The first shock was that he was gone. The second came hours later.
According to senior family members and State House officials directly involved in Raila Amolo Odinga’s funeral arrangements, he left a clear directive: that he wished to be interred within seventy-two hours of his death.
Odinga’s Will was revealed by his lawyer on Wednesday morning at a State House meeting attended by, among others, his brother Senator Oburu Oginga.
The logistics of transporting the body from Mumbai, India, have triggered a debate as to when the 72-hour countdown should begin.
Some in the funeral committee have interpreted that it should start the moment the body lands, but others on the planning team are convinced that this reading would violate his wishes.
Officials at the Presidency and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs intimated that Odinga’s remains would land in the country by Thursday evening at the latest. The flight from Mumbai to Nairobi takes slightly more than six hours.
Winnie Odinga informed Ruto
It was Senator Oginga who first called the president shortly after 7am with news that his younger brother was in critical condition in India.
“He said Raila had been rushed back to the hospital,” a source told us.
Moments later, there was another call. This time Odinga’s youngest daughter, Winnie, calling President William Ruto .
"She was succinct, and, with a trembling voice, said the worst had happened," another source added.
“It is a hell of a logistical nightmare considering that he died in India. But as the ODM family, we are working together with our fallen party leader’s family and the committee formed by the President to oversee his burial arrangements, to ensure that we align with his wish to be buried within 72 hours,” Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi and ODM Deputy Party Leader told Nation .
Senator Godfrey Osotsi, who is the chairperson Senate County Public Investment Committee.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
On a humid morning in Kerala, Mumbai, where the roads curl between coconut groves and the scented hush of medicinal gardens, Odinga, an engineer by training, dissident by temperament, politician by vocation, rose for a walk but did not return.
It is hard to overstate the audacity of that instruction. Kenya’s great political departures are typically measured in days that lengthen into fortnights—processions, parliamentary homilies, choirs rehearsed into consensus, bodies lying in state as a people practice the choreography of loss.
Men of Odinga’s stature; Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, Mwai Kibaki, even his own father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, were farewelled with an amplitude that became part of their legend. Odinga has posthumously edited the script. To go quickly is to reject the theatre.
President Ruto charged Deputy President Kithure Kindiki to co-chair the funeral committee with Senator Oginga. Simultaneously, a delegation headed by Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi left for India on Wednesday evening to supervise repatriation.
Military takes over processes
“The military takes over,” one State House aide said, not in the ominous register the phrase sometimes summons, but as a promise of choreography: a country that will honour a political enigma by moving faster while doing less.
The swiftness bears an uncanny fidelity to the way Odinga practiced politics; as a series of disciplined pivots rather than a single, unbroken march.
Born in 1945, he came of age under the one-party State and spent long stretches of the 1980s detained without trial.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
The prisons did not dissolve him; they tempered him. He emerged with a manner that disarmed and provoked in equal measure: the riddler who could make a dusty field sound like a civics class; the coalition engineer who treated alliances like machines, temperamental but fixable.
In 2001 he startled allies by entering Daniel arap Moi’s Cabinet, in 2002 he stood on a Nairobi stage and pronounced Kibaki tosha (Kibaki is enough), midwifing the coalition that ended KANU’s thirty-nine-year rule.
He never won the presidency he sought in 1997, 2007, 2013, 2017, and 2022, but in losing he repeatedly forced the republic to tighten its jurisprudence.
In 2017, his challenge produced a first for the continent: A Supreme Court annulment of a presidential election. Rage moved from the streets to the bench.
If the rallies supplied voltage, the quieter rooms did the building. As Prime Minister in the uneasy power-sharing government after the 2007–08 crisis, he helped midwife the 2010 Constitution; a document with the scent of the street still on it: a muscular bill of rights, funds and authority devolved to forty-seven counties, architecture sturdy enough to host future disputes without the roof caving in.
He made a public truce with Uhuru Kenyatta in 2018, and, in 2025, entered a policy pact with President Ruto, invoking stability over spectacle. Admirers called it statesmanship; purists muttered apostasy. Odinga, who delighted in turning paradox into leverage, tended to prefer outcomes over applause.
The famous handshake between President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga at Harambee House in 2018.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
Kerala, where his final chapter unfolded, suited his latter style: a place that speaks the old language of balance. Ayurveda, India’s classical medical system, organises illness as imbalance and recovery as a precise choreography of plant-based therapies, diet, massage, exercise, and rest.
The discipline prizes individualised regimens rather than one-size-fits-all prescriptions; its most respected clinics operate like monastic laboratories, equal parts pharmacy and philosophy. Mr Odinga knew the place and its methods. Earlier, a close family member-- his daughter, Rosemary, had sought care in Kerala for a severe eye ailment and, by the family’s account, found relief when other paths seemed to narrow. That experience lingered.
After a recent minor stroke episode, he traveled back to Kerala for specialised treatment, betting, as he often did in politics, on a route others might have considered too oblique.
