PREVIEW
Days after Raila Odinga’s burial last October, his son Raila Junior was formally installed as the head of the Odinga household in a traditional ceremony at Opoda Farm, led by Siaya Senator Oburu Oginga. A year on, it is Raila Junior’s sister, Winnie Odinga, who has been anointed as her father’s political heir after a ceremony in which the Council of Elders of the Luo ethnic group placed a traditional hat on her head.
Though her mother Ida Odinga, and elder sister Rosemary attended, Raila Junior – who has his own political ambitions and has been touted as MP for the Kibra seat in Nairobi – was a notable absentee.
The logical conclusion is that Winnie will take over the party her father led to the brink of government, succeeding Oginga, her uncle, the caretaker leader.
It crowns a remarkable rise for the 36-year-old, Raila’s fourth child. Winnie has been one of Kenya’s nine appointed members of the East African Community’s legislative assembly since 2022, which has been held back by regional tensions, but she emerged as a serious political player with her powerful eulogy at her father’s funeral (AC Vol 66 No 22, Ruto goes west as ODM ponders life after Raila).
Winnie has been critical of her uncle’s leadership. Most of all she opposes his attempts to strike a deal that would give President William Samoei Ruto a second term next August. Before an Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) delegates’ conference in March, partly to heal the Odinga family’s rifts, she insisted that ODM run its own presidential candidate in 2027 and that the party’s leaders should instead try to attract support from those behind ‘maandamano’ (the June 2024 youth led protests) (AC Vol 67 No 2, Newsmaker: Oburu Odinga, awkward caretaker).
At the March conference, it looked as if Winnie would be given a mandate to set up a youth-focused ODM grassroots movement to win over the supporters of the Gen Z protests (AC Vol 67 No 7, Winnie Odinga tries to build bridges as the ODM fractures). Having been nominated by the ODM’s Nairobi section as a deputy party leader, she is now being lined up for the Nairobi Senate seat.
What will be left of ODM to inherit is less clear. Under Oburu, ODM has opened talks on a formal coalition with Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance. Although Winnie said as recently as August that she had not made up her mind on whether to back Ruto, a deal that gives ODM more cabinet seats and, potentially, the deputy presidency is now almost inevitable.
The party’s traditional opposition base is also under attack. The launch of Edwin Sifuna’s Equitable Party on 3 October was attended by other anti-Ruto rebels, including Siaya Governor James Orengo, one of Raila’s oldest allies, and Babu Owino, the rabble-rousing MP for Nairobi’s Embakasi East seat. Sifuna’s party is likely to peel off swathes of young ODM voters, particularly in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, though by-election results in ODM heartlands over the past year suggest the party can still get its vote out.
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