How a song, a running order and rival camps exposed ODM divisions

ODM leaders Gladys Wanga, Hassan Joho, Ledama Ole Kina, Abdulswamad Nassir and Raila Odinga Junior during first anniversary of the late Raila Odinga at Jacaranda Grounds, Nairobi, on October 31, 2026. [Benard Orwongo Standard]

A song, a running order and two words in Luo say more about the day at Migwena than the quarrel that followed it.

Part 3 argued that a sentence about 2022 helped leave the anniversary without its two expected guests. This part is the day itself, and it returns to Raila’s rule on who decides, because on October 15 the decision was made on the ground.

The day began at Opoda on the morning of October 15, 2026, before the convoy left for the grounds. Siaya Governor James Orengo had told the public that everyone was welcome at Migwena, and Mama Ida Odinga, Raila’s widow, hosted him, Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna and other Linda Mwananchi leaders there. Rigathi Gachagua, President William Ruto’s former deputy, had been personally invited by Mama Ida. Dr Oburu Oginga, Raila’s brother and the leader of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), the one voice that could have held the family together, was in Nairobi Hospital, where he turned 83.

The welcome carried a risk, and two earlier events had narrowed the family’s choices. Ruto had appointed Mama Ida Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations Environment Programme, and on October 7, at the State’s handover of the mausoleum, Raila’s son, Raila Odinga Junior, had asked the gathering to support his bid for Kibra, his father’s old seat. Orengo’s welcome to everyone put a microphone within reach of people who had come for one.

The invitation to Gachagua was the sorest point. Mama Ida was reported to have said that Raila loved everyone, even his enemies, yet in August 2024 Gachagua told Kikuyu-language stations that he and Ruto had set traps at State House to keep Raila out of government, and that he had removed them after Ruto and Raila became partners. In 2025, he stayed away from Raila’s State funeral and the burial, saying he had been warned of planned attacks. To those who stood with Raila, an invitation to him offered friendship before any peace had been made.

In his time, Raila managed a guest list as a craft. His close confidants remember that he never invited two rivals at one function unless the event was meant to reconcile them, and then he or his emissaries had struck a gentleman’s agreement beforehand. Had the one-term camp around Gachagua come to a Raila event, they would have been kept out or contained, and ODM would have kept control of the ground. A family that planned Migwena without that method left the gates to chance.

The day offered a second account of why former President Uhuru Kenyatta stayed away. Kalonzo Musyoka, the former Vice President and an opponent of Ruto, said afterwards that the grounds had been “infiltrated with bad faith,” citing yellow school buses, men with machetes and five arrests, and that Uhuru stayed away because of the disorder, having been warned that it would come. Like his remark of September 27, the account named no individual. If a former President’s advance team could see disorder coming, the question is why the organisers could not. With the head of State and the former President absent and the party leader in hospital, the three who might have lent the day authority were missing, and the stage belonged to whoever arrived.

The family spoke before the politicians did, and it brought a surprise. Winnie Odinga, Raila’s daughter, greeted Sifuna as a visitor from Nairobi, said that as he searched for higher office she saw space in the city, and declared that she would stand for its Senate seat. She named no party, which left her options open. Organisers say her declaration caught even them off guard. The family now stood in different places. Dr Oburu leads ODM and works with the President. A name holds only while the family that carries it stands together, and with so many positions in one house, a community has as many places to look. The first strand had begun to fray.

The programme carried its own signals. Rarieda MP Dr Otiende Amollo, deputy chair of the memorial committee, was master of ceremonies. When the crowd kept asking where Dr Oburu was, he told it in Luo that he would read the opposition guests’ names “whether you like it or not.” Raila never shouted at a crowd, his confidants say. During a delay in the programme, the DJ played “Raila (ODM 2007)” by Onyi Papa Jey, an Ohangla anthem, the dance music of the Luo lakeside, built on the call “Wakenya mnataka nani” (Kenyans, who do you want?), which carries the 2007 campaign line “wangni wadinonu” (we have locked you this round), a taunt aimed at a rival community. I heard Dr Amollo sing the line “wangni wadinonu” into his microphone as he danced. He may simply have enjoyed the song, but at a memorial whose guest list included the community it was first aimed at, the singing read as a forecast, and the programme soon supplied the proof.

