Is Sifuna the next President of the Republic of Kenya? Inside the making of a candidacy that has turned rallies into referenda on justice, power and the promise of Canaan

Introduction

There is a river every Kenyan politician eventually has to cross, at least rhetorically, and its name has never been the Tana or the Athi. It is the Jordan. For nearly three decades, Raila Amolo Odinga stood on its near bank and told a nation weary of bondage that he could see the far side, \"Canaan, the land of milk and honey,\" as he put it at his final Azimio rally at Kasarani in August 2022, the land of redemption song, a country where the pharaoh would finally let the people go.1 It was never simply a campaign line. It was theology repurposed as constitutional aspiration, the idea that Kenya\'s independence in 1963, and its second liberation in the 2010 Constitution, were still incomplete exoduses and that somewhere ahead of the tear gas and the ballot-rigging and the ethnic arithmetic lay a country that actually worked for its people. On 15 October 2025, Raila Odinga died of a heart attack while undergoing treatment in India. He was buried four days later in Bondo, on the shores of Lake Victoria, mourned by a nation that argued about him more than it agreed on him, which is itself the mark of a man who mattered. At his funeral, Kalonzo Musyoka, his old ally and rival, said that they called him Joshua, but we never got to Canaan. Another eulogy stated that our Moses is no more. But Joshua\'s are standing strong to make sure we reach Canaan land.2 It turns out the metaphor Raila borrowed from Deuteronomy was more prophetic than he perhaps intended. Moses, remember, was shown the Promised Land from the heights of Mount Nebo and told plainly by God that he would not enter it, that task, and the honour, would fall to his younger deputy, Joshua son of Nun, who would lead the Israelites across the Jordan into Canaan. Raila saw Canaan. He described it in unmistakable, almost cinematic detail, for a generation of Kenyans who grew up believing in it because he did. He did not live to cross over. The question now hanging over Kenyan politics, asked in matatus and law chambers, in State House and in the Bukusu Council of Elders, is who, if anyone, gets to be Joshua. Which is really another way of asking the...read more