Tony Blair’s A Journey echoes the words of former New York mayor Mario Cuomo in describing the drudgery of running government: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”
Closer home, the lofty campaign promises by UDA have evolved into a forced marriage with those of ODM in the formation of a team to negotiate coalition details. From the pre-2022 profanities on never sharing government, the courtship has evolved from de-escalation in the National Dialogue and Reconciliation process to a full-blown romance in the current effort to convert political rivals into a functional governing arrangement with a common position on power and policy.
The youth revolt of June 2024 is the singular seismic event that forced UDA and ODM—the lead partner in the Azimio coalition—into bed together in an act of mutual self-preservation. Yes, the government had lost legitimacy. But the opposition, too, had lost agency.
The rapprochement of erstwhile political rivals in the formal sphere has marginalised non-institutional youth demands through arrests, abductions, extra-judicial executions and clampdowns on online expression—with opposition acquiescence or silence. Over time, Kenyan youth have come to see opposition co-option into the ruling elite as a naked betrayal, evident even in its defence of controversial public-private partnership deals in energy and infrastructure.
One unintended consequence of this rapprochement has been the attempted repositioning of Rigathi Gachagua as a new opposition figure. But it remains a thin substitute that is yet to capture the breadth, energy or decentralised character of the youth revolt.
Bringing together rival camps calms public temperatures and disorganises the opposition. But on its own, it does not deliver legitimacy or alter the trajectory of the economy. It promises dominance and stability but not renewal. It answers the politics of control but neglects the demand for a reordered state. Kenya has been here before. Grand coalitions forged in crisis promise unity but instead deliver drift. There is no question that UDA and ODM can share power and positions. The real question is whether they can share a theory of change.
Yet there is a deeper danger in this convergence that polite language struggles to name. When government and opposition collapse into one another without a corresponding expansion of accountability, what emerges is democratic contraction. Politics ceases to be a contest of ideas and becomes an arrangement of interests. This is why the current moment feels less like reconciliation and more like absorption.
The tragedy of the post-June 2024 moment is not simply that the State overreached. It is that the opposition, having ridden the wave of public anger, chose incorporation over consistency. The streets were pacified, but it was not because grievances were resolved. The political class closed ranks.
The contradiction at the heart of the emerging UDA-ODM arrangement is that it does not stabilise democracy; it hollows it out. It promises stability, but it will likely narrow the space for dissent.
It sells itself as a broad base, but it will actually narrow the space within which citizens can contest power.
Kenya’s history is littered with coalitions that mistook elite accommodation for national settlement. They calmed the surface while deepening the currents underneath. They governed in prose stripped of imagination, urgency and, ultimately, legitimacy.
If this coalition is merely designed to manage crises, it will succeed briefly. If it exists to win elections, it may succeed tactically—and fail strategically. And if it is built to neutralise opposition, it will create a vacuum that something far less predictable will fill. The real opposition in Kenya today is no longer organised around party structures. It is diffuse, digital, impatient and unrepresented. And it does not negotiate through committees.
The youth revolt of June 2024 was a signal. It is a warning that the old grammar of Kenyan politics—ethnicity, patronage, elite pacts—has reached its expiry date. No wonder the invitation to the youth to register as voters is being received with suspicion. Youth have proved once before that they do not need captured institutions and democratic rituals to negotiate with the State.
The task before UDA and ODM is far more demanding than stitching together a working majority. They must justify their convergence not to each other, but to a public that increasingly sees politics itself as the problem.
That justification must concretely answer these questions: what changes in the life of a young citizen who was in the streets in 2024? What shifts in the structure of an economy have normalised precarity? What would restore meaning to a vote that many now experience as symbolic rather than consequential?
A handshake is an opening sentence. Unless it is followed by a coherent theory of change—one that stabilises citizens, expands enterprise and forces structural transformation—it will remain a sentence without a story.
The writer is a board member of KHRC and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected] .
