Today, as the country buries Raila Amolo Odinga, Kenya closes a chapter in her bourgeois political history. The Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK) sends condolences to his family and supporters, while calling upon the working people of Kenya to use this moment not for despair, but for reflection, clarity, and renewed struggle.

Raila Odinga embodied a generation of reformist politics that sought to humanise capitalism, to democratise the machinery of exploitation without dismantling it. His long political career reflected the hopes and contradictions of the national liberation struggle aborted at independence. Yet, as history teaches, no amount of reform can abolish class oppression. The fundamental problem of the Kenyan nation remains the same: imperialist domination and the exploitation of workers and peasants by a comprador-bureaucrat elite.

ODM and later the Azimio coalition represented, in essence, the political unity of the petty bourgeois and comprador classes, always revolving around the ruling elite, never breaking from the neocolonial order. Raila’s reformism, while once a rallying cry for democratic rights, was gradually absorbed into the very system it claimed to oppose. Handshakes replaced resistance. Alliances replaced mobilisation. Revolution was substituted with negotiation.

Comrades, the death of Raila Odinga therefore symbolises not just the passing of a man, but the collapse of a political current — a current that for decades channelled the anger of the masses into the safety valves of electoral illusions. The task before the Left and all progressive forces is to fill the vacuum with revolutionary organisation, not another round of bourgeois alliances.

The CPMK calls upon workers, peasants, students, and patriotic intellectuals to take this historical turning point as a call to action.

Let us build the Revolutionary United Front of the oppressed, independent of bourgeois factions, and uncompromising in its fight against imperialism.

The Party reaffirms that:

The path of reformism has reached its limit; the path of revolution must open.

The political crisis of succession within ODM and Azimio will deepen contradictions within the comprador class; the Left must be ready to intervene among the masses with a clear ideological line.

The struggles for land, jobs, food, and sovereignty can no longer be postponed or diluted through “dialogues” convened by the ruling elite.

As we bid farewell to Raila Odinga, we say:

Let the working class rise from mourning to mobilisation.

Let this burial mark not the end of hope, but the rebirth of revolutionary clarity.

Let us build the new Kenya — a socialist Kenya, free from imperialism and class exploitation.

Issued by:

Booker N. Omole

General Secretary

Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPMK)

“Proletarian Internationalism is the Path to African Liberation.”