Just what did Raila Odinga mean when he said 'who told you' and 'so what'?

Before his untimely demise, Kenya’s former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, answered a chant with “so what?” and rebuked his own side with “who told you?” And after his passing, the question of who decides returned over his funeral and his grave.

Raila spent his last months holding his party to a plain rule about the next election.

His Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party had signed a ten-point agreement with President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) on March 7, 2025, and critics of the arrangement were campaigning under “wantam,” the slang for a single Ruto term.

During Phoebe Asiyo’s funeral in Karachuonyo on August 8, Raila answered them:

“If you’re saying one term, one term... so what? It’s Kenyans who will decide the term.”

He told the chanters to “bweka tu,” keep barking and said a frog cannot stop a cow from drinking water.

“I am confident we will move beyond 2027,” he added.

At Machakos on September 22, 2025, he turned to his own side.

Some ODM members were speaking as though the party had settled its 2027 position.

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He asked, “Who told you that ODM will not have a candidate in 2027?”

He reminded ODM legislators that the party had agreed to work with Ruto “up to 2027,” that “we must remain as ODM,” and that members should not “commit the party to some things which have not been discussed.”

“So what?” was a refusal to let a slogan stand in for a vote.

Rigathi Gachagua, Ruto’s former deputy, whose camp popularised “wantam,” states that a future as settled, and Raila would not concede it: A term is decided by Kenyans at the ballot, and a chant is not a ballot. Whatever the intent behind the chant, its effect is that a one-term Ruto would end the arrangement that since March 2025 has brought the Luo and other communities long kept at the margins of power into government.

Gachagua says the slogan carries no tribal meaning, and the effect stands whether or not he is right.

“So what?” dismissed him, and it did so without raising his voice. “Who told you?” was the same instruction given to Raila’s own party.

The argument here is that his two questions were one instruction given to two audiences.

To the chanters, he said that a slogan is not a verdict. To his legislators, he said that a position on the arrangement was not theirs to announce. The agreement ran “up to 2027,” and whether it went further was for ODM to decide through its own organs and under the rules, in the party’s constitution and in the law, that govern coalition agreements.

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Raila did not want to look like a man who had sold the party. So he fixed the agreement’s term in public and refused to let anyone commit ODM beyond what had been discussed.

That is a lean, and it leans toward the agreement he had signed, kept to the letter.

The two statements about 2027 fit together on a further reading. The arrangement was meant first to steady the country politically and then economically.

“Up to 2027” marks the end of the political phase. The economic phase takes longer, so a structured process, run by the party, would decide whether to carry the arrangement past 2027.

“I am confident we will move beyond 2027” was therefore not a favour to Ruto or a hint that ODM would stand no candidate. It pointed toward continuation if the process, properly followed, so decided. Raila declined on many occasions to commit to a position after 2027. So neither camp can announce one for him.

Three weeks after Machakos, on October 15, Raila passed on in Kerala, India. And within a day the question of who decides came up again, this time over the funeral, where the dispute was about timing and the mourners’ access.

On October 16, I wrote an open letter to President Ruto and Dr Oburu Oginga, Raila’s brother, asking that the burial be moved to the following Saturday so that the people could come. The letter asked for public viewing in Nairobi, Kisumu and Bondo, because mourners were travelling from Turkana, Kisii, Kampala and Kigali and elders were selling chickens to pay for transport. It also appealed to African and world leaders who had carried Raila’s banner, among them Olusegun Obasanjo, who had brokered the 2023 talks between Raila and Ruto, because the grief was not Kenya’s alone. It warned that tear gas, stampedes and blocked gates must not become the last chapter of his story.

Salim Lone, who spoke for Raila while Raila was Prime Minister, answered the letter with “I agree with every point you make.”

The burial went ahead on Sunday, October 19, three days after the warning was on record, and the debt of mourning described earlier followed.

A day after the burial, on Mashujaa (Heroes) Day, former President Uhuru Kenyatta went to Raila’s grave at Kang’o ka Jaramogi and prayed in silence. Dr Oburu and the family were with him, and no other leader was seen doing the same.

Some called it the act of a true friend who had come back to check on the family of his fallen friend, and at least one newspaper asked in a headline why he had returned. He had already eulogised Raila at the burial, and he made no remarks at the grave. A visit to a grave is also a claim to stand beside the dead, and the standing it earns outlasts the visit.