Raila Amolo Odinga

The man whose political career defined Kenya’s multiparty politics

I: A politician for the ages

With reference to leading personalities, politics in post-independence Kenya can be periodized into three eras: the Jomo Kenyatta era (1963-1978), the Daniel arap Moi era (1978-2002), and the Raila Odinga era (2003-2025). As the founding president Kenyatta shaped Kenya’s postcolonial political settlement, the related elite bargains, broad contours of economic policymaking, and the country’s path of constitutional (under)development. Elites or regions/communities that did not fit within the “Kenyatta model,” like Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggiah, and J.M. Kariuki were simply taken out of the picture in one way or another. Path dependence being what it is, Kenya still feels the echoes of the Kenyatta era to this day.

Moi set the agenda through his attempts at redistribution of wealth and power away from those who held both under Kenyatta. His (paranoid) style of managing the economic and political crises of the 1980s and 1990s added its own layer onto …