The King is dead; Long Live The King.

Junet Mohamed, in his eulogy for the late Second (and Longest-Serving) Prime Minister of Kenya, the Right Honourable Raila Amolo Odinga, Elder of the Order of the Golden Heart, took to heart the allusion to Raila Odinga's "Orphans". He noted that there were so many of them, he would organise them into a group and become their chairman. Amidst the humour is a nugget of truth: Prime Minister Odinga was a force of nature who touched millions of hearts and changed millions of lives.

We will have all the time in the world to parse together the life and times of Prime Minister Odinga. For now, we must contend with the void that his death leaves in the politics of Kenya. Prime Minister Odinga has been a consequential politician since the day he was accused of participating, and sponsoring, the 1982 attempted coup d'état against Daniel Toroitich arap Moi.

Those of us who came of age in the 1990s only came to know of him when he was released from detention in 1991 and the pivotal role he played, first at his father's side, and later as an Opposition politician in his own right, in the Second Liberation of Kenya. Few will deny him his flowers; Prime Minister Odinga was a key figure in the reintroduction of Multi-party Politics in Kenya, the constitutional reform movement that resulted in the abortive 2005 constitutional referendum and the successful 2010 constitutional referendum.

Prime Minister Odinga built a formidable political identity, one that has seen dozens of national politicians gain fame, wealth and power. There isn't a politician sitting in the Parliament of Kenya today whose fortunes were not shaped by Prime Minister Odinga. The same is true of county governors, past and present, and dozens upon dozens of local politicians. One either made their name by vehemently and vociferously railing against Prime Minister Odinga or by riding in his coattails to the seats of political power.

Presidents bent to the inevitable: in order to govern, and govern effectively, they needed Prime Minister Odinga, if not on their side, but not in opposition. The Raila Odinga Handshake was the most reliable political insurance policy a president could have. Moi, Kibaki, Kenyatta the Younger and Dr. Ruto - all of them came to the same inevitable conclusion and their governments enjoyed a stability no other politician, themselves included, could provide.

Now that we have buried Prime Minister Odinga, we are in uncharted waters. Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka, one of the senior-most politicians who transcended the same political period as Prime Minister Odinga lacks that charisma and political sure-footedness that Prime Minister Odinga displayed. Ms. Martha Karua, one of Prime Minister Odinga's lawyers when he was persecuted by Mr. Moi, has the political spine, but not the common touch that endeared Prime Minister Odinga to millions. No one else has even the lickspittle of a chance to become the force of nature that Prime Minister Odinga was. We are in uncharted waters. Will Prime Minister Odinga's "Orphans" find among them a champion to carry forward Raila Amolo Odinga's dreams for Kenya?

What Mr. Imanyara must teach us

Gitobu Imanyara was on the frontlines of the Second Liberation, one of the few principled political streetfighters that Kenya actually deserved. Then he got elected to the National Assembly and it all turned to shit. He is not the first political radical to have forgotten the lessons of revolution, the most important being that while a revolution needs men and women to lead from the front, the revolution needs an institutional movement to make the gains of the revolution permanent.

In the Sunday Standard of the 5th October, 2025, Mr. Imanyara says what has become common knowledge: seven [honest] men will save Kenya. This is disappointing.

There are many men and women who have made sacrifices in the name of Kenya and for Kenyans. They have offered not just their bodies, but their intellect and influence to shape the politics of the country. For the most part, they have achieved many big and small gains. But they have singularly failed to alter the trajectory Kenya has been on since Independence. Kenya has entrenched a form of corrupt ethnic balkanisation that has all but guaranteed that the trajectory of the human development index is downwards.

There was a period, sometime in the 1980s and ending with the 1992 multiparty general election, when the Kenyan political revolution was truly organised. It not only established a broad cohort of men and women who would lead the revolution, it also generated a wealth of political discourse that shaped what would become the first draft of Harmonised Draft Constitution of 2010. The Mwakenya writing, the columnists who wrote for Society and Finance, the "opposition" lawyers who defended political prisoners, the Mothers of Political Prisoners who protested for months at Freedom Corner, the Green Belt Movement that challenged the anti-human environmental policies of the Moi government...the list is long...most of their work has been undermined, watered down, distorted and, in some cases, reversed in the decades since the 1992 general election.

Instead, we have been programmed to believe that what Kenya needs is a saviour, or a group of saviours, who will right the ship of state. We no longer speak of organising or institutionalising the revolution. We place enormous faith, and pressure, on individuals to reform the country without building the necessary infrastructure that will assure success. Political parties, newspaper and news magazine columnists, playwrights and filmmakers, musicians and novelists, public debates and intellectual tradition, everything that we need to institutionalise and organise the revolution is a for-profit arrangement that prioritises extremely short-term gains at the expense of the long-term development of the country.

It is why people are suddenly excited that Mr. Maraga has appointed the United Green Movement Party as his political party briefcase of choice to bring him to the highest seat of political power in Kenya. And why people haven't taken time to ask why a political party that seemed to have sprung to life in 2019 with a slate of registered members from all counties in Kenya did so without running a single recruitment exercise in the months before its establishment and registration. Who are these mysterious Kenyans who had not only heard of and agreed with the political message of the United Green Movement Party, but chose to register with the political party, hand over some of there personal information, and agreed to be entered as founder-members of the political party when it was registered by the Registrar of Political Parties?

