One year on: ‘Dad is gone’ — Ida Odinga recalls the moment Kenya lost Raila

A year after the former Prime Minister’s death, his widow speaks of empty chairs, waiting into the night and a grief that still refuses to settle

By Brenda Achieng

Ida Odinga has described the moment she learned of her husband Raila Odinga’s death — delivered by their daughter Winnie from a hospital in India — as the most devastating of her life, one she still struggles, a full year later, to fully accept.

Speaking to Citizen TV at Opoda Farm in Bondo, Siaya County, on the eve of the first anniversary of Raila’s passing, marked yesterday on October 15, Ida recalled a morning that began without warning and ended with the obliteration of a partnership spanning more than five decades.

“The day before he passed away, we talked quite a lot,” she said. “We were talking about ordinary things. There was nothing unusual, no alarm and nothing to suggest that he was unwell. He even assured me that he was feeling very well and that there was nothing wrong.”

The following morning, a call from Raila’s sister, Akinyi Wenwa, carried the first tremor of alarm. Wenwa asked Ida to contact another sister, Ruth Adhiambo, who was with Raila in India. Unable to reach Ruth, Ida called Winnie. Her daughter told her that Raila had collapsed during a morning walk and that doctors were attempting to resuscitate him. Ten minutes later, Winnie called again.

“Winnie called me and said, ‘Mum, we’ve lost the battle.’ I asked, ‘What? What are you saying?’ Then she said, ‘Dad is gone.’ And that is how I received the news,” Ida recalled.

The words, simple and final, closed a chapter in Kenyan political history as consequential as any in the republic’s existence. Raila Amollo Odinga — five-time presidential candidate, former Prime Minister, Pan-Africanist and the most resilient opposition figure Kenya has ever produced — was gone. He was 79.

Ida Odinga

For Kenya, the loss was seismic. Raila had been the gravitational centre of opposition politics for three decades, a man whose career encompassed detention without trial under Daniel arap Moi, a historic power-sharing agreement that ended post-election violence in 2008, four bruising presidential campaigns and, finally, a rapprochement with President William Ruto that took him to the chairmanship of the African Union Commission. His death removed from Kenya’s political landscape a figure of genuine continental stature — and left a vacuum that, one year on, remains conspicuously unfilled.

The Orange Democratic Movement, the party Raila built and led for nearly two decades, has continued under the stewardship of loyalists, but without its founder’s extraordinary capacity to hold together a diverse and fractious coalition through force of personality alone. Party officials have spoken of honouring his legacy through continued advocacy for constitutional reform, devolution and the rights of ordinary Kenyans — the causes that defined his public life. Whether ODM can sustain its national relevance without him as its animating force is a question that Kenya’s evolving political landscape will answer over the months ahead, as the country moves toward the August 2027 general election.

For Ida, the political legacy, however vast, is secondary to a grief that is lived daily in the textures of domestic life. She spoke of the routines that shaped their marriage and now shape her mourning — the late evenings when Raila would return home after long political days, and the habit of waiting that has not yet surrendered to the reality of his absence.

“When he was here, he would sometimes stay out late before coming home. So whenever I go home, I keep hoping that he is going to come back. You wait and wait until late into the night, and then you realise that he is not coming,” she said.

The physical reminders are everywhere. His chair at the dining table sits unoccupied. His clothes remain in the house. The ordinary objects of a shared life have become monuments to absence, each one a quiet insistence that the man who used them is simply elsewhere rather than gone.

“When you enter the house, his usual chair is empty. At the dining table, his usual chair is no longer occupied. His clothes are still around,” Ida said, her words carrying the particular weight of grief that has not yet found a resting place.

She said her faith has been the steadiest source of comfort, anchoring her through a loss that reason alone cannot accommodate.

“But we thank God because I know that even if he is not physically present, his spirit is alive, and his spirit is with us,” she said.

It is the kind of statement that in another context might sound like consolation offered to others. From Ida, it carries the quiet conviction of someone who has genuinely reached for it and found it holding.

Kenya marked the first anniversary of Raila’s death yesterday with tributes from across the political spectrum — a measure of the degree to which, whatever divisions he provoked in life, his absence has clarified his significance. Even those who opposed him most fiercely acknowledged that his departure diminished the country’s political conversation in ways that have yet to be adequately replaced.

Ida Odinga continues to live at Opoda Farm in Bondo, the home they shared, in the constituency he represented and the landscape that shaped him. She waits, she says, not quite able to stop — and not quite ready to.

The post One year on: ‘Dad is gone’ — Ida Odinga recalls the moment Kenya lost Raila appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times.