Political analyst and journalist Kwamchetsi Makokha has offered a sharp reading of last week’s State House meeting between President William Ruto’s UDA and Raila Odinga’s ODM, framing the engagement as less of a formal coalition breakthrough and more of a carefully managed political survival arrangement anchored by seasoned operators like Dr Oburu Oginga.
The meeting, which brought together top leadership from both parties under President Ruto’s chairmanship, was officially presented as a coordination platform to harmonise government priorities and reduce political friction within the broad-based arrangement.
However, Makokha argues that beneath the formal optics lies a deeper political culture of negotiation, accommodation, and strategic self-preservation.
At the centre of his interpretation is ODM leader Oburu Oginga, whom he describes as a veteran political survivor with long experience in backroom negotiations.
In Makokha’s assessment, Oburu represents the continuity of a political tradition in Nyanza that prioritises access, leverage, and negotiation over rigid ideological positioning.
He links Oburu’s current role in ODM–UDA engagements to historical political alignments, drawing parallels with the National Development Party (NDP) and KANU cooperation in the early 2000s, which later reshaped Kenya’s political trajectory when Raila Odinga exited KANU with a significant political bloc.
According to this reading, the current ODM–UDA cooperation should not be viewed as an anomaly, but as part of a recurring pattern of political recalibration in Kenya’s coalition politics.
Makokha also reflects on what he terms the “performance of sycophancy” within Kenyan political culture, particularly in elite circles in Nyanza.
He argues that political praise and strategic alignment with power are not new phenomena, but part of a long-standing tradition of political negotiation framed through loyalty, access, and community benefit.
In his view, such positioning has often been justified by the argument of “letting people eat,” a phrase used in Kenyan politics to describe pragmatic engagement with power in exchange for development dividends or political concessions.
The State House meeting itself, chaired by President Ruto and co-led by ODM leadership, was reportedly aimed at establishing a structured coordination framework between the two political formations.
Key discussions focused on legislative alignment, executive coordination, and managing internal tensions that have occasionally surfaced between UDA and ODM members in government.
Makokha, however, suggests that the deeper political question is not about formal structures, but about the survival instincts of political actors and communities within shifting power configurations.
He further observes that Kenya’s political culture often rewards flexibility over ideological rigidity, especially in coalition environments where access to state resources and influence remains a central factor in decision-making.
As the country edges closer to the 2027 general election, Makokha argues that current alliances should be viewed as temporary arrangements shaped by strategic necessity rather than permanent political marriages.
In his conclusion, he frames the ODM–UDA engagement as part of a broader national political theatre where negotiation, compromise, and survival instincts continue to define the rules of engagement.
“Let people eat,” he notes, capturing what he describes as the underlying logic of Kenya’s evolving political alignments.