Ruto may be Orange party's lifeline and its undertaker

When President William Ruto descended on Kisumu on Sunday, the symbolism said more than the speeches. Yellow — UDA's colour — flooded the heart of what was, for two decades, Raila Odinga's impregnable political turf. Dr Ruto didn't visit as a head of state courting an opposition region; he arrived as a partner of ODM's own leadership, pledging to safeguard Raila's legacy. That distinction is everything.

Oburu Oginga's ODM has made a historic gamble: The party will not field a presidential candidate in 2027 and will instead back Ruto's re-election. For a movement built around presidential ambition — the gravitational force pulling in governors, MPs, financiers and grassroots mobilisers — this is a momentous abdication. The logic is defensible. Raila is gone; there is no candidate; Nyanza has spent decades producing opposition votes without commensurate development. If cooperation converts political influence into roads, water and jobs, why remain permanently outside government?

But here lies the existential risk. Raila's ODM was not an electoral machine; it was a political identity — constitutionalism, devolution, resistance to exclusion, and above all, the man himself. A party cannot live on development projects alone. If ODM becomes principally identified with access to State power, voters will eventually ask the fatal question: What distinguishes Orange from UDA? The moment that question goes unanswered, the brand is absorbed.

The polling should unsettle the leadership. TIFA surveys show roughly three-quarters of ODM's own supporters back the Sifuna-Orengo Linda Mwananchi independent-minded faction over the Oburu-Wanga Linda Ground.

Parties rarely die when politicians quarrel, they die when leaders and voters begin telling different political stories. That divergence is already visible.

Yet ODM is far from dead. It retains structures, elected officials, and an Infotrak-measured national preference of 21 per cent — statistically level with UDA. A party commanding a fifth of national support is not finished. It is, rather, politically homeless: Substantial, but without a centre of gravity.

The deeper problem is that political capital is not hereditary. Oburu has the name and pedigree; Wanga has administrative heft; none inherits Raila's constituency by descent. It must be rebuilt — in a political environment where Ruto is actively competing for the very constituency Raila once owned, through development rather than confrontation, and with the canny self-description as Raila's "student."

Prof Anyang' Nyong'o complicates the narrative usefully. As co-architect of the beyond-2030 national vision, he embodies a possible afterlife for the movement: Its reformist DNA preserved not in rallies but in the architecture of long-term national development.

Three futures await. Absorption — Orange becoming a ceremonial wing of the Ruto machine: Easiest now, deadliest later. Coalition survival — supporting Ruto in 2027 while preserving independent structures and preparing for 2032: The most realistic path. Reinvention — transforming a personality-driven vehicle into an ideological, internally democratic national party: Hardest, but most consequential.

The paradox is exquisite: Ruto may be ODM's lifeline and its undertaker simultaneously, preserving its machinery while eroding the distinction that made the machinery valuable.

ODM will survive — but not in the form Raila left it. The real question is not whether Raila can be replaced; he cannot, as Ruto himself concedes. It is whether the movement he built can acquire a purpose that outlives him. Yellow has entered the Orange landscape. That does not mean Orange is dead — only that, for the first time in a generation, its ownership can no longer be taken for granted. The battle has moved beyond Raila's shadow, and its outcome will decide whether ODM becomes a living tradition, a bargaining chip inside government, or a colour remembered from Kenya's last great era of opposition.