By Cindy Kirui
On Wednesday the 15th of October 2025, Kenya woke up to the disturbing news of the demise of one of its most iconic post-independence political figures. The sad news of the death of former Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga, broken in the pre-dawn hours, struck with the force of a seismic shock.
Suddenly, the familiar rhythms of Kenyan life, the bustling matatus and vibrant market chatter were muted and overshadowed by a single, staggering question: What now?
For more than three decades, the name Raila Odinga has been synonymous with the very soul of Kenyan political contestation. Beyond being a quintessential politician, Raila was a force of nature and a perpetual-motion machine of democratic agitation. His absence therefore creates a vacuum so vast that it threatens to alter the nation’s political gravity for a long time. To imagine Kenya without him is to imagine a stage without its principal protagonist or a debate without its most formidable voice.
The landscape of the opposition, itself a terrain he so fiercely dominated, appears suddenly flattened in the absence of a politician many invariably consider an enigma. It was Odinga who, with his signature political incarnations over the years, could summon a tidal wave of public sentiment like none other. He was the master architect of political momentum and the man who could transform a policy grievance into a national crusade.
Former Prime Minister the late Raila Amollo Odinga. Photo Courtesy/File
Raila’s rallies were a phenomenon to behold. He attracted massive, pulsing gatherings where hope and frustration easily found a collective voice. Without his unifying command, the formidable coalition of regional kingpins and ideological fellow travellers now looks perilously fragile. The centrifugal forces of individual ambition, long held in check by his towering presence, are increasingly looking irreplaceable.
Raila’s legacy is etched not just in the rallies he led, but in the very institutions he fought to build and, at times, challenge. He was a central architect of the 2010 Constitution, the document that delivered a new Kenya, yet he remained its most vigilant and demanding custodian, often taking to the streets to protest its seeming betrayal. He was the man who, in 2017, took the unprecedented step of petitioning the Supreme Court to annul a presidential election—and won. That single act, that “historic, unprecedented decision,” as he famously termed it, forever changed the balance of power between the state and the citizenry, proving that even the mightiest could be held to account.
Yet, Raila’s political methods were a source of equally potent division. To his detractors, he was an eternal agitator, a master of “fire and brimstone” rhetoric whose calls for mass action too often tipped the country into cycles of turmoil and economic paralysis. They saw his relentless pursuit of power as an end in itself. But even they cannot deny the void his passing creates. Kenya’s political theatre has lost one of its most compelling antagonists.
The “Handshake” of 2018 and thus Raila’s unexpected reconciliation with former rival Uhuru Kenyatta, was a testament to his paradoxical role in Kenya’s ever-mercurial politics. Raila could, in one moment, be the nation’s foremost dissident, and in the next, a pillar of its stability and a kingmaker without a crown. That delicate dance of conflict and consensus was a performance only he could stage.
Now, Kenya totters on a precipice. The political ecosystem, for so long defined by the binary of Raila versus the establishment, must now reconfigure itself. New leaders will inevitably emerge from the shadows he cast, but none will possibly inherit his mythic status, forged as it was in torture chambers at some point and tempered on the front lines of every democratic battle since.
Kenya is now left to navigate its future without one of its most experienced, most contentious, and most indispensable political navigator. The storm that always gathered around Raila has finally passed, leaving behind a silence more deafening than any roar.
Fare thee well Agwambo. You played your part well.
Cindy is a budding music scholar, human rights activist and a commentator on social affairs
