Edwin Sifuna Has Been Removed as ODM Secretary-General

ODM's National Executive Committee has removed Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna from the position of Secretary-General.

The charges the party set out are procedural on their face: publicly declaring on television in July 2025 that the ODM–UDA memorandum was "dead", and failing to attend party meetings including a Central Committee meeting in January 2026 and NEC meetings in February and March 2026. Catherine Omanyo has been acting in the role.

Sifuna had earlier secured a temporary reprieve at the Political Parties Disputes Tribunal, which barred the party from executing the resolution.

What the dispute is actually about

Not attendance.

ODM after the death of its founder has moved toward accommodation with the government it spent two decades opposing. Sifuna did not, and said so, loudly and on television.

So the party had a genuine problem: a Secretary-General publicly contradicting the party's direction is a structural impossibility, whichever of them is right about the politics. Parties cannot function that way, and the charges are how that impossibility gets converted into a resolution.

Whether the direction was right is a separate question that the removal does not settle.

The three factions this exposes

Kenyan analysts describe ODM as split roughly three ways since the succession.

The leadership bloc, arguing that a party without its founder needs to be inside government to protect its constituencies.

The legitimacy sceptics, who see the succession as having been rushed.

The opposition-continuity bloc, holding that a party defined by opposition cannot become a governing partner and remain itself.

Sifuna's removal is that third argument losing, formally.

What happens to a removed party official

Three routes, and all three are visible in Kenyan politics right now.

Fight it in the tribunal and the courts. Slow, expensive, and frequently outlasts the political moment it was about.

Build outside the party. A movement, a rally programme, a national profile — which requires the eventual answer to the question of what symbol you will be on.

Wait. Parties change direction, and Kenyan politics has a short memory for internal disputes.

The lesson for anybody holding party office

A party position is not a political base. It is a job you can lose in a meeting you were not at.

What survives a removal is what you built independently: a constituency that is yours, a network you recruited, a record voters recognise. A politician whose standing comes entirely from a party title has nothing when the title goes.

That is the reason we keep repeating an apparently mundane point on this blog: build the structure that belongs to you. Coordinators you recruited, volunteers who work for you, supporters recorded in your own system. In a political culture with this much churn, portability is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole strategy.

Related: what party-hopping costs.

What a Secretary-General actually does

Worth explaining, because the title is more consequential than it sounds.

In a Kenyan party the Secretary-General is the chief executive of the organisation: the person who signs official communications, who is registered with the Registrar of Political Parties as an authorised official, and whose signature can validate party documents — including, in an election year, nomination papers.

That last point is why the office is fought over. The IEBC verifies nomination papers against the specimen signatures of officials a party has filed. Whoever holds the pen at nomination time has real leverage over who gets on a ballot.

Which is also why the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties updating a party's leadership list is not an administrative footnote. It is the point at which an internal dispute becomes an external fact.