BABA, WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

The flags went back up. The tents were folded into lorries and driven to Nairobi. The country went back to Monday.

Lowo otero Amolo. The earth has taken Amolo, and the earth, unlike you, has said nothing since.

Baba, the matatus are still moving. The markets still open before sunrise. Children still put on uniforms. Men still leave home saying nitatafuta kitu, and women still arrange tomatoes under umbrellas for customers who are also counting coins.

Kenya has continued.

Continuing is not the same as living.

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A mother walks into the supermarket with the same money she carried last month and comes out with fewer things.

She picks up the milk.
Looks at the price.
Puts it back.

At the till she is not counting shillings. She is counting how four people eat until Friday.

Baba, what should she do?

A father’s salary arrives already spent. Rent, school fees, fare, food, the chama loan, medicine for his mother upcountry. By the time he has paid everybody, his own pocket has become a waiting room. He works every single day and still feels poor.

A graduate opens the same four websites every morning. Apply. Upload CV. Submit. Silence. He has a degree on the wall and Fuliza in his phone, and he has started avoiding home because of three words waiting at the gate.

Kazi bado?

A boda rider knows the price of fuel better than he knows the date. He owes somebody before the day has even started, and he spends it carrying other people to their destinations while quietly wondering where his own life is going.

A farmer wakes before the politician. He plants before the speech. He waits for rain without a press conference. And after feeding this whole country he reaches the end of the season still wondering whether farming fed him.

Baba, what should they do?

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An old woman stands at a hospital pharmacy with a prescription folded into her handbag. She has enough money for some of the medicine. Not all of it. So she asks the pharmacist which tablet is the most important.

Imagine that. Growing old in the country you fought for, then choosing which part of your sickness you can afford to treat.

And at a mortuary gate, a family counts coins on the bonnet of a borrowed car, because the body of their own mother is being held until the arithmetic is complete.

I know that gate, Baba. I stand at it for a living.

We have become a country where even grief now arrives with an invoice.

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And above all of it, politics. Always politics. Who is joining whom, who has left whom, who inherits which constituency, who will stand in 2027.

Coalitions. Positions. Succession.

Power, and power, and power again.

Can you hear the country underneath the politics, Baba? Can you hear the sufuria? The hospital corridor? The woman locking her kiosk? Can you hear Mwananchi?

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Because you were not perfect, and memory should not start lying simply because a man has died.

You confused us. You disappointed us. Those handshakes broke hearts, mine included. Sometimes we could not tell where principle ended and political survival began.

But when the country caught fire, your name entered the room. When people were locked outside the house, you were the one asking who had been left at the gate.

We still see you in the open car, one hand raised above a sea of heads, that stubborn grin, a man of eighty refusing to sit down.

And then we saw you in Parliament, in a black suit and an orange sash.

Too still for a man who was never still.

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So we are allowed, now, to ask the question history will never answer.

What would Kenya have been if Raila Odinga had become President?

Would the Presidency have changed you, or would you have changed the Presidency? Would devolution have gone deeper? Would the forgotten places have felt closer to Nairobi? Would you have remembered Kibera from the carpets of power?

We do not know. Perhaps power would have disappointed us too. Perhaps some dreams are easier from the opposition bench.

And maybe that is its own kind of grief. Mourning not only the man who died, but the country that was never allowed to be born.

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The elder’s chair is empty. The children are arguing.

So tell us, Baba. When the politician cannot hear the market woman, what should we do? When anger becomes easier than hope, what should we do?

Should we wait for another Baba?

Is that the mistake?

There is no other Baba coming. Nobody is being prepared in some village to arrive and carry our courage for us.

We were leaning. All of us. Leaning on one old man the way a tired wall leans on a single pillar, and calling it loyalty.

The courage we admired in you fell on every one of us at that graveside like rain.

Most of us have not yet noticed that we are already wet.

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So rest now, Amolo. Wuod Mary. Wuod Joka Ogola.

Rest, you stubborn, difficult, magnificent man. You carried this country as far as one person can carry a country, and then you set it down gently at the edge of the work.

We will ask the questions now.

We will remember that freedom was never delivered by comfortable people. That a constitution is only alive when citizens insist on it. That power must never become too important to hear the woman selling vegetables beside the road.

And when this country becomes too loud with politicians and too quiet about its people, we will look towards Bondo and ask again.

Baba, are you seeing us?

And the answer will come back, not as a new instruction from the grave, but as everything your long life was already trying to tell us.

Do not look for another man to save Kenya.

Look at one another.

Stand up. Speak. Remember. Organise. Protect the weak. Question power. Refuse hatred. Build institutions stronger than personalities.

And finish the work.

Chalgi ngero, thoo wuod Odinga.

Baba is gone.

Kenya is still here.

And the unfinished country now belongs to us. 💜