Power, pact and betrayal: Winnie, Aunt Ruth and Uncle Oburu

It might always have been obvious that Raila Odinga’s eventual death – though perhaps never contemplated by anyone except his sworn enemies – would radically rattle and change the political equation.

What few might have predicted was that three members of his family – his brother Dr Oburu Oginga, his sister Ruth Odinga Busia, and his daughter Winnie – would each come to the fore in such markedly different ways.

Raila is survived by three full siblings. The older of the two sisters, Dr Wenwa Oranga, a noted educationist and scientist, is chief chemist at the Marine and Fisheries Research Institute. Apart from a spell as consul-general in Los Angeles, Wenwa has been apolitical. 

The younger sister, Ruth, is a study in contrast. Combative and outspoken, she is arguably the family member who is most like Raila in spirit and character. And she has her own long history in the political sphere.

The only surviving brother, Oburu, has quickly proved himself made of a metal completely different from Raila’s.

Thrust into the post of ODM leader, and tragically ill-suited to the task, Oburu rapidly went down the path of least resistance.

He had already, over the years, evidently become bored with Raila’s continued struggles, reportedly telling him that “You can’t keep fighting forever.”

True to his word, Oburu is not fighting at all. Rather, he is keen to cede everything that Raila achieved, desperately pushing for a pre-election pact with President William Ruto that would probably ensure sinecures for himself and his raft of supporters.

Oburu’s prime objective is to deliver the Luo electorate to Ruto, and he clearly imagines Luos will go like lambs to the sacrificial altar. ODM’s principles, as defined by Raila, are effectively abandoned.

Ruto, for his part, needs the votes that used to be Raila’s to win the next General Election. Having shored up the ‘home’ vote by appointing vastly more Kalenjins to public service positions than match the community’s numbers in the national population, and at the same time having alienated ‘Mt Kenya’, he has seen ODM as his best hope for survival.

This could be a strategic mistake, especially following Wednesday’s attempted ouster of Edwin Sifuna as secretary-general of the party, engineered by Oburu with Ruto’s support and possibly triggering the loss of a large swathe of the substantial Western vote Raila always garnered. Simply appointing another Luhya to replace Sifuna might be whistling in the wind.

In 2007, ODM was a nationwide movement, with Raila the only presidential candidate to receive votes in every constituency in the country. In 2022, voters gave him almost 50 per cent of the total vote (as far as we are allowed to know).

But where are the voices from those different parts now? We were told that Luo elders had “endorsed” Oburu as ODM leader. What have the Kikuyu elders in ODM said? Coast? Kisii? Nairobi? Eastern? North-Eastern? Voices around Oburu from these areas are largely those of inconsequential players, unless they are already in government and already enjoying Ruto’s largesse.

Has Oburu now essentially reduced ODM to being a Luo party?

This would fit perfectly into the never-changing story of Kenyan politics since colonial times – a story of establishment control and a dismally failed opposition.

Oburu and Ruto’s efforts to achieve their joint objective are straight out of the bad old colonial and Kanu playbooks. It is almost as if the past few decades of political evolution never happened.

Before Independence, the colonial authorities operated their divide-and-rule policy with encouragement for such discrete parties as the Kikuyu Central Association, the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association (taking care of Luo and Luhya interests), the East African Indian National Congress (taking care of Asian interests) and so on.

In 1992, President Daniel arap Moi was happy to help engineer a fragmenting opposition when Ford split into Ford-Kenya and Ford-Asili, Mwai Kibaki set up the Democratic Party, George Anyona the Kenya Social Congress, John Harun Mwau the Party of Independent Candidates and so on. This was all music to Moi’s ears.

Now, Ruto is enjoying his own musical choices and even playing DJ, as he (read, the taxpayer) is clearly funding Oburu’s current activities, designed to coerce ODM into the pact. This has had the effect of rendering the party totally dependent on Ruto, both financially and politically.

In this impotent position, bereft of any bargaining power, it’s no wonder Oburu is desperately backtracking.

On November 3 last year, in an interview with NTV, he declared boldly that, “If we have to go for a lower [than the presidency] position, it must not be lower than number two in any formation. That is my take. We should not take less than that.”

By February 2, reality had begun to kick in and Oburu was reduced to pleading pathetically with Deputy President Kithure Kindiki to believe that “You are our friend” and that Oburu was not, after all, chasing his job.

But who knows, Maybe Ruto, who has created any number of different positions for his allies, could create, say, a second deputy president post. Stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, Oburu is basically doing the bidding of the man who, to all intents and purposes, is now his master. Oburu’s ODM is emasculated. His actions have undone decades of Raila’s hard work.

All this is akin to a scenario where someone has watched family members sacrifice themselves to build a fund that will secure the grandchildren’s future, and then suddenly gets access to that fund, and instead of conserving it and adding to it, decides to go on a shopping spree and blow the whole lot on designer goods. It is an appalling betrayal.

Of a radically different mindset is sister Ruth, the Kisumu County woman representative, who has come out in defence of Raila’s ODM and to blast government funding of Oburu’s so-called ‘linda ground’ rallies.

In her defence of Sifuna, who has publicly confirmed that the money for Oburu’s ODM activities is not coming from ODM coffers, Ruth eloquently demanded answers on the actual source of the multi-million shillings being spent on helicopters, tents, logistical arrangements and branded merchandise.  

