Azimio la Umoja is no more. On Monday it became The Ukombozi Alliance, and if you watched that press briefing closely, you would be forgiven for asking: so what’s the point? New name. New philosophy. A crisp new slogan about one term, one team, one coalition. And arranged behind the microphones, in the same semicircle as always, the same faces.
Ukombozi (Liberation) from whom, exactly?
We have done this before, so many times that this sequence has a rhythm. KANU held this country by the throat for 39 years. Narc arrived in 2002 promising a clean break and was dissolving into the Party of National Unity before the decade was out. TNA and URP fused to take 2013, became Jubilee by 2017, cracked, scattered, and partly reassembled inside Azimio. Narc-Kenya became the People's Liberation Party last year, and the reason offered was that young people no longer recognised the old name. Not that they disagreed with it; that they had never heard of it.
This is not a succession of political movements. It is one political class, sixty years old, changing outfits between acts and trusting that we, the ever too eager to fall for theatrics audience, will clap for the costume.
And of course, like clockwork, the rationalisations will arrive precisely on time. Yes, he has a record. Yes, she was in the room when it happened. Yes, that one signed the thing. But the other side is worse. The stakes are too high. This is not the year to be principled. Vote for the lesser evil now, fix the rest later.
Look at what that bargain has actually bought us. The men who presided over the Goldenberg scandal were rehabilitated and returned to public life. The people in the room in 2007 were absorbed into the coalition formed after the post-election violence. The very hands that signed off on the borrowing now swallowing over a trillion shillings a year in interest are, today, seated in the formations asking you to believe they are the alternative. Lesser-evil politics has not slowed Kenya's decline by a single day. It has staffed it heavily with incompetent men and women in a revolving door.
If every option on the ballot is drawn from one class, that class wins every time, and all you are doing is choosing which of its factions gets the keys next. And there will almost always be enough pain caused by one section of this class to give the other section a rallying call.
Meanwhile, look at what this mess has delivered. An executive that ignores court orders and shrugs. A president who admits his own Cabinet is unconstitutional and treats it like a minor inconvenience. Taxation set and unset by announcement while a Parliament costing us billions a year sits there blinking. More than 120 dead in and around protests since 2024 and at least 82 disappeared, with families still waiting.
No, the problem is not that the wrong faction is holding power. The problem is that the law has stopped being a constraint on anyone who holds it, and no amount of rebranding touches that. Which leaves exactly one organising idea worth building anything on. Not a coalition, not a slogan, but fidelity to the law.
Here is the strange thing about this country. The people who could build this are already here, tried and tested. David Maraga sat as Chief Justice and ruled against power, knowing precisely what it would cost him, and then paid it. Okiya Omtatah has spent years filing the petitions nobody else would touch and has dragged more of our debt into daylight than any parliamentary committee ever has. Edwin Sifuna, who carries the youthful exuberance, keeps saying out loud the things his colleagues will only say in hushed tones.
None of them is a saint. We do not need saints. But we definitely need people with a demonstrated habit of choosing the law over their own convenience, because everything else we claim to want sits downstream of it. Investors do not fear poverty; they fear unpredictability. Young people are not leaving because Kenya is hard. They are leaving because Kenya is arbitrary. Fix the rules and everything else becomes possible. Leave them broken, and we are simply choosing our next disappointment.
Word is already circulating that part of Sifuna’s Linda Mwananchi team might be collapsed into The Ukombozi Alliance. The instant a rule-of-law candidacy walks into a coalition built on the same old arithmetic, it stops being one. It becomes a bargaining chip and regional delivery mechanism. The distinctiveness is the asset. It is the only thing on offer that has not been tried before.
So we must build things separately. Slower, harder, lonelier, without the ready-made machinery. Let Maraga and Omtatah, Sifuna and anyone else who is serious build something whose founding promise is not an ethnic ledger or a share of appointments, but one enforceable commitment: this Constitution will be obeyed, including on the days it is inconvenient to us. It is the most practical proposal in a long time.
We either build something new now while there is still time or settle again for the lesser evil, clap politely for the new colours, and meet these same men in 2032 under a name none of us has thought of yet.
