Raila Odinga, a former prime minister of Kenya and perennial presidential candidate whose populist campaigns rattled authorities and gave him an outsize influence on political life in his East African country, died on Wednesday of a heart attack while travelling in India. He was 80.
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His death was confirmed by the Devamatha Hospital in India’s Kerala State, where he was taken after he collapsed during a morning walk. A statement from the hospital said Odinga suffered a cardiac arrest and didn’t respond to resuscitation efforts.
Odinga had recently signed a political pact with Kenyan President William Ruto that saw his opposition party involved in critical government policymaking and its members appointed to the cabinet.
But his ambition was to become Kenya’s president, and he ran five times over three decades – and sometimes with enough support that many believed he might win.
The closest he came to taking the presidency was in 2007, when he narrowly lost to incumbent Mwai Kibaki in a disputed election marred by ethnic violence.
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Kenyan politics has always had a tribal edge, and Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group in Kenya’s western Nyanza province, spent his political life trying to navigate the landscape in a way that might lead him to the State House, the Kenyan presidency’s official residence in Nairobi, the capital.
Although he never succeeded, for many he was a revered figure and statesman whose activism helped steer Kenya away from single-party rule and into a vibrant multiparty democracy.