Raila and the politics of compromise: What changed, what didn’t

NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 15 — From the struggle for multiparty democracy to the corridors of power, from the contested 2007 election to the Supreme Court-annulled 2017 presidential poll, and ultimately to his final political realignment with William Ruto, Raila Odinga’s career embodied the contradictions of Kenya’s democratic journey.

When Kenya launched Raila’s bid for the African Union Commission (AUC) chairmanship in August 2024, the campaign brought together political rivals in an unlikely alliance, with Ruto leading the national effort to secure his election.

To supporters, the partnership demonstrated pragmatism and a willingness to put national interests above personal grievances; to critics, it raised questions about the price of compromise and the fate of the causes that had sustained his movement.

One year after his death on October 15, 2025, the question is not simply what Kenya lost, but what changed because Raila was here, what remained unfinished and what his career reveals about the country’s continuing struggle with power, accountability and electoral trust.

The gains of resistance

Raila was among the prominent figures who challenged one-party rule and helped restore multiparty democracy to Kenya’s political agenda in 1991, alongside civil society activists, religious leaders and ordinary citizens who confronted an increasingly repressive political order.

The confrontation between Reverend Timothy Njoya and anti-riot police during the 1990 Saba Saba (July 7) protests remains a reminder that the struggle for political pluralism extended well beyond established politicians.

Raila’s contribution lay partly in turning political resistance into mass mobilisation and keeping electoral competition and constitutional reform at the centre of national debate.

For Professor Adams Oloo, a political analyst and Raila ally who is leading a team planning the former Prime Minister’s first-anniversary commemoration, his legacy was defined partly by a willingness to put collective interests ahead of personal ambition.

“Because of his selflessness, I think when one looks at Raila Odinga here in Kenya and then tries to project that for the rest of Africa, then you see an individual who has sacrificed not just for the country but at times sacrificed individual interests for the good of the country,” Oloo said.

House Minority Leader Junet Mohamed offered a similar assessment at Raila’s burial in Bondo on October 19, 2025, describing him as “the only leader who knew when to fight and when to lay arms down,” adding that “Baba had fire on one hand and water on the other hand.”

The metaphor captures the duality of a career in which confrontation repeatedly gave way to negotiation, sometimes producing institutional gains while leaving the durability of those gains open to question.

After his first presidential bid in 1997, Raila allied his National Development Party with the ruling KANU in 2001, joining President Daniel arap Moi’s government as energy minister before returning to the opposition ahead of the 2002 election that ended KANU’s long hold on power.

In 2005, he helped lead the campaign against President Mwai Kibaki’s proposed constitution, with the Orange symbol becoming a rallying point for opponents and helping consolidate the movement that evolved into the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).

The ODM Pentagon, which included Raila, William Ruto, Musalia Mudavadi, Najib Balala and Joseph Nyagah, became a formidable political force ahead of the 2007 election.

The disputed presidential election exposed the fragility of Kenya’s democratic progress, with ensuing violence killing 1,133 people and displacing an estimated 600,000, according to historical accounts of the crisis.

A power-sharing agreement brokered through international mediation brought Raila into government as Prime Minister in 2008, helping end the immediate crisis without resolving deeper questions about electoral credibility and political competition.

Together with Kibaki, Raila helped broker a compromise in the long-running debate over the proposed system of government, ultimately helping lead the Grand Coalition Government’s Yes campaign to victory in the 2010 constitutional referendum.

The resulting Constitution expanded the Bill of Rights, established devolution and strengthened checks and balances on executive power through a collective process in which Raila played a prominent role.

The election question

The Supreme Court’s annulment of the August 2017 presidential election demonstrated that judicial institutions could check executive power, but the subsequent confrontation exposed the limits of reform when electoral trust remained fragile.

Unlike the 2007 crisis, which ended in a negotiated power-sharing arrangement after deadly violence, the 2017 dispute placed the courts at the centre of the electoral contest, establishing an important precedent even as political mistrust persisted.

Raila’s National Super Alliance (NASA) demanded credible results transmission and accountability from electoral commission officials it considered biased, arguing that announcing a winner was not enough to establish public confidence in an election.

