Winnie Odinga has spoken about the part of her grief journey that most people did not see, describing how she watched people her father trusted move to dismantle what he had spent his life building while she was still trying to process the fact that he was gone.
The EALA MP opened up at Ignite 2026, eight months after Raila Odinga passed away in India on October 15, 2025. She said the days immediately after his death gave her no room to feel anything privately. She was in India when it happened, rushed home, and almost immediately placed in front of cameras and crowds before she had a moment to sit with what had just occurred.
“In eight months, I have gone through the most difficult period of my life. My dad and I were tight. A very traumatic event happened to me when I was in India. I was quickly rushed home. All of a sudden, I was told to speak about the person I had dedicated my whole life to. Nobody thought or knew, in that moment, the things I was thinking were, wait, I was just with him, I was talking to him, I was laughing with him, I was hugging him, I was feeling him and then all of a sudden, he went,” she said.
What came next hit her differently. She began watching people her father had brought close to him working to tear down the things he had cared about most. When she spoke out against what she was seeing, the response was not support. She was accused of being disrespectful and pressured to back down.
“Before I could look up, I saw the destruction of what he had built and what he had loved so dearly by those he had entrusted. And I felt so much pain. When I spoke up, they said I was disrespectful. I was on the headlines, I trended, but I spoke because I knew what I was saying was correct. But then the debate disintegrated into the manner in which I said what I said,” she said.
The backlash wore her down enough that she pulled back from public life for a period, something she admitted did not come from a place of peace.
“I got low. They wanted to cut me down to size to cower me, and to some extent, they succeeded,” she said.
She added that through all of it, she was never given space to mourn her father the way a daughter should.