If you have tuned into any address from State House lately, you might notice a recurring script that reads like an exasperated father berating his children for eating the seed instead of planting it.
The gospel is simple: the opposition has no agenda. The daily sermon targets the country’s two chief tormentors-in-chief, Edwin Sifuna and Rigathi Gachagua. State House sees empty vessels, loud megaphones making noise but building nothing, and wonders why the public is charmed by men who have never laid a single brick.
But State House may be misreading the room. It is campaigning for builders in an election whose mood belongs to fighters. And it has helped create that mood itself.
The marketplace has not run out of builders because building is bad. Far from it. Hospitals need equipping, schools need desks, and young people need jobs. A country cannot live on political noise any more than a family can survive on motivational speeches for supper.
But elections, like music, have seasons. And this season belongs to the fighters.
Remember the 1980s? Everyone was dancing to Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s Thank You Mr DJ. Today, Siaga Siaga has its moment. You cannot force yesterday’s rhythm onto today’s dance floor and insult the crowd for refusing to dance.
Kenya is exhausted by blueprints that promise jobs but deliver PowerPoint presentations and a new tax. When the taxman behaves like an overzealous uncle raiding a teenager’s piggy bank, then returning to lecture the teenager about financial discipline, the voter will not be consoled by a candidate explaining the national budget. You cannot tell a man whose trousers are on fire to admire your new belt.
And when political goons are perceived to be terrorising citizens and disrupting gatherings, the air becomes more combustible. People start looking for politicians who will not merely explain suffering but confront those they believe are responsible for it. If the house is beaten by rain, you do not want an architect; you want a man with a hammer who knows where the roof leaks.
This is where State House’s irony becomes delicious. In demanding to know what the opposition is building, it advertises the very fighters it wants voters to dismiss. It offers the wheelbarrow; the crowd wants someone to challenge the man sitting on its neck. It shouts, “These people have no agenda,” and the crowd hears, “These people are not afraid of you.”
Enter Sifuna and Gachagua, two brands of fiery hot pepper in the same stew.
Sifuna brings the sharp-tongued wit of a Nairobi lawyer who can dismantle a government argument faster than you can say, “Point of order.” Gachagua fights with the raw, aggrieved energy of a man thrown out of the family mansion and now pelting its windows from the gate, reminding the new tenants that he still has the spare keys. Their CV is not a building; it is a scar. Their manifesto is written on their knuckles.
They do not need to arrive at every rally carrying a hundred-page plan bound like a thesis. Their currency is the ability to articulate anger and make the palace uncomfortable. When State House demands a spreadsheet, it is looking for one in a war zone. In a war zone, you do not ask for the enemy’s business plan; you ask who is brave enough to go to the front.
That does not make builders useless. It means the weather has changed. A man selling umbrellas in a drought may be sensible, but he will struggle for customers. When the house is on fire, nobody queues to admire the architect’s drawings. They want someone to shout “Fire!” loudly enough to wake the household. As the Good Book says, man shall not live by bread alone; sometimes he needs a good fight to remember why he wanted bread.
Mandela became an icon through struggle, not municipal budgeting. Even Ruto climbed there through a combative hustler campaign against the establishment. He knows this game; he invented this dance.
The fighter is not necessarily the enemy of the builder. Sometimes the fighter clears the ground where the builder will lay the foundation. Moses had to fight Pharaoh before leading anyone to the Promised Land. David had to kill Goliath, who was big, well-fed and looked very much like he was on the government payroll, before he could be trusted with a kingdom.
Reading the mood correctly
But there is a catch. The man who knows how to demolish a wall does not automatically know how to build a house. Opposition is not government, and a microphone is not a ministry. They may be reading the mood correctly, but they will eventually have to show that their fighting credentials can survive contact with budgets and the unglamorous business of governing.
A fighter in opposition must become a thermostat in government. A thermometer merely tells you how hot the room is, which is what they are doing brilliantly now. A thermostat must actually cool it. A pilot who cracks jokes may be loved, but passengers relax only when the captain calmly says, “We will be landing in twenty minutes.” Kenyans are clapping for the funny co-pilots. Eventually, they will want to know whether anyone in the cockpit can actually fly the plane.
That transition is tomorrow’s problem. Today’s season has its own soundtrack, and State House cannot change it by complaining about the lyrics.
In 2027, the country may not be shopping for an architect with a beautiful plan. It may be looking for a bouncer to get it back into a club it feels it has been thrown out of.
Builders are not bad. We will need them desperately. But you do not choose the soundtrack of an election by announcing which song you would prefer the crowd to dance to.
This is a fighters’ election. And State House did not just write the chorus; it commissioned the band.
