Actually the CEC wasn’t working with the kodi that I installed with retropie_setup.sh so I used the following commands to install and compile libCEC for raspberry pi

Install the necessary tools for compiling:

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf liblockdev1-dev libudev-dev git libtool pkg-config

Clone the git repository:

git clone git://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec.git

Additional Step

in later versions you need to add
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([.]) to the top of configure.ac
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I . to the top of Makefile.am

Compile:

cd libcec
./bootstrap
./configure --with-rpi-include-path=/opt/vc/include --with-rpi-lib-path=/opt/vc/lib --enable-rpi
sudo make
sudo make install

Link the libraries so that cec-client can find them:

sudo ldconfig

Check that cec-client have found the device by running:

cec-client -l:

Found devices: 1

device: 1
com port: RPI
vendor id: 2708
product id: 1001
firmware version: 1
type: Raspberry Pi

i found the instructions here

https://nyxi.eu/blog/2013/04/15/raspbian-libcec/

now my TV remote works in Kodi, but I still need my controller to launch Kodi from emulation station.