Dennis Onyango, the man who served as Raila Odinga’s press secretary and personal spokesman for decades, has fired a political grenade into the heart of the post-Raila succession battle, revealing in explosive detail that Embakasi East MP Babu Owino was never part of the late opposition chief’s carefully constructed exit strategy from the broad-based government arrangement with President William Ruto.
Speaking on Citizen TV’s Monday Report on March 30, Onyango did not mince words.
While confirming that Senate Minority Leader James Orengo and ODM Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna were deliberate fixtures in Raila’s contingency architecture, he drew a sharp, categorical line at the politician who has been loudest in claiming Baba’s mantle.
“He never had Babu anywhere in his thinking. He thought he was going to be a trouble,” Onyango said of the Nairobi lawmaker who has publicly declared, “baada ya Baba ni Babu.”
The disclosure strips Owino of an aura he has been cultivating since Raila’s death, one that positioned him alongside Sifuna and Orengo as the vanguard of the “Jeshi ya Baba” militant resistance.
Onyango had earlier, in February, affirmed that Raila never named a preferred successor, trusting party institutions to determine who would emerge. Monday’s interview went further, explicitly separating the wheat from the chaff.
Onyango’s revelations build directly on disclosures made days earlier by Raila’s former legal advisor Paul Mwangi.
Mwangi, speaking in an exclusive interview on Saturday, March 28, claimed that Raila deliberately positioned Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna as an “exit plan” while cooperating with President William Ruto, carefully structuring his political moves to ensure he was never boxed into a single corner.
Mwangi described the current ODM internal turmoil as a clash between two factions that have long coexisted within Raila’s orbit: a “political-diplomatic” wing and a “militant” wing, arguing that both sides legitimately reflect different aspects of his leadership style.
Raila, Mwangi insisted, would never engage in anything without an exit strategy. If things did not work out, or if there was a clash on the cooperative side, he would turn to the militant faction and rally them as a fallback.
Onyango on Monday confirmed that logic, then added the crucial asterisk that Mwangi had left hanging. Yes, Sifuna and Orengo were part of the plan. Babu was not. He was a liability calculation, not a strategic asset.
The timing is devastating for Owino.
In February, he had told a local TV station that Raila’s final message was that ODM must produce a presidential candidate and should not be fully in the broad-based government, presenting himself as the faithful interpreter of Baba’s vision. He has also publicly declared his interest in the ODM party leadership.
Onyango’s assessment now positions Owino as a man freelancing on a brand that its owner apparently never fully endorsed for him.
The broader context in which these disclosures land is one of acute ODM crisis.
Dr Oburu Oginga, who ascended to the party leadership following Raila’s death, has staked his authority on institutional consolidation, signalling he will not seek elective office in 2027 but will instead serve as a custodian of the movement.
That transition, however, has been anything but smooth. At the Linda Mwananchi faction’s parallel “People’s NDC” at Ufungamano House on March 27, Sifuna openly rejected serving under the new leadership structure, declaring he would not be “the SG of mediocrity” and telling Oburu to find his own Secretary-General.
Sifuna, who appeared to have accepted his fate after his ouster, drew a firm line against serving under what he called a new leadership lacking credibility, while honoring his tenure under Raila as the greatest privilege of his political life.
The Ufungamano meeting was briefly disrupted when police officers attempted to gain access to the venue, prompting Sifuna to appeal for calm and challenge the officers directly from the podium.
The layered disclosures illuminate, perhaps more vividly than any previous account, the architecture of Raila’s political genius.
He maintained parallel power centres, ensured no single alliance left him without leverage, and ran a diplomatic track alongside a militant one.
Both the pro-Ruto and anti-Ruto camps within ODM have claimed to represent Raila’s wishes, with outcomes likely to have far-reaching ramifications on the political landscape heading to 2027.
What Onyango has now clarified is that not everyone who claimed a seat at that table was actually invited.
For Babu Owino, the revelation is more than a bruised ego moment.
It lands as he positions himself as a credible Nairobi gubernatorial aspirant and potential ODM party leader, ambitions that depend substantially on the legitimacy that Raila’s posthumous endorsement, real or implied, confers.
That endorsement, according to the man who knew Raila best, was never there.
The question now roiling ODM’s corridors is who will inherit the militant faction’s street firepower, and whether Sifuna and Orengo, the two figures Raila actually trusted with his escape hatch, can harness that energy without the maestro who designed the trap.
