The tragedy of the death of veteran Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, who was “arguably robbed of the presidency” twice, is not that he never got a crack at transforming his country. It’s that the working class hero who spent 50 years fighting autocracy and helped midwife Kenya’s robust multi-party democracy died, ignominiously, the way an inordinate number of African heads of state and elites do: in a foreign country, in a private hospital with resources that no ordinary member of their countries can access or afford, sometimes under the care of specialists from home now working in foreign lands. Odinga died of heart failure on Oct. 15 near the port city of Kochi in India.
It’s shameful that a man who dedicated his life to equality and empowerment of the poor died in a manner no different to the likes of Zimbabwe’s kleptocratic president Robert Mugabe who, during 37 years in power, ran his country’s health system into the ground while frequently travelling at taxpayer expense to Singapore (where he died in 2019) for world-class treatment.