Ida Odinga: My Raila

On the eve of the first anniversary of Raila Amolo Odinga's death, Jeff Koinange Live aired one of the most personal interviews of the year. Speaking to Citizen TV senior political affairs reporter Seth Olale at the family's Opoda farm in Bondo, Siaya County, Mama Ida Odinga talked about grief, healing and the man she knew for more than half a century.

She explained why the anniversary on 15 October mattered so much. Raila's will asked that he be buried within 72 hours, and with his death coming far away in Kerala, India, many friends never had the chance to mourn him. The anniversary, she said, finally gave them that time.

Then she recounted the morning the news came. Raila had travelled for a routine check-up and was given a clean bill of health. A call from his sister led to another to Winnie, who said he had collapsed on a walk and was in ICU. Ten minutes later Winnie called back: "Mom, we've lost the battle."

A year on, the loss is still hard to accept. "Sometimes, personally, I don't believe he's gone," she said, describing the empty chair at the dining table and the evenings spent waiting for him to come home. But she takes comfort in one belief: "His spirit is alive, and his spirit is with us."

The interview also went back to the beginning: meeting a young engineering lecturer at the University of Nairobi through a classmate's uncle in the 1970s. Her friends congratulated her for not marrying a politician. The politics, she said, only fully emerged after 1982.

She spoke frankly about the six and a half years Raila spent in detention. She raised three young children alone, saw her husband once every six months under police watch, and had her letters censored. When she went to court in 1988 to challenge his re-detention, she was retired "in public interest" from the teaching job she loved.

It is a rare, unguarded portrait of a public life seen from the inside.