NAIROBI – Raila Odinga, a former prime minister of Kenya and perennial presidential candidate whose populist campaigns rattled authorities and gave him an outsized influence on political life in his East African country, died Wednesday of a heart attack while traveling in India. He was 80.
His death was confirmed by the Devamatha Hospital in India’s Kerala State, where he was taken after he collapsed during a morning walk. A statement from the hospital said Odinga suffered a cardiac arrest and didn’t respond to resuscitation efforts.
Odinga had recently signed a political pact with Kenyan President William Ruto that saw his opposition party involved in critical government policymaking and its members appointed to the cabinet.
But his ambition was to become Kenya’s president, and he ran five times over three decades — and sometimes with enough support that many believed he might win. The closest he came to taking the presidency was in 2007, when he narrowly lost to incumbent Mwai Kibaki in a disputed election marred by ethnic violence.
Kenyan politics has always had a tribal edge, and Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group in Kenya’s western Nyanza province, spent his political life trying to navigate the landscape in a way that might lead him to the State House, the Kenyan presidency’s official residence in Nairobi, the capital.
Although he never succeeded, for many he was a revered figure and statesman whose activism helped steer Kenya away from single-party rule and into vibrant multiparty democracy.
Violence follows 2007 presidential bid
Odinga reached the peak of his powers as a politician in the 2007 presidential race, winning the support of kingpin leaders from other tribes who merged around him. He drew such massive crowds during campaign events across Kenya that many observers believed his time had come.
Although Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, had posted good economic figures in his first term, his government had been weakened by corruption scandals and he looked hopeless against Odinga’s team of rivals. The official results — Odinga’s 44% against Kibaki’s 46% — was the closest in Kenyan history.
Odinga’s camp rejected that result, provoked in part by an unreliable electoral authority whose leader said later that he did not know whether Kibaki had won the election.
After Kibaki’s victory was declared, the president was inaugurated in a strange dusk ceremony that infuriated Odinga’s camp. Almost immediately, protests erupted in the streets of Nairobi, where Odinga had strong support. Violence then spread to other parts of Kenya as groups of people were targeted along ethnic lines: Luos and Kalenjins targeting Kikuyus, and Kikuyus mobilizing reprisal attacks.
Hundreds of people were killed in days of violence that shattered Kenya’s status as a stable democracy in a volatile region.
Although Odinga was never accused of inciting violence, others — including future presidents Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta — were. They were among six suspects who faced criminal charges related to postelection violence when the International Criminal Court opened its investigation in 2010.
The case never yielded any successful prosecutions, with charges withdrawn, terminated or tossed out amid claims of witness intimidation and political interference.
Odinga himself emerged from the turmoil with his dignity intact, securing for himself the post of prime minister in a unity government put together with the mediation of the international community. He unsuccessfully ran for president three more times.
Early activism, detention and exile
Raila Amolo Odinga was born on Jan. 7, 1945, in Kisumu, a large city on the shores of Lake Victoria near the border with Uganda.
The son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president, he attended local schools until he left Kenya to study engineering in East Germany. Upon returning to Kenya in the 1970s, he taught at the University of Nairobi and started a range of businesses, including a successful one selling liquid petroleum gas cylinders.
Odinga first rose to prominence as a political activist fighting against the one-party rule of President Daniel arap Moi in the 1980s. He was linked to a failed coup plot by a group of air force officers who tried to take power in 1982.
Some of the coup leaders were eventually convicted of treason and executed, and the names of Odinga and his father came up during interrogations of some suspects. Odinga was accused of treason, and though the charge was later dropped, he spent much of the next decade in detention.
Odinga described the harsh conditions of imprisonment and alleged torture, including an assault by a police officer who hit him with a wooden table leg. He insisted that while he had been involved in educating and mobilizing people to bring about change in Kenya at the time of the coup attempt, he had never advocated violence.
He briefly went into exile in Europe in 1991 after he was freed from jail.
A return to Kenya, and politics
Odinga returned to Kenya in 1992 and won a seat in the national assembly as an opposition lawmaker representing a constituency in Nairobi. It was during his two decades as a legislator that he came into his own as a national figure, with massive support among people disaffected by official corruption and poverty.
In 1997, he launched the first of multiple presidential campaigns that always ended in such bitter failure that some Kenyans started to talk of an Odinga curse. In 2001, he accepted a position in government as Moi’s energy minister, unsuccessfully angling for a ticket as the ruling party’s standard-bearer.
He was instrumental in the rise of Kibaki, an economist without a popular touch that he backed in the 2002 presidential race and who would be his rival in the disputed election of 2007.
Even as he grew older, appearing drowsy at campaign rallies, Odinga never seemed to lose his zest for politics, and even some of his rivals conceded that he was an excellent mobilizer whose retirement they wanted to see.
In 2017, speaking on civil disobedience after he lost his fourth presidential campaign, Odinga told The Associated Press that street protests were a democratic measure permitted by the country’s constitution.
“If a regime is undemocratic, if a regime does not enjoy legitimacy, the people are justified to resist that regime,” he said.
Odinga’s last campaign for president was in 2022, when he was backed by the outgoing president, Kenyatta, in a race against Ruto.
He lost yet again and went on to complain that he had been cheated of victory, and launched a wave of street protests, asserting his constitutional right to demonstrate.
Earlier in 2025, he lost a bid to become the executive head of the African Union Commission, the body that runs the continent-wide African Union.
Odinga’s survivors include his wife Ida.
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Muhumuza contributed from Kampala, Uganda.
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