Inside 25 years as Raila’s spokesperson, Dennis Onyango reflects on life in the inner circle

For a quarter century, Dennis Onyango was the unseen hand that crafted Raila Odinga's public narrative.

He was not merely a spokesman, he was a strategist, a confidant, and a gatekeeper. Now, for the first time since Baba's death, he is speaking.

It began in 2001, outside Nyayo House, with a green suit and a phone call that never quite ended.

Dennis Onyango, then a young journalist at the Nation Media Group, had been assigned to track down the elusive Raila Odinga, who had just been appointed cabinet minister in the Moi government.

What followed was not just an interview, it was the beginning of a 25-year partnership that would shape how Kenya, and the world, understood one of its most consequential political figures.

"He got out and got into his car. He told me to get into his car. He was on the phone, but his eyes were on me," Onyango recalled of that first meeting during an interview on JKL Show. "That was the first real encounter."

From that moment, Onyango evolved from journalist to insider, eventually becoming the man who drafted Raila's most consequential statements, managed his international engagements, and served as the quiet architecture behind a very loud political career.

Working for Raila Odinga required more than good writing. It required an almost telepathic understanding of a deeply complicated man.

Onyango describes a principal who rarely gave explicit direction yet expected his team to anticipate his thinking.

Before the historic March 9th, 2018 handshake with Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila pulled Onyango aside with a characteristically blunt instruction.

"He told me, 'Now we are going to meet Jadwong' tomorrow. I want you to prepare a statement we are going to make there, but if this thing leaks out, it will be you.'"

It was a dynamic Onyango learned to navigate, operating with enormous responsibility while carrying the weight of total deniability.

He drafted statements, managed media crises, and represented Raila's worldview in rooms the principal never entered.

Raila famously described himself as a striker who needed the ball delivered to him. Onyango was one of those quietly delivering it.

"There were very competent people working behind the scenes who would feed him with information, which we would then weigh to see which one to go with," Onyango said.

"There are people who would feel so sorry if Baba made a remark that they thought they should have advised him better on. They would call in the morning to say, 'We failed.'"

That culture of quiet accountability defined Onyango's tenure a team of unseen thinkers meeting as early as 6 a.m., gone before the cameras arrived.

Eight months after Raila's death, Onyango has not stopped.

He is currently compiling Raila's speeches into a book he hopes to publish before the end of 2025, honouring a conversation they had on the morning Raila left for India, never to return.