Ten points, zero reform: Inside Kenya's backdoor peace bargain

The Ten Point Agenda of President Ruto and the late Raila Odinga faces criticism as more of a political bargain than a governance reform. [File Courtesy] To style the recently released Ten Point Agenda report of President William Ruto and the late Raila Odinga as disappointing is to engage in unnecessary understatement. The big question is not whether or not the goals have been met within the one-year deadline that the owners have given themselves. It pertains instead to the wider relevance of an elite power bargaining scheme disguised as a public-spirited governance agenda. This is despite the fact that the performance has been an unmitigated failure, as its Linda Mwananchi detractors have said. The ten-point entity was presented to Kenyans in March last year as a master stroke that would end decades of civic challenges in ten strokes of political magic. On close scrutiny, however, the agenda only reveals a package of regular State obligations couched in seductive political idiom. There is nothing revolutionary about it. Nor was any meaningful effort made to realize the professed goals. From the outset, the agenda did not introduce any unfamiliar philosophy of governance or any new visionary pathways for the Kenyan nation. It only restated obligations that Kenya's Constitution already imposes on the State. Yet, Dr Agnes Zani, the chair of the implementation committee, was expected to report huge strides. The predicament facing the obsequious academic was evident. Ms Zani struggled to maintain emotional restraint while reporting on what were styled as "the successes" of a revolution that never was. For it is difficult to present something out of nothing. Not much was going to come out of this agenda, as the ODM Secretary General, Edwin Sifuna and the Linda Mwananchi strand of ODM keep reminding Kenyans. Virtually all the commitments in the Ten-Point Agenda are captured in the Constitution of Kenya (2010). The mother law of the land speaks extensively about social justice, accountable governance, equitable development, and the protection of citizens' rights. Yes, at face value, the Ten-point Agenda pretended to be a broad governance framework that addressed several chronic national challenges. Accordingly, the agenda identified the thorns in our national flesh as the cost of living, job creation (especially for the youth), managing public debt, strengthening devolution, and fighting corruption and waste of public resources. Others were promoting inclusivity and equity, safeguarding civil liberties and peaceful protest, compensating victims of protest violence, strengthening the rule of law and constitutionalism, and implementing electoral and governance reforms from the NADCO Report. In substance, there is nothing new here. This is familiar terrain. Everything said here is a part of the regular government reform language that has been spoken for decades. To unpack it, the cost of living is addressed in the socio-economic citizen rights in the Constitution. When Ruto and Raila agreed on this, they were saying nothing new. The war against corruption, for its part, is contained in the articles on integrity among state officers and in the articles on management of public finance. Inclusivity and civil liberties have a whole chapter in the Constitution. Everyone only needs to be awake to the provisions of Chapter Four, and there will be no need to sign separate agendas on human rights. The forty articles in the Bill of Rights leave nothing to chance. Where the rights have not been enjoyed, it has been a matter of impunity for those charged with the protection of citizens' civil liberties. The same could be said for electoral reforms and accountability. Chapter Fifteen provides independent commissions and authorities that should not act under the direction of outsiders. That the President is petitioned to midwife electoral reforms speaks to abuse of office, and to trespass into independent spaces, with a sense of culpable arrogance and entitlement. Further, it speaks to heads plastered with power, and governing themselves with a massive sense of impunity. It is on account of this that Kenya's political elite often treats the Constitution as if it were only an opinion, rather than the binding rulebook that it is. They believe that it is a negotiable working document with items that can be cherry-picked. They comply with it when it suits them, or when pushed against the wall. During high tension, they negotiate extra-constitutional political settlements. This is where the Ten-Point-Agenda comes in. In this matter, it cannot report anything good, as it was never intended to bring anyone any good, except its owners. This invariably leads us back to the uncomfortable starting point. Here, an ugly question confronts us: are we willing to acknowledge that our civic difficulties are not because of the absence of rules? Can we accept that the difficulty is our consistent disobedience of the rules? An honest engagement with ourselves could only lead to one conclusion: the Ten-Point-Agenda is a power elite political instrument. It was designed not for reform, but for political stabilisation. Competition had just become potentially combustible in March 2025. Raila had recently returned to the country, following Kenya's February debacle at the African Union in Addis Ababa. Kenyan politics periodically reaches moments when competition becomes dangerously combustible. Elections are disputed. Public protests intensify. The legitimacy of institutions is openly questioned. At such moments, rival elites may retreat from confrontation to negotiate temporary accommodations. While they are designed to calm the system, the accommodations are sold to the public as packages to solve their challenges. The Ten-Point Agenda belongs to that tradition. Its primary function was not to invent new policies, but to manage temporary political tensions between Ruto and Raila after Addis. It sought to forestall fresh confrontation after months of rapprochement, during Kenya's campaign for the AUC Chair. While hope for Addis remained alive in the second half of 2024, following the start of the "broad-based government," Raila was now back home, empty-handed. What was next on his cards? Gen-Z protest tensions were still simmering under the ashes of the 2024 protests. How should Raila be put in check, lest he should stray their way? A quick ploy to appear to address the kind of things that could lead him into the streets was crafted. It was named the Ten-Point Agenda. The agenda was given a one-year lease of life, or to put it differently, the agenda gave President Ruto a one-year lease of political peace from Raila and ODM. Provided that something appeared to be working in the guise of reform, Ruto was free from Raila's surveillance, opposition, and street protests. This strategy of incorporating elements of the Opposition into a cooperative political framework has an immediate stabilising effect. Political temperatures fall. Public rhetoric softens. The spectre of prolonged confrontation recedes. That is what the Ten-Point Agenda has been about. But does