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 after falling out with Odinga, under the auspices of a party named—wait for it—ODM-Kenya, being appointed vice-president by Kibaki as violence engulfed the country. Today, helming an outfit that has since been renamed Wiper Democratic Movement, Musyoka’s ethnicity and complicated allyship with Odinga are seen to confer him some neutrality in Kenya’s charged and polarized identity politics.

He hails from the Kamba, a Bantu group whose heartland is the sprawling savannahs east of Nairobi. The Kamba are closely related to the Kikuyu, their aspirational mountain cousins, who are considered Kenya’s indigenous capitalists par excellence. The savannahs of the Kamba heartland have now been christened “Mount Kenya South” by Musyoka’s new allies from the Gachagua faction, with the community gaining admission into a pan-Bantu confederation called the Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru Association (GEMA). Though Odinga had pledged in 2023 to return the favor and support Musyoka for the presidency in 2027, things are now in limbo, with gadfly fusionists calling for Odinga to “hand over” his Luo electorate to Ruto. It’s a prospect that excites an ethno-essentialist fringe, who are keen to offer a retort to the pan-Bantu gambit. They hail a Kalenjin-Luo alliance as the great Nilotic reunion, reviving the fraternity of the Bahr el Ghazal urheimat a millennium ago.

With atavistic pan-Bantu, pan-Nilotic pandering in the air, you’re probably wondering: What on earth is going on in Kenya? Additionally, the events of 2007–2008 are being relitigated as a result of the Gachagua impeachment, which broke the elite ethnic pact that had maintained a certain omertà around the issue. Is the country nosediving towards a nadir of national cohesion, presided over by demiurge Ruto, the ultimate kakistocrat, tribalist, and autocrat whom everybody wants out? Amazingly, not quite. This state of affairs didn’t start with Ruto. The “Must Go” suffix itself was alive and well in the era of his predecessor, when youths were gunned down for shouting it in western counties during protests. Ruto is, in short, by no means excrescent to the Kenyan body politic. Perhaps what makes him come off as so aggravating is the fact that he is actually its very avatar, a pastiche of the rogues’ gallery of presidents that preceded him.

It’s no wonder that Kenya today concurrently feels like déjà vu of the ’80s and ’90s Moi era, with Ruto’s assorted, tribeless, partyless band of sycophants insulting, threatening, and belittling Kenyans every other day, just like Moi’s rainbow troupe of jesters used to troll the nation. It feels like a throwback to the Kibaki era, with noxious and laughable efforts to form blood-and-soil pan-Bantu, pan-Nilotic coalitions, two junk categories in a heterogeneous nation. Fundamentally, there is no decoupling Ruto from Uhuru Kenyatta and his own antidemocratic, ethnic-baiting klepto-kakistocracy, under which Ruto wasn’t simply deputy president but indeed co-principal for the first five years, after they had come together in extremis to escape charges at the ICC by clinching the highest offices in the land.

Kibaki, Uhuru, and Ruto are all Moi’s epigones, having all, when it benefited them, displayed staunch loyalty to the late Big Man. When it comes to extralegal actions, abductions were rife in the previous two administrations; they were just happening to expendables from the marginalized peripheries—namely, coastal Muslims and Cushitic speakers from northern Kenya accused of “being Al-Shabaab.” What distinguishes Ruto’s regime is his exploitation of marginality, and his mastery of the tics of the country’s man-made ethnic pathology. Specifically, the tics of the 56-year-old Kikuyu-Luo political blood feud, Kenya’s sinister, shadow two-party system. This feud is now manifesting through proxies in form of the nascent realignments, with its esoterica having been at play in Ruto’s election, and in the Gachagua impeachment.