Even the few saviours we have elected to Parliament don't seem to know how to understand how the government actually functions. They have ideas. Some of their ideas are great ones. But they seem confused about their role in the government. Indeed, many of them refuse to accept that they are in the government. Take Mr. Omtatah's obsession with public finance. As a senator, he has the power to summon the Cabinet Secretaries responsible for public money to appear before the Senate and account for how they have spent the public money entrusted to them. Mr. Omtatah has not done so even once.

He also has the power to introduce in the Senate legislative proposals (Bills) that would reform the public finance management framework. He has done so only once and the proposal itself was a miss-mash of confused musings about public debt and the public debt management office. Needless to say, beyond publishing the Bill Mr. Omtatah did little to promote it among his Senate colleagues, and ignored the vital role of the National Assembly in seeing to it that it was enacted by Parliament. Instead, Mr. Omtatah has not missed an opportunity to sue the sue government he's serves in whenever it has enacted a Finance Bill. His litigation victories since he became a parliamentarian have been on very narrow points of the law, and have done little to reform the government he serves in.

The point I am trying to make is that Mr. Imanyara's prescription for what ails Kenya is what we have practiced since 1992 without success. If he were to pay attention, even he would admit that the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 did little to change the way Kenyan political institutions behaved; it just slapped a veneer of legitimacy on them. But, by and large, the corrupt ethnic balkanisation that prevailed in the 1990s continues to poison the body politic in 2025. Given his vast experience in the radical political opposition in the 1980s, what Mr. Imanyara should be helping us to do is to rethink everything we know about political organisation and institutionalisation of the not-yet-over revolution. We need to rebuild, from the ground up, political institutions, political ideologies, political thinking, and political streetfighting. Wow must eschew the narrative that we need Messiahs. No one is going to save us. Only we, the body of Kenyans, collectively, can save ourselves.

The definition of "insanity"

Now that we are all committed to campaigning for the various elective posts in the national government at the 2027 general election, regardless of the fact that we have not implemented many of the promises we made to each other during the 2022 general election, it is time to revise some of my hobbyhorses. One of my obsessions is whether the system we are participating in right now is capable of identifying, promoting, nominating and electing qualified politicians to successfully stand in the general election and effective perform the functions of the State offices to which they are elected. My view, as always, is a mixed one, but the short answer is, "No."

Kenya inherited the Westminster style of politics from the English and, through several constitutional amendments and statutory tweaks, adapted it to the peculiar style that Jomo Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia promoted before and after Independence: the Balkanisation of Kenya into tribal fiefdoms with tribal satraps pledging the troth of their tribes to the president, and not to their own tribal interest. In return, the president would appoint the tribal satraps to high public office, usually the Cabinet but also assistant minister, chairman of the board of a parastatal, ambassador or diplomat of some kind, head of a powerful government organisation like the Kenya Police Force, and so on and so forth.

For nigh on forty years a majority of Kenyans believed that if their tribal satrap was "in government", they too, were "in government" and the fabulous wealthy their tribal satrap acquired during his tenure "in the government" was a reflection of the tribe's power and influence "in the government". Obviously, any casual observation of the country the past fifty years shows that this is not true. Urban areas, for their most part, benefited immensely from the "development budget". The rest of the country would get piecemeal "development" as and when the president deemed it necessary to secure a political goal. It had nothing to do with the power of their satrap or the needs of the people that a road or a school or a factory or a dam or a hospital or a university was built in their "area". All that mattered was that the president would get something out of it in the end.

This lesson appears not to have been learnt.

Chief Justice (Emeritus) Maraga has thrown his hat in the presidential election ring. For this, he has chosen the United Green Movement Party as his vehicle to State House. He has promised to "popularise and strengthen the party". It is sad that a man in his mid-seventies, who has been witnessed to epochal political transformations in this country, is continuing in the legacy of buying briefcases and thinking that he is the new broom that will sweep the Augean stables clean. When he fails - and he will fail - he will not have the necessary political education to understand why he failed.

There are no shortcuts to organising a people. It takes time, effort, money, charisma and, sometimes, violence, to get them to see that their fate can only be salvaged if they row int he same boat and in the same direction. The Hon. Mr. Maraga's political party of choice has been in existence only since 2019. In that time, it has done little, if anything at all, to "popularise and strengthen" itself. It has not established a system for subscription-based membership. It has obsessed itself with he "national leadership" and has done little, if anything, to establish grassroots leadership cadres and the village and ward levels. In my opinion, it is not a serious party regardless of its lofty ambitions.

The same is true of all the other political parties. Not one of them is a member-driven subscription-based political party. None of them prioritises the establishment, promotion, support and development of grassroots leadership cadres at villages or ward level. What is worse is that their total focus, to the exclusion of everything else, is the presidential election; all the other elections are of interest only to the candidates yet, in the balance, a member of a county assembly has the ability to improve your quality of life that is on an order of magnitude greater than what the president or county governor can do.

It is irrelevant that counties are organised, largely, on the basis of linguistic and ethnic identities; all of them suffer from the same dearth of political education, political leadership and political knowledge. If this doesn't change, then we will be repeating the same failed pattern of behaviour we have practiced since 1964 when Jomo Kenyatta pushed through the first constitutional amendment and the result will be the same failures we have endured since Independence.