Members of the youth-led ‘Niko Kadi’ initiative march through the streets of Kisumu City on March 26.
With President William Ruto ramping up his campaigning, Kenya’s 2027 election battle is beginning in earnest. His pace has revealed some interesting changes that have taken place, are in place, or are coming of age since the 2022 election. Some are surprising, and we shall focus mostly on what, with a little exaggeration, we could call the megatrends.
To begin with, something has happened in Kenya that could have been expected instead in countries like Uganda and Somalia, which have been through protracted civil war, or Rwanda, which suffered the tragedy of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Such conflicts usually destroy old institutions and entrenched post-colonial interests, and kill off the historic independence parties. New societies in Africa tend to emerge more from those ashes than from the natural ebb and flow of politics in countries like Kenya, which, apart from the two months of madness during the 2007/08 post-election violence, have had neither a full-scale civil war nor a military dictatorship.
Yet, as we head into 2027, the influence of the independence party, the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), is almost nil. Even the logic of the parties that drove the late-1990s democracy wave and the 2003 multiparty democracy 2.0 era no longer dominates the political scene. By contrast, in Uganda, the politics of President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), in power since 1986, remains evident. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has been in power since it ended the genocide in 1994, and the tragedy of that mass slaughter still sits at the centre of the country’s politics.
Political fingerprints
Look in Kenya for similar political fingerprints, and you find zilch. Which brings us to Tanzania, which also avoided military coups and civil wars, though two waves of post-election violence have hit it. Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has been in power continuously since independence in 1961, as the Tanganyika African National Union (Tanu) before 1964.
Part of that break from independence-era partisan party traditions is the October 2025 death of opposition and pro-democracy doyen and First Pragmatist Raila Odinga, and the fact that nobody has yet filled the vacuum he left. Raila was the last active frontier politician in government with ties to the militant politics of independence and its immediate aftermath, through his activism as a young man in that period, and as the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice-president and a founding figure of the opposition.
The other megatrend is the demise of anti-dynastic politics. It came about in the most unexpected of ways. Ruto skilfully turned anti-dynasty politics against Raila, his main rival in the 2022 election, whom his then boss, President Uhuru Kenyatta, backed in the Azimio coalition. The wealthy son of founding president Jomo Kenyatta backing the wealthy son of first vice-president Odinga made for rich pickings.
It was on display on March 27, 2023, when, as a counter to Azimio protests, hundreds of pro-Ruto-Gachagua youth, some seen wielding machetes and power saws, invaded the Northlands City farm owned by the Kenyattas. They cut down eucalyptus trees, set parts of the farm on fire, and took off with a large flock of prize sheep, which they sold or slaughtered a short distance from the farm.
Then came June 2024, and the Gen Z protests blindsided Kenya. The Gen Z uprising, with its rallying cry “leaderless, tribeless, partyless, and fearless”, spooked both the new and old political establishments.
Simmering differences
Raila and Ruto buried their 2022 hatchet and came together to “stabilise the country”. That set off a series of events that deepened the simmering differences between Vice-President Gachagua and President Ruto. Matters came to a head in October 2024, when Ruto stuck a knife into Gachagua. The National Assembly voted to oust him, and the Senate swiftly finished the job.
Gachagua extended an olive branch to the Kenyatta wing of the dynasty, and apologised for the farm raid and the sheep eaten. Ruto’s cooperation with Raila absolved the Odinga wing. As a result, Ruto-Gachagua, the ticket that made most of the anti-dynasty card, is the one that buried it deepest. Gachagua even alleges that Ruto is now cultivating a new kind of moneyed hegemony.
Out of all this, a certain kind of centrist politics has emerged in Kenya. Anyone who watched the divisive, slash-and-burn campaigns of 2022 would not have predicted it. Of course, decentralisation has also helped to make redistributive and equity politics less angry. But the political trends born in this period, the severing of ties to independence party tradition, the burial, or half-burial, of the dynasty card, and the centre now emerging (hopefully it takes hold and consolidates), are the children of the Ruto-Gachagua liaison.
The parents have long since divorced. But their children are all grown up. In 2027, Ruto and Gachagua (likely through a proxy) will meet all three of them at the ballot box, and the children will have the final word. You can be sure they will not love both parents equally.
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The author is a writer, journalist and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X (Twitter): @cobbo3
