Watching the week at Kang’o ka Jaramogi, the arrangement finally sat in plain view. The centre of power was Ida Odinga, and it had not been Raila.
The illicit handshake with a sworn enemy, and the decision to suspend his presidential bid in order to save a presidency that was already finished, stop looking like strategy once they are read as pressure from the wife.
Raila was the figurehead, the face on the poster. The engine was his wife, who did not treat his declining health and waning prospects as reasons to step off. He needed a pause, a recalibration, a season in which the machine could be repaired.
He was kept on the treadmill, come rain or shine. It is plausible that Ida was the weak link all along, the rat inside the works, the person through whom the other side did not have to persuade the principal.
Rosemary Odinga makes the cost visible. The videos and the day itself tell the same story. She is not well, and she is not strong enough for these charades in the service of a British-backed war criminal and mass murderer. Their mother is putting the children up for her own gain, just as she overworked her husband to his death.
On the long walk behind William Ruto at Kang’o ka Jaramogi, Rosemary was already labouring. She has a public history of a vision ailment that took her to an ayurvedic hospital in Kerala in 2019. Her father died on 15 October 2025 at that same hospital, after a minor stroke, having arrived in a wheelchair.
A family that has buried a man who collapsed on a morning walk, and is still producing children for obligatory attendance, has not understood what killed him.
Under their father’s umbrella the children still had some discretion about which function to attend. Under Ruto the attendance looks compulsory, and the errands look like NIS work rather than family duty.
At what point does this witch of a mother notice that the invitations are thinning the family one body at a time? Oburu Odinga has passed from the jovial “youth leader” to a frequently hospitalised effigy of himself, the grave beckoning with each passing week.
If she is the one putting them up to it, then the mother is the channel, and boomers should be listened to at one’s peril.
A system that wants to exploit the children for political expediency does not have to convince the children. It convinces the mother, who then uses guilt, status and the phrase “your father would have wanted” to get into their heads. Until that manipulation is named, they remain beholden to it.
The health advice that comes with the guilt is useless. Older politicians tell you to attend, to marry, to build a house, and to be seen in public. They never talk about blood pressure, sleep, the chance of a stroke, or the fact that you already need help to walk. A mother who thinks love means showing up at every event is not giving medical advice. Stay away.
Wicknell Chivayo is the clean example of the same misguided counsel. When he came to Kenya around Charlene’s staged wedding to the Larry Madowo-linked scammer from Tanzania, he was taken round a Kilgoris farm and told to build his rural home by Ruto, which to a boomer is the measure of having arrived.
He went back, started the construction, and took to inspecting the progress by helicopter. He was 43, in motion, doing deals with heads of state. A rural house was not the business in front of him. On 30 September 2026 he died in a helicopter crash in Marondera, his wife among the dead.
Ruto’s age had been mistaken for wisdom, the elder had been let into his head, and the outcome was a body that did not need to be in that aircraft.
The same useless advice is now being given to the Odingas, who are being told to show up, to build and to refuse rest, which is not wisdom at all but the method by which a family is walked, one function at a time, into the next hospital ward.
