After Odinga, Kenya at a Crossroads

Last month, Raila Odinga, who served as Kenya’s prime minister from 2008 to 2013, died at the age of 80. In many ways, his passing serves as a fitting end to a monumental chapter in Kenya’s democratic development, one written in no small measure by Odinga himself.

But in other ways, that convenient narrative is a bit at odds with reality. Kenya’s politics had already begun to leave behind Odinga and most other political elites of his era. In their place, the grassroots, youth-dominated protests against President William Ruto’s government that began last year have continued sporadically, representing a new phase of Kenyans’ democratic engagement. It’s a movement that is less beholden to the ethnically driven, elite-led mobilization of Odinga’s multiparty era.

Those politics—which Odinga mastered by deftly trading the lockstep loyalty of his Luo ethnic community for both personal power and genuine reform—have produced occasional, at times severe violence and endemic corruption. But they also provided a predictable framework and workable logic that could accommodate real democratic progress, greater stability, and prosperity than the regional norm. Kenya’s politicians cut deals and formed alliances knowing the unspoken rules of the game that ultimately benefited them all, with some trickle-down rewards for the country. The best of them, like Odinga, translated popular sentiment into organized political action.

Now the game is changing, and the passing of its star player puts Kenya at the crossroads of possibility and risk. 

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Odinga was a teenager when his father, Oginga Odinga, became Kenya’s first vice president in 1964 and its first opposition leader when he fell out with President Jomo Kenyatta two years later. But it was Raila Odinga who finally toppled single-party rule. He was one of the original activists in the push for multiparty order in the 1980s, serving several years in prison for his opposition to the Daniel arap Moi regime (1978-2003); the architect of Kenya’s first democratic transfer of power in 2003; and the dogged force behind the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 that devolved and checked executive power. The next elections, in 2027, will be the first without Odinga as a presidential candidate since the election of 2002, in which he played the kingmaker, standing aside to create a winning opposition coalition, with the new president’s promise, later broken, of meaningful constitutional change. Odinga arguably won the election of 2007, the results of which appeared to be altered by the electoral commission in favor of incumbent President Mwai Kibaki. In the violent wake of that contest, Odinga assumed a newly created role of prime minister as part of the peace. He then shepherded the drafting and adoption in 2010 of a new constitution, which has successfully strengthened institutional checks on the presidency, including a fiercely independent judiciary, and pushed more money and power away from Nairobi. 

Odinga is revered among his ethnic Luo community, one of Kenya’s largest but disproportionately poor and politically marginalized. There has never been a Luo president of Kenya, but Odinga—like his father before him, Kenya’s first vice president, Oginga Odinga—has served as the de facto head of the Luo for over 30 years. But as the response to his death has made clear, Odinga was loved by Kenyans of all kinds, who turned out in droves to bid “Baba” (father) farewell.

In recent years, Odinga’s dynamism and charisma faded with age, and his well-worn tactics of wielding his populist appeal and command of one of Kenya’s major ethnic blocs to gain concessions from the president seemed to serve his own ambition more than the national interest. His repeated claims of electoral fraud held less water as Kenya instituted greater transparency and evidenced judicial independence. Whereas he helped extract from Presidents Moi and Kibaki major democratic reforms, from Uhuru Kenyatta (president from 2013 to 2022) and current President Ruto he got little more than support for his candidacies for president and African Union chair, respectively. He lost both anyway.

Even as his national appeal waned, Odinga kept a stranglehold on opposition politics. As his age advanced and his health declined, he refused to cede ground, running for president over and over again. An official in Odinga’s party hinted earlier this year that Odinga would run again in 2027, when he would have been 82. He left little space for healthy internal competition and transition, and his one-man opposition enterprise gave the government a singular target for cooptation. There is still no heir apparent for the Luo community, Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement party, or the political opposition as a whole.

By the time youth-dominated protests rocked Ruto’s government last year, Odinga was in no position to be their champion; mostly organized online, they were well beyond his or any other politician’s direction or control. Much of his party had effectively joined the ruling coalition since the 2022 election and had voted for Ruto’s unpopular and short-lived finance bill, which would have raised taxes on a large swath of consumer items at a time of inflation had it not become the target of the initial wave of protests in 2024 and subsequently been withdrawn by Ruto. More generally, Kenya’s economy has stalled under a heavy debt burden, caused by the swelling size and cost of Kenya’s government and massive infrastructure spending on poorly considered and graft-generating projects with few benefits for most Kenyans under Ruto’s predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta. Economic opportunities have not kept pace with young Kenyans’ educational attainment. These and other unmet expectations have only fueled resentment. 

