Nairobi, Kenya
AP
—
Raila Odinga, a former prime minister of Kenya and perennial presidential candidate whose populist campaigns rattled authorities and gave him an outsized affect on political life in his East African nation, died Wednesday of a coronary heart assault whereas touring in India. He was 80.
His dying was confirmed by the Devamatha Hospital in India’s Kerala State, the place he was taken after he collapsed throughout a morning stroll. An announcement from the hospital stated Odinga suffered a cardiac arrest and didn’t reply to resuscitation efforts.
Odinga had just lately signed a political pact with Kenyan President William Ruto that noticed his opposition get together concerned in important authorities policymaking and its members appointed to the cupboard.
But his ambition was to grow to be Kenya’s president, and he ran 5 instances over three a long time — and generally with sufficient help that many believed he may win. The closest he got here to taking the presidency was in 2007, when he narrowly misplaced to incumbent Mwai Kibaki in a disputed election marred by ethnic violence.
Kenyan politics has all the time had a tribal edge, and Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group in Kenya’s western Nyanza province, spent his political life attempting to navigate the panorama in a means which may lead him to the State House, the Kenyan presidency’s official residence in Nairobi, the capital.
Although he by no means succeeded, for a lot of he was a revered figure and statesman whose activism helped steer Kenya away from single-party rule and into vibrant multiparty democracy.
Odinga reached the height of his powers as a politician in the 2007 presidential race, successful the help of kingpin leaders from different tribes who merged round him. He drew such large crowds throughout marketing campaign occasions throughout Kenya that many observers believed his time had come.
Although Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, had posted good financial figures in his first time period, his authorities had been weakened by corruption scandals and he regarded hopeless in opposition to Odinga’s workforce of rivals. The official outcomes — Odinga’s 44% in opposition to Kibaki’s 46% — was the closest in Kenyan historical past.
Odinga’s camp rejected that outcome, provoked in half by an unreliable electoral authority whose chief stated later that he didn’t know whether or not Kibaki had gained the election.
After Kibaki’s victory was declared, the president was inaugurated in a wierd nightfall ceremony that infuriated Odinga’s camp. Almost instantly, protests erupted in the streets of Nairobi, the place Odinga had robust help. Violence then unfold to different components of Kenya as teams of individuals have been focused alongside ethnic traces: Luos and Kalenjins focusing on Kikuyus, and Kikuyus mobilizing reprisal assaults.
Hundreds of individuals have been killed in days of violence that shattered Kenya’s standing as a secure democracy in a risky area.
Although Odinga was by no means accused of inciting violence, others — together with future presidents Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta — have been. They have been amongst six suspects who confronted prison fees associated to postelection violence when the International Criminal Court opened its investigation in 2010.
The case by no means yielded any profitable prosecutions, with fees withdrawn, terminated or tossed out amid claims of witness intimidation and political interference.
Odinga himself emerged from the turmoil together with his dignity intact, securing for himself the submit of prime minister in a unity authorities put along with the mediation of the worldwide neighborhood. He unsuccessfully ran for president three extra instances.
Early activism, detention and exile
Raila Amolo Odinga was born on Jan. 7, 1945, in Kisumu, a big metropolis on the shores of Lake Victoria close to the border with Uganda.
The son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice chairman, he attended native colleges till he left Kenya to review engineering in East Germany. Upon returning to Kenya in the Seventies, he taught at the University of Nairobi and began a spread of companies, together with a profitable one promoting liquid petroleum fuel cylinders.
Odinga first rose to prominence as a political activist combating in opposition to the one-party rule of President Daniel arap Moi in the Nineteen Eighties. He was linked to a failed coup plot by a gaggle of air drive officers who tried to take energy in 1982.
Some of the coup leaders have been ultimately convicted of treason and executed, and the names of Odinga and his father got here up throughout interrogations of some suspects. Odinga was accused of treason, and although the cost was later dropped, he spent a lot of the following decade in detention.
Odinga described the tough situations of imprisonment and alleged torture, together with an assault by a police officer who hit him with a picket desk leg. He insisted that whereas he had been concerned in educating and mobilizing folks to result in change in Kenya at the time of the coup try, he had by no means advocated violence.
He briefly went into exile in Europe in 1991 after he was free of jail.
A return to Kenya, and politics
Odinga returned to Kenya in 1992 and gained a seat in the nationwide meeting as an opposition lawmaker representing a constituency in Nairobi. It was throughout his twenty years as a legislator that he got here into his personal as a nationwide figure, with large help amongst folks disaffected by official corruption and poverty.
In 1997, he launched the primary of a number of presidential campaigns that all the time ended in such bitter failure that some Kenyans began to speak of an Odinga curse. In 2001, he accepted a place in authorities as Moi’s power minister, unsuccessfully angling for a ticket because the ruling get together’s standard-bearer.
He was instrumental in the rise of Kibaki, an economist with out a in style contact that he backed in the 2002 presidential race and who could be his rival in the disputed election of 2007.
Even as he grew older, showing drowsy at marketing campaign rallies, Odinga by no means appeared to lose his zest for politics, and even a few of his rivals conceded that he was a wonderful mobilizer whose retirement they needed to see.
In 2017, talking on civil disobedience after he misplaced his fourth presidential marketing campaign, Odinga informed The Associated Press that avenue protests have been a democratic measure permitted by the nation’s structure.
“If a regime is undemocratic, if a regime does not enjoy legitimacy, the people are justified to resist that regime,” he stated.
Odinga’s final marketing campaign for president was in 2022, when he was backed by the outgoing president, Kenyatta, in a race in opposition to Ruto.
He misplaced but once more and went on to complain that he had been cheated of victory, and launched a wave of street protests, asserting his constitutional proper to show.
Earlier in 2025, he misplaced a bid to grow to be the chief head of the African Union Commission, the physique that runs the continent-wide African Union.
Odinga’s survivors embody his spouse Ida.