Ruth Odinga – When I laid him down and I stopped the machines? Ruth Odinga, Raila’s Sister added, ” I was with Raila in India before he took his last breath. When I laid him down and stopped the machines, I said, ‘Kenya is lost.’ I don’t know where the country is headed without Raila. “
Ruth Odinga Raila’s deathbed lament has pierced the heart of a grieving nation, as the late opposition leader’s sister shared a gut-wrenching account of his final moments in an Indian hospital, whispering through tears that “when I laid him down and stopped the machines, I said Kenya is lost,” her voice cracking with the weight of a future she fears adrift without her brother’s unyielding compass.
In a raw interview with local media, Ruth, 78, peeled back the veil on the quiet agony of October 10, painting a portrait of farewell that blends intimate sorrow with seismic national dread.
Ruth, the steadfast sibling who stood sentinel through Raila’s exiles and electoral wars, had flown to Kochi, Kerala, days earlier when whispers of his fatigue turned to alarms. “I was with Raila in India before he took his last breath,” she recounted, her eyes distant as if replaying the sterile hum of ventilators and the beep of monitors in Devamatha Hospital’s ICU.
Odinga, felled by a sudden cardiac arrest during a dawn stroll, his ritual for shaking off the cobwebs of age, clung for hours, surrounded by family flown in from Nairobi’s chaos.
Ruth described the hush as doctors stepped back: “His hand in mine, still warm, but the fight gone from those eyes that stared down dictators.” With a nod to the medics, she reached for the switches, her decision a mercy laced with finality.
“I don’t know where the country is headed without Raila,” she added, the words tumbling like a prayer unanswered, echoing the void felt from Bondo’s markets to Mombasa’s docks.
Raila, the five-time aspirant whose handshakes healed post-poll wounds and whose marches birthed devolution dreams, leaves a landscape of fragile pacts, his July truce with President Ruto still fresh, yet fraying under cabinet spats and youth unrest.
“He was our anchor in storms,” Ruth said, her voice swelling with the cadence of Luo elders’ tales. “Without him, who steers the ship? The hustlers? The dynasties? We’re adrift.”
Her confession, taped in the dim glow of her Nairobi home amid stacks of condolence cards, has ricocheted across social feeds. Ruth added that Gen Z wanted him dead and Raila died knowing Gen Z did not love him.