Kibaki and Kenyatta only ever turned to their gargantuan Mount Kenya backyard, with Kenyatta even being crowned something of a tribal boy-king. Ruto, as evidenced by his pivot to love-bombing the peripheries with development goodies, and removing discriminatory ID vetting in northern Kenya, simply serves up the Kool-Aid at different times to a revolving set with dexterity. The Gachagua impeachment epitomizes this; let the ex-DP run riot declaring his vision of the country as some apartheid entity, then jettison him with the help of the factions targeted with the exclusion, who now rationalize abductions because they think the X posters are on Gachagua’s payroll.

On the ethnic-baiting front, today’s Kikuyu entitlement boogeyman is just the flip side of what can only be described as the Orange Scare of class and ethnic contempt that Kenyatta’s 2017 Cambridge Analytica–assisted campaign sold. Itself a rehashing of the dog-whistles from Kibaki’s 2007 campaign, Uhuru’s evoked the specter of hordes of unwashed, uncircumcised Luo racaille from the slums bringing pandemonium upon the nation, deporting entire ethnic groups and refusing to pay rent in the event of an Odinga presidency. In a miniature, memory-holed version of 2007–2008, a conservative estimate of 150 lives were lost in the electoral aftermath, hundreds more ruined.

This moment, then, isn’t simply the shell-shock vibe shift of June 25 being countered by an atavism. It’s the same old thing—it’s déjà vu in the most literal sense of the term. Yet the chaos that has characterized Ruto’s rule seems to indicate that the chickens might be coming home to roost. If Ruto really is the prelude to the third Kenyan dispensation, what does the next tome in the saga hold?

The last 43 years of this 62-year-old saga might as well be subtitled The Adventures Of Raila Odinga, after the picaresque personage who has alternately haunted and gallivanted with four of the country’s five presidents. Today, with him as the newly minted co-principal, the barely two-month-old AUC defeat feels like a relic. Odinga, whom Ruto’s jubilant operatives had boasted of sending to doze in his ancestral Bondo village in 2022, is now the avuncular foil to the victorious but ultimately resented head of state.

Before the consolidation of the Ruto pact, old friends and foes alike in the popular front had been angling for Odinga’s support, with Gachagua even putting down the gambit of delivering the Mount Kenya vote to Odinga in 2027. Branded a betrayal by Musyoka, the pact has, for many, irrevocably drawn the battle lines between Ruto and Raila on one side, with the popular front and Gen Z on the other.

Refueled by the consolidated pact, the war of narratives regarding Odinga’s impact on the 2024 uprising continues to rage. Did the 80-year-old, god-king of the Luos, commander of street legions and heckler parliamentarians that believe Baba is always right, steal the revolution of the tribeless, leaderless, partyless, 20-year-olds, who achieved—in their maiden outing no less—the concrete results that have eluded him during his self-centered, senescent, and quixotic efforts in 2023, and before? Or is he being scapegoated, as his fan army contend, for the failures of a rudderless, ahistorical, protean movement that has been appropriated by even the Gachagua faction, whose crash course in activism began the moment he was impeached? Who provided the critical mass in 2024: Raila’s protest-hardened street troops, or self-proclaimed Gen Zs? As a matter of fact, what is “Gen Z” anyway—an age group, a social media crowd, a social class of downwardly mobile yuppies, a vibe, all the above, or anything that just isn’t tied to Odinga?

These debates say something more depressing altogether about Kenya’s existence in the liminal spaces of illiberal democracy. While the opposition is not devoid of depth, it sure has been devoid of alternatives. Despite high pedigree, its other luminaries lack Odinga’s pathos as the country’s longest-serving political prisoner, his ability to mobilize the streets, and the cultic gravitas he has acquired from giving up struggles for electoral justice to put an end to bloodshed. This clout has made him a heavyweight candidate who contests election result after election result, eventually putting out the embers of civil strife with one capitulatory handshake after another. Instead of real political power, he is merely deeply entwined with whoever is president, making him the sole opposition interlocutor. Frolicking in this exclusive liminal space, Odinga is part and parcel of what is holding Kenya back. Yet, his cynical moves within the pornocracy’s racket system have taken up outsized attention, to the point of creating analytical lacunae that could help make more sense of the anti-tax uprising.

