AAAAYAAAA… Today, Kenya buries more than a man. It buries a movement, a history, and a spirit that refused to die even when beaten, jailed, or betrayed.
Raila Amolo Odinga, the son of Jaramogi, the student of resistance, the architect of reform, takes his final rest today at his Opoda home in Siaya, leaving behind a nation that will not forget him.
For over four decades, Raila defined Kenya’s political imagination. From the cold cells of Nyayo House to the fiery rallies at Kamukunji, he stood as the face of defiance.
He made democracy tangible, not an abstract promise in a dusty constitution, but a lived struggle in the hearts of ordinary people. Every reform that widened Kenya’s political space bears his fingerprints: the repeal of Section 2A, the birth of multiparty democracy, the 2010 Constitution, and the relentless pursuit of electoral justice.
Raila built politicians the way blacksmiths forge steel, through heat, pressure, and purpose. Those who once stood beside him now fill the ranks of governors, ministers, and presidents. They may have moved on, but they were all at one time molded in the furnace of his politics.
His charisma was not rehearsed. It was raw, magnetic, and deeply human. In the crowd, he did not just speak to people, he spoke for them.
Whether you loved him or loathed him, you could not ignore him. He was Baba, the father figure of a restless republic, the rallying cry of millions who believed in a fairer Kenya.
Now the chants have quieted. The convoy has stopped at the gates of history. Kenya must now ask itself what it becomes without the man who kept it talking to itself, sometimes shouting, sometimes dreaming, but always hoping.
Goodbye Raila Odinga. You gave a generation its political language.
You taught Kenya that democracy is not given, it is fought for.
And as the soil of Siaya receives you today, the country you leave behind still whispers the words you lived by: Tuko pamoja.
