The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is living through the most consequential moment of its existence since its founding—not because it has been defeated electorally, but because it has lost the singular figure who once metabolised its contradictions into coherence. Raila Odinga’s death did not merely create a leadership vacancy; it exposed a party whose ideological spine, ethnic balancing act, and oppositional purpose had long been personalised rather than institutionalised. What is now unfolding within ODM is not a routine succession dispute, but a structural reckoning over whether the party will renew itself as a modern opposition force or devolve into a nostalgic holding company for power brokers negotiating relevance in the age of William Ruto. The crisis is real, deep, and unresolved, as evidenced by public feuds, aborted purge attempts, and contradictory signals on the party’s direction .
The Vacuum Raila Left Behind: From Charismatic Unity to Organised Confusion
For nearly two decades, Raila Odinga functioned as ODM’s ideological shock absorber. He reconciled mutually incompatible elements: radical rhetoric with elite bargaining, Luo ethnic centrality with multi-ethnic alliances, and permanent opposition with episodic cooperation with the state. His authority was not bureaucratic but affective; it rested on history, sacrifice, and symbolic capital accumulated over decades. Once that gravitational centre disappeared, ODM’s internal contradictions—long managed through deference to Raila’s judgment—lost their mediator.
The appointment of Oburu Odinga as acting party leader was therefore less a solution than a pause button. It signaled continuity, but not renewal; lineage, but not legitimacy. Oburu lacks Raila’s national charisma and moral surplus, and his elevation is widely read as a dynastic holding operation rather than a consensual generational transition. This has left the party oscillating between formality and drift: leadership exists on paper, but authority is contested in practice. The result is a party speaking in multiple voices at once—one gesturing toward accommodation with power, another insisting on resistance—thereby confusing its base and weakening its brand.
Edwin Sifuna and the Politics of Unresolved Opposition
No figure embodies ODM’s present schizophrenia more vividly than Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna. To his critics, Sifuna is indisciplined, contradictory, and destabilising; to his supporters, he is one of the few remaining figures articulating a coherent oppositional stance in a party flirting with co-option. His statements—declaring the Memorandum of Understanding with the ruling coalition politically dead while warning he would resign if ODM backs Ruto in 2027—are not logically inconsistent. They are politically inconvenient because they force the party to confront questions it has postponed.
The attempted moves to expel Sifuna, later withdrawn, reveal the deeper calculus at play. Ideology is only part of the story; ethnicity and arithmetic matter just as much. Sifuna is ODM’s most prominent Luhya figure at the national level. His removal would not only alienate a crucial constituency already politically homeless after the absorption of ANC into UDA, but would also accelerate the perception that ODM is reverting into a Luo-centric enclave. Thus, Sifuna remains both indispensable and intolerable to the old guard: too loud to ignore, too costly to remove. His continued presence keeps the question of ODM’s oppositional identity alive—but also keeps the party in a state of permanent internal tension.
Babu Owino and the Unfinished Question of Succession
If Sifuna represents the ideological fault line, Babu Owino represents the generational one. His rise as the most visible—and polling-supported—claimant to post-Raila Luo kingpinship has unsettled ODM’s traditional hierarchy. Babu’s appeal is real, particularly among urban youth and digitally networked supporters who see in him a more combative, less deferential politics. Yet his ambitions collide with entrenched norms of seniority, lineage, and patronage that still govern Luo political culture and ODM’s internal bureaucracy.
Resistance to Babu is framed in many registers: questions about his background, discomfort with his style, and fears that he would disrupt established networks. But beneath these objections lies a more existential anxiety. Babu represents a mode of politics that is less patient with elite consensus and more willing to weaponise popular anger. For a party leadership contemplating accommodation with the state, such a figure is destabilising. Yet expelling or marginalising him would hollow out ODM’s claim to represent Gen-Z and radical urban constituencies, pushing that energy either into apathy or extra-parliamentary spaces. ODM thus finds itself unable to crown him and unwilling to confront him—a stalemate that mirrors the party’s larger paralysis.
The Ruto Question: Coalition, Co-option, or Collapse
Hovering above all internal disputes is the unresolved question of President William Ruto. ODM is split between a pragmatist bloc that sees Ruto’s re-election as likely and prefers negotiation to isolation, and a defiant bloc that insists ODM must oppose him unequivocally and frame 2027 as a one-term referendum. This is not merely a tactical disagreement; it is an ideological fork in the road.
President Ruto’s overtures to ODM are calculated and strategic. By offering inclusion, recognition, and selective concessions, he seeks to neutralise ODM as an oppositional force while fragmenting its base. Sections of ODM’s leadership appear receptive, interpreting cooperation as stability and access. Others see it as surrender disguised as pragmatism. The absence of a definitive party resolution on this question has turned ODM into a party that critiques power rhetorically while enabling it structurally—a posture that corrodes credibility and alienates supporters who expect opposition to mean resistance, not proximity.
The Direction ODM Is Drifting Toward
ODM today is best understood not as a collapsing party, but as a transitional shell whose future remains radically contingent. If current trends continue—caretaker leadership without renewal, ideological ambiguity without resolution, and generational conflict without mediation—the party is likely to survive institutionally while decaying politically. It will remain present, but thinner; visible, but diminished; a regional power broker rather than a national oppositional force. The danger for ODM is not extinction, but irrelevance through slow absorption into the logic of the state it once opposed.
Yet decline is not destiny. ODM still possesses organisational depth, emotional legacy, and a base hungry for clarity. Whether it becomes a renewed vehicle of opposition or a nostalgic appendage of power will depend on choices made in the near term: whether it subjects itself to internal democratisation, whether it resolves the Ruto question openly, and whether it accommodates generational change rather than policing it. Parties do not die when leaders depart; they die when they refuse to evolve. ODM now stands at that threshold, suspended between inheritance and reinvention, with history watching closely.
Okoth Osewe
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