If mass action is to come back stronger, there has to be some trenchant analysis of broader dynamics that contributed to the 2024 mobilization dying down. The uprising’s heterogeneity, and consequent inchoate nature, are consistent with what some sociopolitical theorists have branded “non-movements”—the complex, global protest waves of our age that register symbolic wins and peter out. The personal attacks and explosive accusations that have now ensued between some current and former luminaries of the mobilization also locate it in the tradition of mass, internet-driven movements that have melted down in the public glare.

The scleroses of class and ethnic pathology are also at play in the inability of some Raila faithful and Gen Zs to see eye to eye. A most unlikely source illuminates the absurdity of these disconnects. In a TV interview, Kindiki Kithure, the current DP, who was interior minister during both police crackdowns, had to remind his memory-holing interlocutors of the lives lost in 2023; it isn’t simply that Kithure knows his body count. He recognizes the protest waves as related, something even journalists seem not to.

The last time Raila Odinga wasn’t on the Kenyan ballot, it is widely acknowledged that his iconic 2002 “Kibaki Tosha!” (Kibaki is the man) endorsement energized the masses and helped propel his future nemesis to the presidency. In those halcyon years, the breakout stars of the Gen Z uprising were mere tots or unborn. Today, young activists like Hanifa Adan, Morara Kebaso, and Kasmuel McOure, alongside many others who have emerged in recent months, have brought the deportment, idioms, worldview, and aspirations of the youth to the forefront of Kenya’s stale, dinosauric political culture, energizing a huge, historically apathetic constituency that finally sees itself represented. But youth participation in politics is not a panacea. They are as vulnerable to the copious ethnic bait being thrown around as any other demographic, if not more. Young people are, after all, the ones who are most easily weaponized to participate in political violence. It’s time to demystify this demographic; they are neither a progressive monolith, nor an inscrutable alien species. They are simply a large part of the population in a country experiencing a youth boom. While Kenya is not a gerontocracy (many MPs from Ruto’s UDA party and Kenya First coalition are millennials, with a sprinkling of zillenials), it’s abundantly clear from the infantilization of twenty-somethings during the abductions debacle that young people, despite their numerical majority, are a minorized constituency, and it is high time they took on a more proportional role in politics.

And what better role than to provide the critical mass that removes an extremely unpopular president at the ballot box? The psychosis that has beset Ruto’s sycophants, with some now threatening us with ballot-stuffing, extending his mandate beyond 2032, and one MP, Farah Maalim, using unprintable pornographic terminology to deride the Must Go movement, shows that they are well aware of this fact.

Elections are, of course, won through broad church coalitions, not the consensus on social media echo chambers. The newfangled opposition finally has that long-awaited alternance, allowing it to win new constituencies that Odinga could never make inroads into. Though it bumbles at times with ham-fisted parries of Ruto’s salvos, the popular front is nevertheless building up its grit, waging its liberatory crusade on all fronts, be it taking up the abductees’ cause in court, or Karua going across the border to represent Kizza Besigye after he was kidnapped by Ugandan agents on Kenyan soil. Baggage notwithstanding, Gachagua remains the front’s crown jewel. He brings not only the pathos of wounded ethnic pride, but also the insider perspectives that allow him to make the explosive allegation that Ruto is in business with RSF warlord Hemedti. With hints that ODM outcasts, Omtatah, and Gen Z luminaries are gravitating towards the popular front’s orbit, a broad church coalition might finally materialize, enriching the complexion of the opposition coalition, which for now looks like a GEMA and Friends affair.

