How Opposition miscalculation has reinforced Ruto's prowess

President William Ruto. [File, Standard] Is President William Ruto trudging on, not because he is strong, but rather because the Opposition is misaligned? It was William Shakespeare who famously talked of the tides of time, in the play ''Julius Caesar''. "There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries." It is all about the slow grinding passage of time, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fleeting moment, when life changing decisions must be made and action taken. Ancient Greeks drew a clear distinction between the two. One they called Chronos. The other one they christened Kairos. It's about missed chances and opportunities, just the metaphor for Kenya as the clock ticks steadily towards January 2026. Soon, we will be talking of "next year's elections." But we will also be talking about wasted opportunities and lost chances, a superb Greek Chronos, and a clumsy Kairos. The Kenyan political class, both in government and in the Opposition, is at the best of time comfortable in the Chronos of life. This class is long on calculations, ethnic arithmetic, coalitions, and hunting for opportunities to eat. The political Opposition seems to trust that the incumbents will eventually get worn out; that they will go into self-destruction and that their free fall is a matter of course. They wait "to see how things will go," without seeming to appreciate that "things don't go." Things are taken where they go. Someone calls the shots. You are either the anvil, or the hammer. The Opposition are mostly the anvil, while the incumbents are a destructive hammer. Demand clarity Political Kairos in the tides to time require courage. They demand clarity of whom you really are, what you stand for, where you want to take the nation, and why you should be followed. They especially demand speed. Kairos punish dithering. You must move before consensus hardens. This has been the undoing of Kenya's Opposition. Did ODM and the entire Opposition miss the tide during the Gen Z uprising, for example? Since the Gen Z season last year, they have not known how to strike while the nail is hot. The uprisings in June and July 2024 were a classic Kairotic moment. Kenyan youth poured into the streets of the country's major cities adorned in fresh moral courage and pious rage. They caught the State on the back foot. The youth invited the Opposition to take leadership and turn the country's history. But it proved to be a turning point when history, once again, refused to turn. The Opposition slept on the job in a typical Kenyan way. It failed to recognise that the Kenya Kwanza Government was trapped in a crisis of legitimacy. Instead, Opposition chiefs thought that the mid-year protests against the 2024 Finance Bill were just another Opposition cycle, an annual cycle, for that matter. Where they should have seized the opportunity to form a moral political front, they reverted to managing William Ruto. ODM saw the opportunity to get into Government; to join the gravy train. They swung into bargaining with Ruto. Eventually, they have been swallowed up. It is difficult to tell the once formidable Opposition that was ODM from Ruto's UDA Party. ODM failed to seize the Gen Z uprising to name a post-Ruto future, in preference for coalition geometry. In the end, ODM is disintegrating, their leader Raila Odinga having passed on leaving behind mixed signals. Increasingly, Ruto looks like the de facto leader of ODM. Ruto has given the Opposition many tidal moments that have been allowed to slip through the fingers. He is a man who seems to be permanently in motion without clear direction. In a country whose government seems to be broke, the President is forever cutting across the landscape, unleashing one grand promise after the other. Futuristic promises Ruto is going to fly the country from Third World status to First World over the next 10 years. In a year's time, he will be halfway through this mission. Spectacular futuristic promises of this kind by a government in power is often the last refuge of uncertainty. President Ruto is uncertain about what he is doing in State House. Accordingly, he must be seen to be busy; perhaps too busy, as an indication that he is working. Ruto is a man of optics, an individual who harbours pathological fear for losing power to the Opposition. And so he hides in speed. The Opposition, for its part, has elected to react to his speed by also becoming speedy, rather than methodical. The President is a wounded individual whose yaws the Opposition has failed to take advantage of, steeped as it is in its own internal competitions, involving who should bear the presidential election ticket for a united opposition. Where the President's promissory credibility has been eroded by high taxes and cost of living, the Opposition has failed to anchor public disaffection into a clear alternative vision. Into this already confused landscape entered Rigathi Gachagua in October 2024, a difficult political horse. Gachagua is loud, restless, and prolific in speech, but thin in strategy. Each intervention he makes produces noise rather than structure. He complicates Ruto's arithmetic but does not threaten to break it, lacking the national political machinery required to do so. Yet Gachagua understands one thing well: power as bargaining leverage. He styles himself commander-in-chief of the Mt Kenya region and increasingly angles for national Opposition leadership. Paradoxically, even as he seeks national relevance, he does little to endear himself to the wider Kenyan nation. His apparent strategy is transactional rather than transformational, using regional dominance as collateral in negotiations with whoever emerges victorious in 2027. In that sense, regardless of whether the Opposition wins or loses, Gachagua positions himself as a beneficiary. This may be rational politics, but it does not serve an opposition seeking a decisive national breakthrough. Command respect The prominence Gachagua has assumed also exposes a deeper opposition deficit. Other leaders command respect, but lack urgency. Kalonzo Musyoka embodies patience, diplomacy, and decency. In another context, he could be Kenya's Konrad Adenauer, a steady hand guiding national renewal. But decency, admirable as it is, functions as a Chronos virtue in a Kairos season. It struggles to mobilise a voter who is broke, cynical, and transactional. Martha Karua offers moral clarity and intellectual sharpness, but her authority has not translated into mass following beyond social media admiration. Eugene Wamalwa remains a principled reformist awaiting