Riding on Death, Fighting for Memory-Sarah Elderkin and the Battle for Raila Odinga’s Political Soul

There are opinion pieces that merely react to events, and there are those that attempt something more difficult and more enduring; to rescue memory from opportunism. Sarah Elderkin’s Sunday Standard column, “Raila orphans: False spokespersons and heirs riding on death’s back,” belongs firmly in the latter category. It is not a eulogy, nor is it a factional briefing note disguised as commentary. It is a lament, a warning, and a forceful act of political guardianship over a legacy she knows intimately and one she believes is being casually vandalised in public.

                                               The late Raila Amollo Odinga

At its core, Elderkin’s piece is about death, but not only in the literal sense. It is about the political afterlife of Raila Odinga. The moment when a towering figure begins to be spoken for, interpreted, claimed, and repurposed by voices that were never central to his struggles, sacrifices, or ideas. Her argument is simple and devastatingly clear; that even before history has settled, a cottage industry of “Raila orphans” has emerged, self-appointed heirs and spokespersons who invoke proximity, intimacy, or moral authority they did not earn, all while emptying Raila’s life of its discipline, context, and meaning.

What gives the article its emotional weight is Elderkin’s refusal to romanticise this process. She writes with the anger of someone who has watched Kenyan politics long enough to know how quickly grief is converted into capital. Death, in her telling, becomes a ladder, something to be climbed by those desperate for relevance. Her prose cuts sharply at this instinct, suggesting that what is being fought over is not Raila himself, but the symbolic power his name still carries in a country unable to resolve its relationship with dissent, reform, and unfinished democracy.

Elderkin’s authority here does not come from sentiment alone. It comes from history. Few journalists can claim, as she can, decades of proximity to Raila Odinga’s political journey’ not as a court chronicler, but as a serious recorder of events. As co-author of The Flame of Freedom, she worked through the long arc of Raila’s life; detention without trial, ideological battles within the opposition, betrayals, resilience, and the grinding patience of reform politics. That experience shapes the tone of her Sunday column. She is not speculating about Raila’s legacy; she is defending the integrity of a record she helped assemble.

This is why her critique of “false heirs” feels less like gatekeeping and more like a moral intervention. Elderkin is not arguing that Raila was flawless or beyond criticism. On the contrary, her career has unfolded alongside some of the most intense debates about his choices and compromises. What she resists is the flattening of that complexity into convenient soundbites, or worse, into opportunistic claims of closeness meant to sanctify present-day positions.

That same instinct explains her long-standing skepticism toward Miguna Miguna’s Peeling Back the Mask. Elderkin has never denied Miguna’s proximity to Raila at one point in time, nor the bitterness of their fallout. What she challenges is Miguna’s insistence on presenting his personal rupture as definitive truth. In her view, Peeling Back the Mask is less an exposé than a memoir of grievance,; valuable as a personal testimony, but deeply limited as a historical account. It magnifies internal disputes while shrinking the broader struggle that defined Raila’s politics long before Miguna arrived and long after he left.

Elderkin’s silence on Miguna in The Flame of Freedom was itself a choice, and one she has implicitly defended over the years. Autobiography, she seems to argue, is not a courtroom transcript. It is a narrative of purpose. Including every internal quarrel would not necessarily bring readers closer to understanding Raila’s political mission; it might only satisfy the hunger for scandal. Her Sunday column echoes that philosophy. Not every voice that shouts the loudest, she reminds us, deserves to be treated as a custodian of truth.

This brings us to her pointed dismissal of Professor Makau Mutua’s claimed proximity to Raila Odinga. In earlier writings, Elderkin has bristled at what she sees as revisionist self-placement, figures inserting themselves into Raila’s story after the fact, retroactively upgrading acquaintance into intimacy. Her objection is not personal animus toward Mutua as an intellectual, but resistance to a broader trend: the inflation of association as moral license. To Elderkin, proximity is not a feeling; it is a matter of shared risk, shared sacrifice, and shared time in the trenches.

In “Raila orphans,” this theme deepens. The false spokespersons she describes are not merely mistaken; they are dangerous to memory. They turn a life defined by struggle into a set of talking points, a brand to be worn rather than a discipline to be studied. Elderkin’s grief, beneath the sharp language, is that Raila’s long fight for democratic space may be reduced to a scramble for symbolic inheritance.

What makes the piece resonate is its quiet insistence that legacies are not owned. They are stewarded. Raila Odinga’s political life, Elderkin suggests, belongs neither to professional mourners nor to sudden heirs. It belongs to history and to a public willing to engage it honestly, without shortcuts.

In a media environment addicted to immediacy, Elderkin’s column asks for patience. It asks readers to sit with discomfort, to question loud claims of closeness, and to distinguish between those who walked the journey and those now running to the microphone. That is why the article lingers long after it is read. It is not just about Raila Odinga. It is about how a nation remembers, who gets to speak for the dead, and whether truth can survive the noise that follows greatness into silence.

In that sense, “Raila orphans” is not merely an opinion. It is a line drawn in defense of memory itself and that is what makes it essential reading.

Innocent Musumbi-Ndungata