By Wesa Sitati
The nation has lost a great hinge of its recent history, and with him goes a voice that for decades kept the promise and the pain of Kenyan democracy alive.
On the morning of 15 October 2025, in a quiet hospital far from the clamour of Nairobi, Raila Amolo Odinga’s long walk came to its final rest.
He left not in the fireworks of battle but in the soft, ordinary gravity of a human breath stopping; a statesman, an exile, a father, a myth, folded into the long story of this country.
It is hard to give shape to a grief that is both personal and public. For many of us he was simply “Baba”/ the man whose thunderous oratory could turn a crowd into a choir and a complaint into a national demand.
For others he was the vexing, infuriating companion of compromise: a strategist who knew, better than most, that politics is sometimes the art of choosing lesser injuries in the hope of a larger healing.
He lived many lives in one, engineer, political prisoner, exile, prime minister, coalition-maker and each life left an imprint on the republic.
He was born into politics: the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Mary Juma, baptized early into the burden and privilege of public expectation. In Germany he learned a discipline of thought and craft; in Kenyan prisons he learned the art of endurance.
He became, in the long struggle for multiparty democracy, one of the century’s most visible testaments to the belief that liberty should be ceaselessly pursued.
His arrests, his long silences, his return to Parliament in 1992, these were not mere biographical footnotes but the seams by which a country stitched itself into a more open civic life.
Yet Raila’s public life was not only about confrontation.
He was, paradoxically, the country’s premier compromiser: the architect of handshakes and uneasy truces that sometimes unsettled his followers even as they recalibrated national governance.
His handshakes, from the celebrated 2018 truce through later accords were tactics born of a conviction that the work of nationhood often required negotiation with imperfect partners.
Those choices widened his reach and narrowed his base; they provoked praise and anger in equal measure.
In his final years, the pact he struck with the incumbent government crystallised that contradiction, a last, fraught exercise in seeking influence for reform while exposing the limits of elder statesmanship in an age of young, urgent protest.
Public service and oratory were his instruments and his calling cards.
He read crowds as others read scripture; he taught a generation how to speak in the public square and how to demand that the square be honest.
Yet for every rallying cry he raised, there was a quieter devotion to institutions of health, education and labour, the everyday scaffolding of a nation he wished to see less unequal.
Outside politics he was a reader of people and a seeker of stories; his life produced books, marches, and a constitutional reform that reshaped our law and imagination.
And still, for all the public passion, there was a private life he guarded with a fierce tenderness.
Mama Ida Odinga stood beside him not as a shadow but as a partner of decades: in campaign trails and in hospital rooms, in the rooms of power and in Sunday pews.
Their marriage was not merely a biographical footnote; it was the scaffold of his capacity to endure and, often, to forgive.
He loved his children and family with the same devotion he reserved for the nation – with impatience and petitions, with humour and heavy sincerity.
I write this with the memory of a small, private grace that changed how I understood him.
I was then editorial director at Hadithi Publishing Hut; we had just completed the publication and launch of Rev. John Gichinga’s Why Not Me! at the Nairobi Club in Upperhill.
Raila admired the work, the care in editing, the way the event had been arranged and he asked to meet the Hadithi team.
Fate intervened: my son, Arthur Amir Wesa Sitati, was ill and I had to travel to Garissa.
My colleagues led by my the boss Rev. Edward Ondachi, Wamuyu Maina, Paulite Wairimu and Sally, went on to meet him at the Club.
Rev Ondachi talked to him about my deep admiration for him, he inquired why I had not joined them in the meeting, Rev. Edward explained to Raila that I had a family emergency.
“Nothing should come before family,” Raila said, and asked that Rev. Edward call me.
When my phone rang and a voice I had admired all my life said, “Hello,” I did not know how to behave.
He spoke as a man who remembered names and stories; he knew my grandfather, the late Bishop Isaac Namango, and called him “a cherished friend.”
He asked for the details of my life and we chatted as if we were long lost friends.
Then he asked for permission to pray for my son quietly.
I am not usually known for the sharpness of memory but I remember to this day, every detail of that prayer.
I remember the tone and sound, the words and hope.
The refrain- may the lord heal you Arthur, may the lord prosper you Wesa.
From that day my son’s health steadied, he had been sickly the better part of his younger life.
My admiration moved into a gentler, deeper love. We spoke of plans to meet: a new biography that is open and a tell it all, and which I would have the honour of leading editorially.
I had even imagined a title.
That project never reached its page. Soon after the Gen-Z protests broke up.
Baba was called upon to steady a nation that was on the brink.
The meetings were postponed;as he was soon a part of the broadbased government and then he was gone forever.
For me, as for many, the loss is both private and public.
Raila’s legacy will be argued over in the years to come: in courtrooms, in editorials, in the busy cafés where young organisers map the future.
He leaves behind achievements and ambiguities, the 2010 constitution, a record of mass mobilization, but also the compromises that split loyalties.
What is undeniable is that he made Kenya take its democratic impulses seriously, sometimes painfully so.
He taught us how to shout and how to sit at the table; he taught us that the two are often the same act, separated only by time and circumstance.
Now the drums slow in Nairobi.
Flags hang at half-mast.
The phone numbers we saved and kept as talismans are all now archives of a voice that will no longer answer.
We will bury him with ceremony and song, with dust and the rites of state.
But his story will not be buried. It rises in the voices of those who learned to speak because he taught them, in the small reforms that took root because he pushed, in the stubborn belief that a people can insist on better.
Here, in private memory and public mourning, I keep the moment he prayed for my son, Arthur and I keep the sense that even in the vast machinery of history there are small, human mercies.
For me, that is the most lasting thing he gave: an example of how power and care might, however unevenly, be bound together.
In the words of Mark Antony I ask the big question, >Here lies julius ceasar, whence come such another?
- Wesa Sitati is a Gender and Cultural researcher based at Kenyatta University, Kenya.