The running order then did its own work. Dr Amollo had announced that Orengo would speak next. Then he changed the order and called Kisii Governor Simba Arati, the deputy party leader, and Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi first, saying ODM should lead in an ODM zone. The reason sounded fair. The speakers were slow to come; people invaded the stage, and Dr Amollo told them the programme would not go on until they cleared it. Arati read Dr Oburu’s message and led the crowd in a call for a second Ruto term, Wandayi followed, and the crowd answered both with “two term.”

The sequence did what the song had foretold. By speaking first, ODM’s leaders exhausted their right of reply while the opposition kept the last word, which left them with two humiliations: to withdraw after their speeches or to remain and hear, without recourse, those who had defied Raila’s decision to work with Ruto and left his party lecture them at his memorial. Arati and his entourage left as Orengo introduced the Linda Mwananchi team. The effect was to foreclose ODM from its own ground, which is the lock the line had announced.

Dr Amollo had opened by calling the day a religious service, a family event and a cultural remembrance and “not a political occasion.” Babu Owino, the Embakasi East MP, introduced as a guest, was greeted by chants of “Babu, Babu” from part of the crowd, acknowledged them, and then told the crowd that “our rally cannot be broken” and that “we are here as Linda Mwananchi to defend the rights of the citizens.”

Orengo then called up other United Opposition leaders who had come with him. Asked to raise their hands for Babu, the crowd answered with shouts of two-term, and Orengo said in Luo that the two-term people had overpowered his side. Wamalwa cut his address short, and Kwamboka had barely finished a sentence of a song, “all is possible without Ruto,” when the microphone was hurried into Orengo’s hand, and Kwamboka left the podium. Guests began leaving, and those left on the stage were Orengo’s security, a handful of his supporters, organisers and technical staff.

At the end, with the crowd thinning and the wantam voices louder, Orengo shouted “haraambee!” and the remaining crowd roared “wantam.” He said, in Luo, Odonjo ndi! (It went as planned). The crowd had not gone as he planned, and the words may have been a consolation. I cannot prove intent, and the argument does not need it. The platform was theirs, since ODM’s leaders had gone. That is the second strand. A Luo gathering ended with Luo voices on opposing sides, and the party Raila built had no stage of its own at his memorial.

The naming had a history. In mid-May 2026, at a roadside rally in Homa Bay County, Orengo made public remarks about Governor Gladys Wanga, the ODM chair, that women leaders condemned as sexist and to which Wanga replied with an open letter on May 22. On August 16, he returned to her county with the Linda Mwananchi group for a rally in Homa Bay town. Wanga’s supporters resisted it as a provocation, and the violence that followed hurt many people. Mama Ida was reported to have said she did not want “goons” from Homa Bay at the event, and the remark was taken to mean Wanga’s supporters. During that unsuccessful rally, some youths in the Linda Mwananchi group were filmed carrying crude weapons, and some bound for Homa Bay were stopped on the road from Nairobi with them, yet they were not called goons. The youths who defended Homa Bay were.

Wanga attended the October 7 State function, where she invited Orengo to the podium, but did not attend the family event at Migwena. Whatever anyone intended, the label set the Luo of South Nyanza against those of Central Nyanza and kept ODM’s chair from the memorial of the man who built ODM. It also hides its cause. Young men who can be hired for a rally are the product of decades in which regions such as Nyanza were kept out of budgets, appointments and classrooms, and the ten-point agreement set out to reverse that exclusion.

Three days after the anniversary, on October 18, at a church in Donholm, former Makadara MP Reuben Ndolo said he took youths from Busia and Bondo to political forums, Migwena among them, and that he was sent. In the video, he points toward Sifuna as he says it. The claim is untested, and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission has summoned Ndolo to explain his remarks. If proved, it would show how a division can be staged and then described as spontaneous. The chants that greeted Babu and Sifuna may have come from those youths.

The family, the programme and the platform each moved a different way, and none of them could say the day was theirs. On October 20, five days after the anniversary, Sifuna led a delegation to Nyeri.

Part 5 asks who spoiled the day, and what the crowd’s answer shows.