Young generation of Gen Z and millennials seems to feel Raila’s Death most deeply. For the youth who filled the streets during protests, painted his name on placards and sang his slogans with pride, his death left a void too heavy to describe.
To them he was a compass and a reassurance that when things got tough he would show up. They marched because they believed he would always be there to negotiate, shield and speak when their voices were ignored. Now he is gone and the streets suddenly feel colder, lonelier and more dangerous.
“I grew up hearing the name Raila Odinga long before I understood what politics meant,” wrote Activist Hanifa Adam Safia. “He was the symbol of resistance, who dared to stand up to power even when others stumbled.”
For those born in the late 1990s and 2000s that resistance became a kind of inheritance. They never saw the torture chambers of Nyayo House, but they lived in the freedom that Raila and others fought for. They studied in schools that were more accessible, marched in streets that had once been forbidden and spoke freely on social media because of the democracy he helped build.
Raila’s voice was calm but firm and anchored an entire generation’s political confidence. Every time the youth poured into the streets demanding justice or reform they did so knowing that Baba was somewhere close, watching, ready to intervene or negotiate.
But in 2024, when Raila chose to join President William Ruto in the “broad-based government,” many young people felt betrayed. They had watched friends bleed in the streets during anti-government protests, believing they were fighting for the same ideals he once championed for which was justice, inclusion, and accountability.
Hanifa continued, “Last year, when Raila chose to join a so-called ‘broad-based government’ amid the chaos of youth-led protests, many young Kenyans felt a deep sting of betrayal. In our eyes, the man fighting for democracy was defending the very ideals that once defined him. We sensed he had now come to serve the same side we were resisting.”
To the youth, his partnership with Ruto felt like watching their moral father dine with the very power they had been fighting. And yet, even in disappointment they couldn’t bring themselves to hate him. Raila remained the one constant in their political imagination the man who had always tried even when the odds were impossible.
Raila’s absence leaves a vacuum of trust. “When youth power starts to rise,” Hanifa noted, “when you watch your best friends killed demanding better governance, reconciliation starts to sound bitter.” For many, that bitterness has now turned into an ache the fear that they will face future struggles alone.
During past protests, when the youth faced off with police Raila’s name often acted as a shield. It was whispered in defiance, shouted in unity and invoked in hope. His ability to mobilize people to shut down the city, and bring the economy to a halt showed how deeply he was woven into Kenya’s social fabric.
Now as young Kenyans look at the same streets they fought for their rights the fear is palpable because the man who could balance rage with reason, confrontation with conversation, is no longer here.
Online tributes shows the story of that heartbreak clips of Raila at rallies in the 1990s, documentaries about his detention, grainy footage of him raising his fist in Parliament. To many young Kenyans he was not perfect but he was their defender. He embodied both hope and contradiction, courage and compromise. His death forces Kenya’s youth to confront a new reality to fight for change without a political father figure to lean on.
It is now on Kenya’s youth to carry that baton forward to build the moral courage he stood for and demand justice not in his name but in their own.