ARCHIVE |

Raila Odinga addresses journalists outside the IEBC offices at Anniversary Towers amid a dispute over the technology used in the 2017 presidential election, with Capital FM’s Jeremiah Wakaya (centre background) and Nation Media Group’s Patrick Lagat (right) among those covering the opposition leader. The Supreme Court later annulled the August 2017 presidential election. PHOTO | Dennis Onsongo

After boycotting the repeat poll, Raila took an unofficial oath as the “people’s president” on January 30, 2018, before meeting President Uhuru Kenyatta in March in what became known as the handshake.

The reconciliation produced the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), which proposed constitutional changes to address governance and political inclusion but ultimately failed in court, reinforcing the principle that political consensus cannot substitute for constitutional procedure.

The handshake eased confrontation but shifted political activity towards negotiations among elites, leaving questions about the durability of opposition pressure and the substance of reform.

Raila’s defeat by Ruto in the 2022 presidential election, subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court, marked another setback for a movement that had pursued the presidency for decades.

From protest to partnership

In 2023, Raila led demonstrations against Ruto’s administration over the cost of living, taxation and electoral concerns, but the Gen Z-led protests against the Finance Bill in 2024 exposed a generation increasingly unwilling to defer to established political hierarchies.

Many young protesters rejected the familiar opposition establishment as well as the government, demanding accountability over economic hardship, corruption and state violence in a challenge that raised questions about whether a political tradition built around dominant personalities could adapt.

Raila’s emphasis on dialogue and negotiated change reflected his longstanding concern about instability, but the protests also exposed the limits of his influence over a generation determined to define its own political identity.

In March 2025, Raila and Ruto signed a ten-point framework covering issues including devolution, electoral reform, corruption, peaceful assembly and constitutionalism, seeking to ease political tensions and advance reforms through cooperation.

The framework became a source of division within ODM, with Edwin Sifuna’s Linda Mwananchi faction accusing Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) of reneging on its commitments and challenging claims that sufficient progress had been made.

Following Sifuna’s ouster as ODM Secretary General, the Linda Mwananchi camp ditched the party and adopted The Equitable Party as its political vehicle, with plans to rebrand it as the Linda Mwananchi Movement.

The fallout has placed Raila’s final political pact at the centre of the struggle over his legacy, with the Oburu Oginga-led Linda Ground camp, which took control of ODM, treating cooperation as a route to reform, while the breakaway faction rejects the approach, arguing that continued engagement without delivery risks weakening the opposition’s accountability role.

The unfinished business

Raila lost the February 2025 AUC chairmanship election to Djibouti’s Mahmoud Ali Youssouf despite Kenya’s diplomatic campaign, ending his bid to extend his political influence to continental leadership.

At home, devolution remains one of the most consequential outcomes of constitutional reform, yet questions over resources, accountability and service delivery demonstrate that moving power closer to communities does not automatically guarantee better governance.

Electoral trust and the protection of fundamental rights also remain unresolved, depending on whether state institutions respect constitutional limits and whether citizens can challenge authority without fear.

The divisions within ODM illustrate the difficulty of translating a leader’s personal authority into durable political institutions, particularly when the movement must decide whether to preserve his final political agreement or return to a more adversarial relationship with the government.

That tension reflects a wider question about Raila’s legacy: whether his final turn towards cooperation should be remembered as pragmatic statesmanship or judged against the reforms that supporters expected it to deliver.

Beyond the man

Raila’s legacy cannot be reduced to the elections he contested, the governments he opposed or the agreements he signed, just as Kenya’s democratic progress cannot be attributed to him alone.

His historical significance lies in helping place power, constitutionalism and political inclusion at the centre of national debate, while the compromises of his career expose how often the underlying questions remained unresolved.

One year after his death, Kenya is still negotiating the balance between resistance and reconciliation, political inclusion and accountability, and stability and the right to challenge authority.

The ultimate measure of Raila Odinga’s legacy will not be the tributes paid to him or the scale of his following, but whether the democratic principles he helped advance can endure beyond the individuals who championed them.

The man is gone, but the questions he helped place at the centre of Kenyan politics remain.