My heart is bleeding at the events preceding Homa Bay Linda Mwananchi’s scheduled rallies today (Sunday, August 16, 2026).

I condemn – without reservation – the use of our young sons and daughters to propagate violent attacks in Homa Bay, in a bid to stop Linda Mwananchi from conducting their series of rallies. I equally condemn – in the strongest terms – the assault on journalists Fred Ooko and Brian Ongoro of AFP, who were attacked and had their equipment destroyed simply for doing their jobs.

An attack on the press is an attack on every Kenyans’ right to know. Attacking a political convoy is an attack on the right of every Kenyan to move, assemble, and associate freely – rights our Constitution guarantees and that too many of our people have paid for in blood.

As a leader born in a political family – and conscious of the history of our country – I cannot help but see a dangerous pattern in Luo Nyanza, where a region whose sons and daughters paid the ultimate price for us to get democracy has turned around and is now being used to stifle the very democracy those before us fought so hard for.

Who is keen on dividing us? Who stands to benefit?

My late father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, spent a lifetime being punished – through detention, through the banning of his party, through decades in the political wilderness – simply for insisting that Kenyans deserved a real choice at the ballot. He was not alone.

Argwings-Kodhek did not live to see old age. Tom Mboya was razed down by an assassin’s bullet. Prof Crispin Odhiambo Mbai, son of Homa Bay, a University of Nairobi political science professor, chaired the critical Devolution Committee at the Bomas of Kenya Constitutional Review Conference, and was killed in 2003, roughly five months into the tense constitutional deliberations that began in April 2003.

The devolved constitutional order he championed was eventually realized in 2010, seven years after his death.

We must take stock as a community. We have had men and women who believed political disagreement should be settled with argument, not with pangas, stones, and hired goons. They believed that a rally is not a crime and that a dissenting voice is not an enemy.

Watching what unfolded in Homa Bay today – youth mobilized and paid to disrupt a lawful, notified political gathering, journalists beaten for doing their jobs, a whole town shut down by fear – I have to believe my father and his generation are turning in their graves. This is not the Nyanza they bled for. This is not the democracy they envisioned.

We are a people who produced some of Kenya’s fiercest champions of multiparty democracy and freedom of expression. We should be the last region in Kenya where a political rally cannot proceed in peace, where a convoy cannot pass safely, where journalists cannot do their work without being attacked.

Instead, we too often turn on each other over political differences that pale in comparison to what our forebears fought and died for.

So what is my point? We, the leaders, stand accused. We are the ones mobilising and funding the youth to disrupt lawful gatherings. We are rattling pretty fast towards a dark abyss, and when we get there, getting out of it will be a different story. So this madness must just stop; otherwise we will not have a country.

We owe our children a Homa Bay and a Nyanza, where political disagreement is a conversation, not a battlefield.

• A Tell Media report / By Ruth Odinga / The writer is Kisumu county Woman Representative younger sister of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Siaya Senator Oburu Oginga