Sifuna has expressly stated that the most recent expense paid out of ODM funds was for the party’s 20th anniversary celebrations in mid-November. It is, therefore unquestionably public money that is funding Oburu’s jamborees, in a travesty of everything that ODM stood for.

Ruth also pertinently pointed out that Ruto’s failure to honour the 10-point reconciliation agenda agreed with Raila a year ago augured ill for any further pact Oburu might imagine he is negotiating.

Ruth herself, like Raila, has history as a bit of a firebrand, which I was first privy to in 1992, when she and I found ourselves working together as election agents for Raila in his first bid for the Langata parliamentary seat.

It was the first multi-party election for 23 years and had been a desperate battle for opposition candidates. Every obstacle had been erected by the ruling Kanu, and the odds were deadly, literally fatal in several cases.

Everyone had a gruelling tale to tell – I myself had sat on sealed ballot boxes in the back of an army truck ferrying them at night to the counting hall (votes weren’t counted at polling stations in those days). Nervous armed soldiers were very unhappy with my presence, which was stopping them from following orders and tossing the boxes off into the bush as we passed through Ngong forest. Others in the opposition had it much, much worse.

Raila was seeking to unseat the incumbent Philip Leakey, whose party, Kanu, now tried everything to corrupt the counting, keeping us in that hall for three tense days and nights.

As it became clear that he would lose, Leakey grew increasingly agitated and loudly made some wild and ridiculous accusations, including that Ruth and I were concealing votes in our underwear. Alarmed soldiers weren’t sure which way to point their guns, but Ruth was undeterred and engaged Leakey in an angry argument that led to his slapping her.

Ruth is brave. She was in exile for years after Raila was detained, but she has long been known for her principled and fearless stand in political and social causes, especially in Nyanza.

She was deputy governor for Kisumu from 2013 to 2017, and continues to make notable contributions to development projects, women’s empowerment, social justice, education and the environment, among many other aspects of community and national life. She is a hard-working woman.

She has also risked prosecution over fiery political protests, such as in 2017, when Raila was demanding reforms to electoral practices before the re-run of the annulled General Election. When such reforms were not forthcoming, Ruth was allegedly among those who disrupted a training session for election officials in Kisumu.

But beneath the feisty exterior, Ruth is also a down-to-earth thinker. She is principled, a woman of substance. She could be a role model…..

And so we come to Winnie, Raila’s dearly loved daughter.

And kudos to Winnie for her social media post after Sifuna’s ouster – an orange-coloured square inscribed simply ‘It is not well’.

For the most part, Winnie has lived a gilded life. Conceived and born after Raila was freed from his second detention in June 1989, she was fortunate to escape the privation and fear suffered by her older siblings during the nearly 10 years Raila was persecuted and detained.

In fact, Winnie stands out as the only person in the entire Jaramogi Oginga Odinga-Mary Juma family to be born with such luck. Her charmed life so far is in marked contrast to the early lives of both Oburu and Ruth.

But Winnie has recently come out strongly to stand up for Constitutional law and order in ODM, and she has not been afraid to take an alternative path and to face up to her uncle, Oburu.  

She deserves praise for this, but going forward she remains with a challenging dilemma, namely that her family name gives her visibility but it also incites strong opposition. She will have to prove whether she can navigate this dichotomy to build an independently worthy future.

Winnie likes to emphasise that she was close to her father, and on one level, who can blame her? But Raila is a hard act to follow in many ways other than the obvious.

It might be a surprise to some but he was an intellectual, extremely well read and very knowledgeable about the history and politics of much of Africa, and equally perceptive about world affairs past and present.

It was his eclectic knowledge, his phenomenal memory and his acute analytical powers that helped inform his extraordinary instinct for a political decision. Anyone would appear a lightweight by comparison.

Currently, Winnie does not have that kind of depth. She can call upon very little real personal experience (accompanying your father around and about does not amount to personal experience), which notably contrasts with Raila’s experience by a similar age, and, while articulate, she has little of really original essence to say. Continually referencing her father and thus pointing up the comparison might not be in her best interests.

Equally not in her best interests is the round of rather shallow interviews – conducted with a rather patronising air on her part – with every media outlet. She risks being overexposed and viewed simply as a celebrity.  

Striding majestically into venues surrounded by a posse of heavies is another terrible image, not helped by flashy but vapid TikTok escapades with a fan club of similarly ‘showbiz’ young women, with their self-proclaimed “girl crushes” on Winnie.

Come on. These are women getting to the wrong side of 35. Such juvenile trivia will appeal only to a very small constituency and will seriously alienate others.

There’s a long way to go for Winnie. She has a chance to make it, which would be great – not because she is an Odinga, though that has inevitably given her a leg up, but because recent events have shown that she could, with diligence and application, in future be a strong and effective, independently minded woman – no doubt like many other young women out there but who start with fewer advantages.

It is up to Winnie to make good. In this ongoing family saga, she has already set out her stall with regard to Uncle Oburu.

Maybe what remains is for her to study and possibly emulate Auntie Ruth a bit, and to understand from Ruth’s experience what it is to fit into a team, what it is to work hard without any kind of entitlement, what it is to be committed to difficult but real issues at the grassroots, what it is to be a woman of substance, and what it is to achieve, without, as they say, fear or favour. And especially without favour.

Sarah Elderkin is a former (1983-1992) managing editor of The Weekly Review, and co-author of Raila Odinga’s autobiography 'The Flame of Freedom.'