his catalytic moment. George Natembeya thrives as a regional insurgent but has yet to find national anchorage. Wamalwa is another gentleman politician; a votary for reform whose catalytic and transformational moment has not yet come. He seems to be one who would be at his best as a university don, opening up budding intellectuals to political theory. Apart from hedging for space at the national level, Wamalwa has domestic issues to sort out in Western Kenya, with his deputy party leader and nemesis of sorts in his Democratic Alliance Party (DAP), George Natembeya. Natembeya's Bukusu nationalism spares nobody, not even his party leader. In their local tussling, they weaken their brand at the national level, and lose glaring opportunities. Dr Fred Matiang'i leads a troika of luminaries who are delaying in finding wings to fly. Together with Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah and Chief Justice Emeritus, David Maraga, Matiang'i's name was a favourite of the Gen z youth during their June 2024 protests, and to some extent in June 2025. Matiang'i symbolises order, competence and authority. Omtatah symbolises fidelity to the rule of law. Maraga is personified moral courage anchored in institutional memory. But symbols require structures. Does the troika need structured stepping up to the plate, faster than it seems to be doing? While they have been darlings of Gen Zs, none has convened a Gen Z platform, for instance. The street energy that pulsated for them has cooled down, or alternatively hibernated, as they look on. Have they been overly cautious about Opposition correctness to the extent of delaying their full plumage and flight? If anyone has missed the opportunity to translate street energy into civic machinery, it has been these three. The tide of youth protest that hankered for them has receded not because of false hope, but rather because they failed to anchor it. If they will not come up with strategic agendas that are independent of youth energy in the streets, they will have to wait for yet another Gen-Z moment. Yet the Kairos of such activities hardly ever returns in full. And sometimes when it does, it springs up new heroes. But have the Gen Zs themselves lost steam, or have they just learned that dissent can be expensive? It has taken lives and maimed bodies. They have also, probably, learned that leaderless movements are easy to scatter and subdue. They can also be hijacked by calculating political entities like ODM. And smart individuals who style themselves as spokespersons during leaderless protests are basically charlatans and courtesans, waiting for clients. As Kenya orbits towards 2026, the political Opposition, especially, needs to take stock of lost opportunities, if it must remain relevant. Clueless brooding together is unlikely to take them far, if anywhere at all. Kairos rewards boldness in ambiguous situations. The situation in the Opposition is ambiguous. What do the ace leaders really want, to transform the country, or to become President? In 2026, the Opposition must frame the election question for the following year. They will want to build the question around a seductive and emotional moral agenda. In the self-same effort, they will want to look more like a people-focused moral coalition, and less like a leadership-seeking alliance. Yet, in the midst of all this, the Opposition will want to be constantly awake to the art of the possible and the hand of fate in the affairs of man. They have previously missed the tide. And while they will find it difficult to manufacture another tide, yet they must be keen to recognize the next tide when it rises. TV cameras Social science teaches us that Kairos will punish those who are morally hesitant. Kairos are not occasions to be met with press statements and crowding before TV cameras. They are moments of active presence. They require not caution, but courage; not negotiation with the regime of the day, but framing, naming and communicating to the public the order of tomorrow. Meanwhile, President Ruto will continue splurging car rooftop theatrics and making promiscuous promises about making Kenya a First World country and sundry abracadabra. The Opposition must recognise that these promises as panic signals. They speak not to evidence of anything useful he has done, but rather to political anxiety. A President who is busy campaigning in the middle of his term is certainly a worried individual. He imagines that optics and spectacles are going to be more reassuring to the voter where evidence is absent. Ruto is trying to bring forward an imaginary future, when he should be concretising the present. His rooftop dramas speak of restlessness rather than steadiness. He is a man in motion without useful knowledge of where he is headed, nor where he will end. He is trying to run faster than the clock. The only clarity is that he must continue to make Kenyans believe that he is one of them, he is everywhere, and he is unafraid of the Opposition. The Opposition makes a huge mistake when it joins the game on Ruto's terms. Ruto's midterm campaigns are pre-emptive. The sole objective is to pre-empt loss of power. If Ruto is focused on outrunning time itself, the Opposition must reframe time. They must frame Ruto as a man who has run away from governing for survival and self-reservation. The competition must not be seen as the Opposition versus Ruto, but rather as Ruto versus the people; Ruto versus everybody else. Those shouting "two-terms" for their part will be framed as paid hirelings, their master's voice, or echo chambers. The Opposition errs when it plays this game on Ruto's terms. Let me repeat, the contest ahead is not about the Opposition versus William Ruto. It is about Ruto versus the People. Opposition chiefs must only style themselves up as the tools that the People need to liberate themselves from William Ruto. If Ruto governs through speed, the opposition must respond by reframing time - presenting him as a leader who has abandoned governing for personal survival and his crisscrossing the country as a clueless stampede to nowhere. Kenya, perched as it is at the crossroads of time, does not lack movement. It lacks direction. It lacks individuals who know how to take advantage of moments and build movements out of them. However, moments are also created. Leaders who wait; who say that they want to see how things are moving, will be moved out of the way by the moving things. Things don't move, they are moved. Dr Barrack Muluka, PhD [Politics & International Relations, Leicester, UK], Strategic Communications Adviser

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