Great friendships rarely begin with a handshake. Maurice Ogeta’s began with six large men in suits and a sauna.
It was 1997, and Ogeta was the fitness manager at a Nairobi health club where Raila Odinga trained. One afternoon, he says, six tall men in suits arrived at reception asking for the boss. Ogeta asked Raila whether he was expecting visitors. The question was barely out of his mouth before Raila panicked, and Ogeta told him to sit tight and went back out. When he returned, Raila was hiding in the sauna.
Ogeta got him out fast. He gave him his own tracksuit and a cap as a disguise and led him through the kitchen. Then came the detail that makes the story. Passing a production area where fruit platters were being arranged for guests, the man who had just fled a sauna in a borrowed tracksuit picked up a piece of fruit and ate it as they walked.
It is a very funny story, and it tells us something about Raila that statesmen’s obituaries often miss. He had a politician’s fear of the state, honed by years in detention, and in a presidential-election year those fears were real. Yet he had a comedian’s response to it. The same man later answered the news of Ogeta’s abduction and loss by asking him, in an attempt to lighten the mood, what “baptism” was.
I would argue this humour was the secret of Raila’s endurance. A leader who could laugh at his own flight from six strangers could survive detention, defeat and betrayal without going bitter. When Kenyans gathered at Uhuru Park for the anniversary candle-lighting, they remembered him through his favourite tunes and the songs that powered his 2017 and 2022 campaigns. No one sang a policy paper. They sang the songs of a man they felt they knew.
That is the harder legacy for ODM to inherit. Organisation can be rebuilt, but warmth is not a transferable asset. Ogeta met Raila in a sauna doorway, in a moment of undignified fear, and spent 29 years beside him. He is a better witness to Raila’s humanity than any set of party rules.