Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the new chair of the African Union Commission, has a Kenyan fandom. Breathlessly referred to by his local stans as “Djibouti Man” or “Djibouti Guy,” sounding like something out of ’80s or ’90s Black Atlantic pop culture, the enamorment doesn’t stem so much from his skill as a foreign minister, diplomatic elegance, or prowess with languages, shifting as he does between Arabic, English, and French like a YouTube polyglot guru. No—it’s because he was up against and defeated 80-year-old Raila Odinga, Kenya’s long-time opposition leader, who was contesting the AUC chair seat as a last-gasp effort at a political consolation prize, following a fifth presidential loss in 2022.
The mood in Kenya on February 15 felt like a referendum, with celebrations breaking out in some areas—my boondock hometown among them—when Odinga lost. And it wasn’t just rubes who were in a festive mood. The weeks preceding the AUC elections had been characterized by social media campaigns to reach out to African foreign ministries, asking them to pick Youssouf and #RejectRailaOdinga, the political conman, perennial loser, and betrayer of Gen Z. #RailaMustFALL. And fall he did. While the role played by these efforts to sublimate Kenyan vendettas onto the continental stage is debatable, the defeat was nonetheless received in many quarters as Odinga’s divine comeuppance for his collaboration with the William Ruto regime. A perfid Ruto proxy had fallen; a catharsis and symbolic chipping away at the edifice of the president, in the absence of any veritable possibility that he could actually leave office.
The exaltation didn’t last too long, as it just so happens that to every vibe shift that has occurred since the June 2024, out-of-left-field, anti-tax uprising, there has been an equal atavism. Odinga won’t miss the continental sinecure all that much, despite the jet-setting campaigns costing the country an arm and a leg. In March 2025, he and Ruto solemnized their de facto political union, which dates back to July 2024, when Odinga dashed to prop up the very same president he had been trying to oust a year earlier. Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement party has now been allocated 50 percent of government spots in a fortified “broad-based government.”
To the uninitiated, this consolidated pact is an extended betrayal, an insatiable octogenarian seeking even more power, when he should have sat back and let popular pressure get a wobbling Ruto out way back in July 2024. But the ingenues are actually just coming face to face with the arcana, cabalism, and racket ethics that undergird Kenyan politics. Wins—electoral, in the courts, on the streets, even in Addis Ababa—do not actually matter to an establishment that only handles matters how it knows best, through elite cohesion or, better yet, elite cohabitation.
Considering his starring role in the most controversial episodes of the Ruto regime—to wit, colluding with the president to impeach ex-DP Rigathi Gachagua and promoting the contentious, multibillion-dollar Adani deals—Odinga has come to be viewed as toxic enabler number one. But he is far from alone in propping up Ruto. Following a handshake photo-op, several loyalists of ex-president Uhuru Kenyatta were appointed to government posts in December 2024, officially burying the hatchet between the best friends–turned–enemies. In a country that has caught the protest bug, having both Odinga and Kenyatta conciliated isn’t merely the political class regrouping. On the one hand, it’s the attenuation of Odinga’s urban, poor, and working-class base, which forms the critical mass during protests and for whom Baba’s word is final. On the other, it’s a gesture to capital, with multibillionaire Kenyatta’s multimillionaire stalwarts now occupying the critical trade, communications, and agriculture dockets. This is a tacit signal to the capitalist class that their investments are as safe as those of the Kenyatta business empire, which had faced niggling difficulties as hostilities with Ruto raged.
Despite being helmed by a government of elite cohabitation, the country is not especially at ease. Two consecutive years of social unrest met by gratuitous, deadly state force, a raft of malfunctioning policies, abductions, and renewed ethnic balkanization are eating away at the social contract. Nowadays, seemingly anodyne government directives turn into full-blown controversies, such as the nationwide cattle vaccination campaign that spawned a kerfuffle of Bill Gates–inflected conspiracy theories and crass jousting from even the president himself. The most reviled head of state in decades, William Samoei arap Ruto is seen as Daniel Toroitich arap Moi’s epigone seeking to atavize the country to the doldrums of anti-democracy. “Ruto Must Go” echoes everywhere, even at Kenyan pop star Bien-Aimé Baraza’s concert … in London.
