Raila Family Locks Oburu Out of Capitol Hill Office as He Relocates to Lavish Riverside HQ, Loyalists Fired

The political empire Raila Odinga spent four decades assembling is now fracturing along family lines, with his daughter Winnie said to have personally issued instructions locking the Orange Democratic Movement’s interim party leader, Dr Oburu Oginga, out of the iconic Capitol Hill offices in Nairobi that served for a generation as the nerve centre of the country’s most consequential opposition movement.

At the same time, long-serving aides broke down in tears on Wednesday as a sweeping purge of Raila’s personal secretariat unfolded behind closed doors at the very compound they can no longer freely enter, five months after the former premier drew his last breath in Kerala, India.

The lockout of the party from its historic home is rooted in a property claim that redraws the battle lines within ODM entirely. Party insiders and sources familiar with the matter say Raila Odinga personally purchased the entire building housing the Capitol Hill office during his lifetime, vesting full ownership in the Odinga family rather than the party.

With the building now a family asset, the ODM leadership under Oburu has no legal claim to the premises, and Winnie, Raila’s daughter, has moved to enforce that reality.

The compound where generations of Kenyan politicians sought the former prime minister’s counsel, where alliances were sealed and presidential campaigns were plotted, is now sealed off from the party he founded.

The family’s grip extends further than Capitol Hill. Oburu has also been barred from using the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Foundation, known as JOOF, for any party-related activities.

The foundation’s gardens, which were recently renovated to accommodate gatherings of up to a hundred people and which hosted ODM events regularly under Raila’s tenure, are now off limits.

In a development that deepens the proprietary dispute, sources allege that Raila also finalised the purchase of the JOOF land outright before his death, converting what had long been a Kenya Railways leasehold of over four decades into full Odinga family ownership.

Both the party’s spiritual home and its most prestigious event venue have, in effect, passed to a private estate.

Stripped of both addresses, Oburu has relocated ODM’s operational base to a residence on Riverside Drive, a secluded property in one of Nairobi’s most exclusive corridors near Strathmore University.

The Riverside facility, insiders say, was acquired by a UK-based engineer who has been a long-standing financier of ODM, injecting a layer of external financial dependency into the party’s leadership transition at precisely the moment it can least afford questions about independence and direction.

Oburu has fitted the new address with a security detail that includes a chase car and a helicopter reportedly kept on standby, a projection of stature that signals his determination to be seen as wielding genuine executive authority over the party machinery.

It was against this backdrop of contested territory and competing claims that the Wednesday staff meeting at Capitol Hill turned into something close to a wake. The meeting, called through a memo dated March 5 by Raila’s chief of staff Andrew Mondoh, a retired Permanent Secretary who had served in the Grand Coalition Government of 2008 to 2013 overseeing the resettlement of internally displaced persons, was presented as a routine briefing.

What unfolded was a painful reckoning. Staff who had served through successive election cycles, political crises and the defining upheavals of Kenya’s post-2007 era were informed their services were no longer required.

Among those shown the door was Philip Juma, Raila’s longtime driver and a retired Kenya Prisons officer who had steered the former premier’s motorcades through the country’s most volatile political seasons for nearly two decades.

In a twist that stunned the room, Mondoh himself was caught in the same purge whose notice he had signed. He told The Star only that he had been unwell.

ODM Party Executive Director Oduor Ong’wen sought to contain the fallout.

He insisted the number of genuinely affected staff was small, putting it at seven individuals who had operated in an informal arrangement with no contractual basis after Raila’s death, running from Mondoh as chief of staff down to office cleaners.

He said those seconded from the public service remained government employees awaiting redeployment, and those on the formal ODM payroll continued to receive their salaries. “People have not been sacked,” he told reporters.

The party, he added, had grown concerned that continuing to fund the informal seven without a paper trail would invite audit queries, and had offered them a transitional payment alongside an explanation that the new party leader’s office might absorb or redeploy some.

But the picture that emerged from sources inside the Capitol Hill compound was considerably darker than Ong’wen’s account suggested.

Raila’s personal funding of staff ran well beyond any formal party or government arrangement, sustaining a third tier of aides who managed his philanthropic gestures across villages, settled medical bills for elderly supporters and childhood associates, and maintained the grassroots personal network that was as much a part of his political identity as any manifesto.

ODM politician Ben Ombima said friends of the late premier from Vihiga County whose hospital bills he quietly covered were now suffering in silence. “Raila touched many families in ways people may never fully know,” Ombima said. With that system now dismantled, the human cost of the transition is spreading across the country in ways that will not easily be measured.

At the Riverside office, Oburu’s own transition has been troubled from the outset.

His appointment of political activist Mike Agwanda as chief of staff has been received with barely concealed hostility by party veterans. Agwanda, who previously stood as an independent candidate and was a vocal critic of ODM in parts of Nyanza, is regarded by insiders as an outsider parachuted into the innermost ring of the party’s machinery.

Meanwhile, Raila’s son Raila Junior is reported to have attempted to install a new secretary and accountant at the Capitol Hill office, only for the existing accountant, a civil servant seconded by government, to refuse to hand over pending formal redeployment orders. Junior also did not respond to queries.

The property battle and the staff purge have erupted at the worst possible moment for a party already consumed by an ideological civil war.

The rival Linda Ground and Linda Mwananchi factions have hardened into what party insiders describe as the most serious internal split in ODM’s twenty-year history.

The Linda Mwananchi camp led by Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna and Embakasi East MP Babu Owino presented a ten-point scorecard of the ODM-UDA power-sharing deal with President William Ruto, which they titled “The Ten-Point Lies” and rated one out of ten on delivery, dismissing a counter-report from the Oburu-aligned side as superficial and misleading.

Oburu’s own performance in formal settings has done little to project the commanding authority the moment demands.

At a joint UDA-ODM Parliamentary Group meeting attended by President Ruto this week, he set aside a prepared speech outlining the party’s ten-point agenda and spoke without notes, leaving legislators uncertain what official messaging to carry back to their constituencies. “I said I’m not very good at reading speeches,” Oburu told the gathering.

The remark drew laughter but also unease among those expecting sharp political direction from a party already approaching a National Delegates Convention on March 27, at which fundamental questions about ODM’s leadership and its relationship with the Ruto administration are expected to come to a head.

Of those who formed the protective innermost ring around Raila, only Maurice Ogeta, the head of his security detail who was at his side in Kerala when he died on October 15, has so far landed safely.

Mombasa Governor Abdulswamad Nassir appointed Ogeta in January as the county’s Adviser on Security Affairs, citing his years of dedicated service to the party’s founding leader.

For the rest, the dismantling continues. As some staff quietly packed their private belongings and walked out of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, many understood that what was ending was not merely a job. It was an era, and it was being brought to a close not gently but with the cold finality of a padlock on a door.