The recent protests have been both inspiring and worrying. Thousands of young Kenyans have taken to the street peacefully, organizing on TikTok and other digital platforms. Their solidarity across ethnic lines and around an economic imperative should serve as a wake-up call to the political elite. 

I saw the hope the protests presented and the evident pride young Kenyans took in them while in Kenya in July 2024 near the beginning of the movement. “Mimi ni Gen Z (I am Gen Z),” my server at a hotel in Nyeri, Kenya, told me proudly, identifying himself with what many Kenyans have referred to as the “Gen Z protests.” The young man had attended local protests, at no small risk. The demonstrations became unruly, and security services responded violently. He was hit by tear gas and saw others beaten and arrested. But he was energized by the results. Ruto subsequently withdrew the finance bill in acquiescence to protesters’ demands. The government seemed to be listening. 

In June 2024, protesters stormed Kenya’s parliament and set it on fire. Criminal elements have taken advantage of overwhelmed police to loot and vandalize businesses and assault ordinary people, and politicians have reportedly paid thugs to foment violence in order to discredit demonstrators and provide a pretext for a heavy-handed response. The protests have repeatedly brought Kenya’s major towns and transport networks to a standstill, causing businesses and schools to close and splashing unflattering headlines in front of potential tourists. But these reports of violence and economic disruption stemming from the protests have too often overshadowed their promise, especially because the extent to which the protesters themselves have been responsible for the negative effects is unclear.

Moreover, the government’s response represents a significant setback to democratic progress. The government imposed media and internet blackouts during some protests and proposed new restrictions, such as imposing a seven-second delay on live coverage. Security forces have killed dozens of demonstrators in the streets and detained and harassed dozens more activists over the past year. One blogger died in police custody this year, and more than 20 people remain missing.

When I returned to Kenya this past summer, the earlier optimism seemed to have fully given way to weariness, anger, and disillusionment. During the weeks between two major protests in June and July, I rode through a small town in the Rift Valley with a group of tourists when a group of young people, burning tires in the road, stopped our car. They told us they were angry over the arrest of their friend at an earlier protest, then demanded payment before letting us pass. 

A week later, after violent protests rocked multiple cities on July 7, I spoke with a young man working at a hotel in the Rift Valley city of Naivasha, which saw widespread looting and vandalism during the protests. I asked him if he had attended them, and he grimly shook his head. He said it was too dangerous. He also worried about the impact on tourism, a major economic sector, and the prospect that he would lose his hard-won job. At the same time, he had no love for the government, which he blamed for much of the violence and for failing to address the economic concerns of ordinary Kenyans, particularly its large numbers of unemployed youth. 

The question for Kenya after Odinga is whether the next generation of political leaders, under increasing popular pressure, can see how their personal ambitions might be fulfilled through responsiveness to the demands of the people, not their ability to cobble together alliances and deals among themselves. The risk is that they will instead retreat into autocracy in order to entrench their position. Thus far, there are few viable possibilities for a new kind of politician on the horizon. Longtime human rights activist Boniface Mwangi—whom the government has arrested multiple times, most recently in July—has launched a 2027 presidential campaign, but political outsiders unable or unwilling to use bribery and ethnic appeals to build political support have a poor track record competing with Kenya’s entrenched power players. Mwangi himself has tried and failed running for elected office before. 

The 2027 elections will be a key test. Ruto is unpopular and vulnerable, but no incumbent has ever left office as a result of electoral defeat. It’s unclear who his opponent will be, but for the first time since 1997, it won’t be Raila Odinga. Will Kenya’s youth bring their solidarity, energy, and anger to the ballot box in the belief that it will make a difference? Or will they grow weary and resigned in the absence of organization or leadership to translate their demands into programs and platforms, like so many of the popular protest movements of the past decade or so?

– Holly Berkley Fletcher is a former Senior Africa Analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she covered multiple African countries for 19 years. She was raised in Kenya by evangelical missionaries. She is also an American historian and author of the Substack A Zebra Without Stripes and the forthcoming book The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism. Published courtesy of Lawfare.