Former Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has died at the age of 80.
According to a source in Odinga’s office revealed to Reuters on Wednesday, October 15, without giving further details.
An Indian newspaper, Mathrubhumi, had earlier reported that Odinga suffered a cardiac arrest on Wednesday and was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The late Raila Odinga was undergoing treatment in the southern Indian city of Kochi.
The late Odinga was one of Kenya’s most prominent political figures.
His political career spans decades of democracy activism and five unsuccessful, yet fiercely contested, presidential bids.
Raila Odinga, as an opposition leader, lost all five of his presidential campaigns, with two of the votes leading to chaotic bouts of bloodletting and recrimination a decade apart, which marked his political legacy.
Odinga led mass protests following the disputed 2007 Election, which plunged Kenya into one of its most serious episodes of political violence since gaining independence.
The bloodshed resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,300 people and displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes.
However, his work as a democracy activist over the years helped seal two of the country’s most important reforms: multiparty democracy in 1991 and a new constitution in 2010.