GOING FORWARD if the interests of the Luo community clash with those of the ODM Party, the interests of the Luo community will be given priority by the Luo — until the equilibrium is achieved.
This point is important so that nobody deludes himself or herself that the Luo community has no interests. We do.
We want good roads, water and electricity. We want our produce, whether beans, rice, potatoes, cassava, yams, onions, tomatoes, etc; to reach NCPB.
We want the lakefronts open. We want waterway transportation that connects all the bays from Muhuru to Port Sio. That means new ports and piers.
We want factories that can employ people here. That means the sugar sub-sector, a key industrial base, must thrive.
We want our fish to reach Nairobi, and elsewhere in the world.
We want sports facilities and health facilities upgraded or built — for the counties that have none.
We want schools infrastructure improved and more institutions constructed. We want universities and KMTCs and TTIs and the human resource that produces fully responsible adults from children.
We want to live in peace with those who neighbor us. That means we want more investments in security.
Last but not least, we want to contribute our full share to the nation: economically, socially, intellectually and politically. You can add more.
For much of Kenya’s post-independence period we appear to have overly subjugated our own communal and geographical interests to pursue aspirational national interests and worse, on many occasions, we have pursued the interests of those who, once in power, deal us the worst blows.
Today in Kenya, there’s no national interests that will be achieved by the removal of President William Ruto in the manner such an endevour seems to register in Sifuna’s head.
We cannot in 2025 confuse Kikuyu jingoistic interests to Kenya’s national interests, regardless of who has been procured to stake them: Sifuna, Ong’wen or you.
The ODM Party of Edwin Sifuna and Oduor Ong’wen is completely different from the ODM Party of Hon. Mark Nyamita of Uriri and, or; of Yunia Aluoch of Ndhiwa Constituency at a place called called Kabuoch Kobita.
What Mark Nyamita is saying is that the top priority of the ODM voter in Kanyamkago, extending all the way to Kabuoch Kobita is not the removal of President William Ruto.
In Ndhiwa, and here I get a bit personal, the full implementation of the upgrading to bitumen standards of the Gor Mahia Ring Road, so that like Sifuna, Yunia too can enjoy the commonwealth of the country she’s lived in for the past 60 years, is the top priority.
At 60, she does not have much time to wait for the ideas in the head of a handpicked ODM Party Secretary General, however garbed in fury they may be, or the 1980s revolutionary hubris coming from Oduor Ong’wen’s mouth.
The ODM voter in Tana River has local interests they want achieved too, like the two long forgotten bridges Treasury CS John Mbadi recently talked about — so that their own children are not eaten by crocodiles while swimming across River Tana to school and back.
The entire ODM base, from the cradle (Turkana) to the sea (Kwale), want the party to focus on BBG and help the President deliver to the base.
The future of the ODM Party is not in hollow TV talkshows and press statements by party higher-ups lost in their own comforting privileges.
It is in the forgotten villages where old women troop to polling booths to vote for the party’s pro-poor agenda, then return to their homes to go fetch river water to drink. Or watch helplessly their children fall out of schools because their maize fetches too little and sugarcane rots in farms.
If Sifuna, Ong’wen and their groupies keep talking nonsense on TV from morning to evening in Nairobi, then they are right to say the ODM Party is dead because they bury it everyday.
In the end it will not be the toxic garbage from Gachagua and his minions that will destroy the ODM Party, but the backstabbing by the leeches within — the washed up revolutionaries and small time lawyers.