The atavists are taking none of this lying down. Never to be left behind by a trend, stalwart allies of the president—such as Kimani Ichung’wah, the gadfly majority leader in the National Assembly known for his verbal sallies—are now declaring that “Ruto Must Go ON.” When several young X users were abducted in late December after posting “offensive” images of the president (one was an AI depiction of Ruto dead in a coffin), members of Ruto’s UDA party and pro-Ruto ODM fusionists emerged in full force to infantilize the young adult abductees, downplaying their political agency by calling on parents to police their children’s social media activity. Some went as far as claiming that the abductions were staged.
Beyond anti-democratic apologia, the rhetoric adopted by some of these sycophants is not anodyne, bringing back some noxious memories and, to some, a feeling that a Damocles sword of ethnic strife once more hangs over the country. The run-up to the ill-fated December 2007 elections was characterized by many dog-whistles, one of whose premises is making a comeback in 2025. Claiming to oppose Mwai Kibaki and his exclusionary, chauvinistic inner circle known as the “Mount Kenya Mafia,” some ODM supporters in 2007 used the epithet “41 tribes against 1” to rally against Kibaki and the Kikuyu community at large. The first act of the 2007–2008 carnage was the premeditated slaughter and displacement of the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley by blood-and-soil militias. Ruto, then an ODM stalwart, faced charges at the ICC for allegedly masterminding the violence, charges that were eventually dropped, following mysterious witness retractions. From 2023, Gachagua and his bitterly controversial statements about ethnic “shareholding” (he was accused by several members of the National Assembly of withholding flood relief money to their constituencies, because they “didn’t have shares”) have once again come to embody this so-called Kikuyu entitlement. It has elicited a revanchist response from ethnic-baiting politicians and social media bomb-throwers, whose coded posts and statements in public about “isolating the mountain” hail what they see as Ruto’s efforts to equally share the national cake and discipline the majoritarian excesses of Kenya’s largest ethnic group.
The politics of redistributive development are, of course, something Ruto picked up from Odinga, whose platform of devolution in the aughts was seen to champion the marginalized in Kenya’s northern, western, coastal, and informal urban peripheries. Ruto’s pivot, though partially desperate as he seeks to shed the taxman tag, builds on the support he had already siphoned from Odinga in these peripheral constituencies in 2022. Today, with the consolidation of the broad-based government, the AUC-campaign-era fear that ODM itself might be carted off to the tent of the prodigal old boy has fully materialized. Ruto’s inroads are now fracturing the party’s diverse coalition, with ODM’s Luo core seen to be privileged in transactions with him. An ideological schism is also underway, with a traditionalist faction deeming Ruto’s antidemocratic habits, weakness on federalism, and incoherent economic policies as antithetical to the party’s social democracy.
This faction is rapidly becoming outcast. It faces an ascendant Ruto fusionist wing, which is composed of ethnic bigots titillated by the anti-Kikuyu mood, careerists, and crony capitalists relishing the opportunity to gorge themselves at the state table of accumulation that Gachagua’s traps and shareholding gospel had tried to keep them from.
The discontent and disarray that the Ruto regime hath wrought has unsurprisingly made maneuvers for 2027 start in earnest. Human rights activist–turned–senator Okiya Omtatah Okoiti has already put an exploratory presidential secretariat in place, which includes Hanifa Adan, a young journalist and activist widely seen as influential in the Gen Z movement. Omtatah is a favorite of the civil society and Gen Z crowd, protesting against abductions and maintaining a purdah from the pornocracy. He is also largely unknown beyond online-centric, political-junkie crowds.
In the political mainstream, something of an anti-Ruto popular front has now been formed, casting itself as a vehicle for liberation. It consists of, among others, Martha Karua, a one-time justice minister and Odinga’s 2022 running mate, who has renamed her party “People’s Liberation Party”; fellow veteran Kalonzo Musyoka; Fred Matiang’i, a former minister who was the chief enforcer of iron-fisted policies under Uhuru Kenyatta; and Gachagua. The frontrunner of this bunch is widely seen to be the 70-year-old Musyoka, a long-time Odinga ally and current leader of the rump Azimio opposition. A foreign minister in the aughts, mild-mannered lawyer Musyoka has ever been in the shadow of Odinga, perceived as preponderant and imperious. In 2007, he ran a spoiler presidential campaign…