Come 2027, flying the flag of the popular front will be either Karua or Musyoka, the Kibaki epigones; or Fred Matiang’i and fast-rising freshman governor George Natembeya, the iron-fisted Uhuru epigones. The popular front candidate could very well clinch the top seat in a landslide, forestalling any attempts at electoral fraud, just like 72-year-old compromise candidate Kibaki did. Though Kibaki had sustained serious injuries in a car accident mere weeks before the election, this could not impede him from roundly defeating Moi’s boyish, hand-picked KANU successor, Uhuru Kenyatta, who at the time was supported by an equally boyish William Ruto. In 2002, their youth stood no chance against the OG tribeless, ageless, limitless movement, Kibaki’s national rainbow coalition, what with his campaign being soundtracked, as it was, by the thunderous “Who Can Bwogo Me? (Unbwogable),” a novelty hip-hop song and ode to swaggering Luo masculinity. The neologism encapsulated the zeitgeist, with Kenyans caring less about the unintelligible Dholuo lyrics, which they nonetheless sang along to in gibberish. It was more about the liberatory fervor—the tectonic vibe shift—that ensued when the declamatory, earworm chorus swept in.

The end of the Ruto racket might usher in some euphoric months, years, or even a decade reminiscent of Kibaki’s golden first term, when the yoke of the Moi dictatorship came off. We might experience vastly improved service delivery, instead of the odium of state violence and political chicanery that we have witnessed over the last two years.

Yet the question remains: With radioactive characters wielding influence within the popular front, would any meaningful steps be taken to start attenuating the pathogens of negative ethnicity, kleptocracy, state terror, and marginalization? Would the Kenyan state cease operating like a violent occupying power in its coastal, northern, western, and internal informal peripheries?

Or will the clouds of sectarianism eventually gather uninhibited over the idyll, like they did after the 2005 referendum? Aided by new media, ethnic stereotypes have, in some cases, coarsened into something uglier altogether, resembling a crypto-casteism. This turning of the tide was visible by 2007, when Luo masculinity was once again being spoken of in bold tones, but the tune had gone from goofy to ominous. Kibaki’s PNU took to declaring that they were not man enough to lead a nation. Revenge slaughter of Luos and other “opposition” communities quickly followed the anti-Kikuyu massacres, constituting the second act of the pogroms. Uhuru Kenyatta, by then metamorphosed into Kibaki’s right-hand man, was slapped with charges by the ICC for his alleged role therein, charges that were also eventually dropped, after mysterious witness retractions.

Back in the present, Ruto’s capacity as incumbent to keep the racket going remains intact. His political expiration has, after all, been predicted several times before: during his ICC tribulations, following his break-up with Uhuru, and after the anti-tax uprising. Today, his redistributive pivot has found fertile ground. The step to remove discriminatory ID vetting in northern Kenya will also enfranchise new voters, though not a swarm of imported illegals, as tribeless southern Kenyans believe. As the popular front claims the moral high ground by reading out Ruto’s variegated rap sheet, it’s worth recalling that many Kenyans did not care for such pearl-clutching in 2022, when they said that the only thing he had stolen was their hearts.

In the end, the 2027 election will not be the Bantu versus Nilotes showdown that agitprop purveyors online are prepping for. Neither will it be the periphery versus the center. For the most part, it will be just another Kenyan election, in which traditional allegiance to ethnic kingpins, old feuds, new rancors, and emerging affinities will once more play a large role. Nonetheless, Odinga’s retirement is remaking regional coalitions, and Ruto’s sheer unpopularity will also lead to issues-based voting. Finally, there’s the residual impact of the anti-tax uprising, whose freak nature altered the national psyche. For now, the pristine vistas of a new frontier in Kenyan civic life remain half mirage. But in the same way that #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo were preceded by incremental awakenings, the anti-tax uprising has planted seeds of its own. Kenyans of all stripes might now rise up periodically, rattling the pornocracy and causing the same characters to lurch between opposition and ruling factions. But the biological and adoptive children of new and old political dynasties will also scramble to protect their interests, and the narcissism of small differences borne of the ethnic pathology will be there to dampen solidarity amongst the hoi polloi. In such a state of affairs, there can be no veritable third liberation. Only a third dispensation, in which the system propagates itself through elite cohabitation.