ODM bans Gachagua from Bondo and Kisumu areas in a fiery edict that’s cranked up the post-Raila Odinga political furnace, barring the ousted Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua from setting foot in the late icon’s Luo heartlands amid fears his “Mt Kenya supremacy” rhetoric could ignite fresh tribal tinderboxes just weeks after the nation’s mourning veil lifted.
The Orange Democratic Movement’s national executive, in a terse communique, branded any Gachagua incursion into Bondo – Odinga’s ancestral cradle – or Kisumu’s bustling lakeside wards as “a direct provocation to our healing process”, effectively drawing a red line around Nyanza’s sacred soils where the Agago’s eulogies still echo like distant thunder.
The ban, dropped during a stormy virtual huddle of ODM’s pentagon elders, stems from Gachagua’s unrepentant barbs since his December 2024 impeachment boot – a spectacle that saw him branded a “divisive dinosaur” for fanning ethnic flames in the Rift Valley’s vote-rich pastures.
“Bondo and Kisumu are Baba’s legacy zones; there is no space for empire-builders peddling exclusion,” ODM thundered in the statement, the party words laced with the raw edge of a party still nursing the October 14 void left by Odinga’s sudden fade.
Gachagua, 59 and unbowed from his Karen bunker, fired back on X with a 280-character salvo: “ODM’s fear-mongering won’t muzzle Mt Kenya’s roar. I’ll visit where my people need me – borders be damned.”
This showdown isn’t mere mudslinging; it’s a seismic shift in Kenya’s post-handshake chessboard. ODM, retooling under Sifuna’s steady hand and whispers of a Joho-Jalango tandem for 2027, sees Gachagua as a ghost haunting Azimio’s unity dreams – his recent Nyeri rally, where he crowed, “Luo deals starved our farms,” drew jeers from cross-ethnic crowds still raw from 2022’s hustler wars.
Bondo, with its red-earth graves and fishnet-draped markets, symbolises Odinga’s unyielding fight for equity; Kisumu, the “city of champions” where youth marches once toppled regimes, pulses with that same defiant beat.
“Banning him safeguards peace – one wrong step, and it’s ’07 all over,” cautioned Prof. Jane Thuo, a UoN political anthropologist, over a crackly phone from her Siaya field notes.
As October’s harvest moons rise over Lake Victoria, ODM’s ban on Gachagua in Bondo Kisumu feels like a gauntlet thrown in grief’s garden. Will it forge fences or fan fractures? In Kenya’s kaleidoscope of kin and grudge, one truth simmers: Borders drawn in blood rarely fade.