. It lowers expectations until disappointment is normalised. Yet even in fatigue, Kenya’s civic will persists; people still vote, litigate, and argue, proof that bruised faith can still sustain a republic.
A Mirror for a Nation
Raila’s story mirrors Kenya’s own: a democracy skilled at renewal but hesitant about transformation. Each political cycle has refined the form of democracy while leaving its substance largely untouched, revealing how moral conviction without structural reform can take a nation only so far.
Kenya has learnt to simulate change without surrendering power. It legalised dissent, institutionalised opposition, and perfected the choreography of inclusion. The performance is impressive, but the substance is lean. The state absorbs reformers faster than it reforms itself, and the republic has yet to turn moral consensus into administrative competence.
Raila’s dilemma of how to turn moral authority into institutional stability remains the country’s central challenge. The politics of resistance cannot govern, yet governance without resistance drifts into complacency. Raila embodied both forces, oscillating between rebellion and reconciliation. His career, viewed in full, is not simply one of failure or victory but of a democracy learning, again and again, how easily conviction can outpace institution.
Yet belief has not disappeared; it has changed shape. A younger generation is redefining dissent as less anchored in personalities and more attuned to outcomes. Their movements are decentralised, their demands specific, and their loyalties fluid. Where Raila’s generation spoke the language of sacrifice, they speak the language of accountability, service delivery, and inclusion. This is not cynicism but civic maturity: citizens determined not to inherit the fatigue of deferred hope.
An unfinished revolution
To speak honestly of Raila Odinga is to resist both romanticism and cynicism. He was not the saint his admirers proclaimed, nor the villain his detractors painted. He was a man who carried the burdens of history longer than most could bear, a product of his time but also its shaper. Raila’s story is not just about Kenya’s politics but about its soul: how a nation wrestles with gratitude for those who opened its democratic space, even as it yearns to move beyond their shadow.
Across Africa, the moral authority of liberation has struggled to translate into the discipline of governance. Movements that once embodied freedom, such as South Africa’s ANC, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, and Uganda’s NRM, have found it easier to win independence than to institutionalise accountability. Kenya has avoided the extremes of authoritarian relapse, yet not the fatigue of deferred reform. Its revolution remains unfinished: a democracy that functions procedurally but falters substantively, where competition often substitutes for transformation.
In the end, Raila Odinga’s greatest legacy may be that he made politics matter, that he convinced millions, for decades, that the ballot could be a moral instrument. The baton now passes to a generation less defined by struggle and more by structure, one confronted not by dictatorship but by dysfunction. Their task is to turn conviction into competence, to make renewal visible in governance and accountability. They must build the institutions their predecessors could only imagine, anchoring democracy not in personalities or moments of defiance, but in the steady practice of public purpose. If Raila’s life was a sermon on belief, theirs must be a discipline of building: the work of making freedom durable.
Whether one loved or loathed him, Raila refused the comfort of retreat. And perhaps that is what it means to live, and die, as a democrat in Kenya: to leave behind a country still arguing about what you stood for.
May this moment remind Kenya that freedom is not an inheritance but a responsibility, and that each generation must complete the work its liberators began.