the approach also carry a structural weakness that we can best discern now that the one-year period it was given to produce results has lapsed? By design, such arrangements as the Ruto-Raila Ten-Point Agenda substitute structural political accountability with elite accommodation. Instead of allowing institutions to resolve disputes through established constitutional processes, powerful actors negotiate settlements among themselves. The issues they were supposed to address are swept under the rug. In the short term, the country becomes quieter. In the long term, however, the underlying institutional questions remain. The tensions between short-term glory and long-term failure explain why discussions around the Ten-Point Agenda have often generated more heat than clarity. The agenda was broad and ambiguous. Its goals were noble, but imprecise. It lacked clear timelines and measurable institutional commitments. Because of these ambiguities, the discussion has easily slid into political signalling rather than policy analysis. The supporters of the agenda have portrayed the arrangement as a pragmatic path to national stability. Critics, like Sifuna, have seen it as another instance of elite co-optation. To understand why this failed pattern recurs so frequently, do we need to look beyond the mechanics of politics to examine the deeper philosophy of government that seems to guide my country's ruling class? It is the philosophy of the gravy train, a mentality focused on eating. We could, in point of fact, call it the gravy train philosophy of power. In Kenya, the government is not a constitutional order that is governed by rules and institutions. It is a locomotive engine, pulling a long train of resources, opportunities, and privileges. Those on board are on a looting and eating spree. Their central political struggle concerns control of the engine and access to the dining carriage. The train captain decides who joins him at the table. He also decides what is served. Ironically, everyone is at the table, some as diners and others as part of the menu. Whatever the case, you are present, either eating or being eaten. When too many factions are excluded from the eating, instability follows. The opposition mobilises public protests. Political tensions escalate. The legitimacy of the governing order comes under pressure. Its first reflex is repulsive. It seeks to fight back and push back against parties that it now considers disgruntled and disruptive. It unleashes state violence against its detractors. How dare they disturb public order, which is essentially saying the eating order? But pushed beyond certain limits, the system responds with accommodation. A few opposition figures are invited aboard. They are offered seats in the dining carriage. The train stabilises and continues its journey. This is where the logic of the Ten-Point Agenda deepens. Yet this is only for a while. The stability is temporary. It will only last until the end of the current government. The next electoral cycle will reopen the contest over who controls the locomotive. They will use all the tricks in the book, and those without, to win the election. Kenya's recent political history mirrors this rhythm. After the 2007-2008 violent post-election crisis, rival elites fronted by President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga, negotiated the National Accord and Reconciliation Agreement that gave birth to the Grand Coalition government. This coalition government restored calm. It created the political space that eventually produced the new constitutional order. The Constitution was a major win for the nation. Yet, the true taste of the constitutional pudding was always going to be the ruling elite's faithfulness to the rule of law and faithfulness to the Constitution. A decade later, political tensions surrounding the 2017 presidential election ended with the dramatic reconciliation between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga in what is now known as the March 2018 handshake. The same could be said of the cooperation that eventually led to the March 2002 merger between President Moi's Kanu and Raila Odinga's NDP, to form the short-lived New Kanu Party. Each settlement reduced tensions. Each also reinforced the habit of resolving political crises through elite bargains rather than through the regular operation of constitutional institutions. It also marginalized the role of citizens in elections; the consent of the governed. The bargains in the name of peace easily leave the electorate puzzled about their wider relevance in the legitimacy of political power sharing in the country. Why should citizens elect a government when political power after elections is going to be exercised through extra-legal power-sharing bargains disguised as national peace deals? ODM and UDA supporters of these illegal deals have argued that they reflect political maturity. Compromise, they say, is the essence of democratic practice. A divided society must sometimes rely on elite cooperation to maintain stability. It is possible that there is some merit in that argument. Political settlements can indeed prevent dangerous escalations that could lead to unending uncertainty, lawlessness and even total anarchy. Yet the opposite risk is equally real. When stability depends primarily on elite bargains, the Constitution gradually risks becoming ornamental and even irrelevant. The Kenyan Constitution, for example, has steadily become revered in principle, but bypassed in practice. Ruto and Oburu Oginga are running a broad-based government that has no constitutional basis or bearing. Kenya's constitutional provisions under Ruto and Oburu have become a rhetorical sedative. They are invoked in speeches and public ceremonies. Yet, the real mechanisms of political management reside elsewhere. They derive their energy from negotiation among competing power blocs in ODM and UDA. This is the paradox that has gripped the Kenyan nation. While the country's constitutional framework has been hailed as one of the most ambitious in Africa, the political underpinnings are not from the Constitution, but from periodic handshakes among powerful individuals. The Ten-Point Agenda, accordingly, raises a fundamental question about the future of Kenyan governance. Is Kenya's future going to be defined by its constitutional order as the primary engine of stability, or will political authority continue to swing between ambiguous agitation and accommodation, and between institutional rules and negotiated settlements? The big irony is that the ten points could, in fact, be reduced to one point, or even to one word: constitutionalism. If faithfulness to the Constitution becomes the norm, our Ten-Point Agendas will not be necessary. What Kenya requires are not these agendas, however well-intentioned. Fidelity to the national constitutional covenant is everything. Tragically, the political elite are overloading public expenditure with unnecessary, even irrelevant expenses that pretend to address these agendas. After a full year of spending on the vague mandate of the implementation entity, there is nothing to show for it, except fresh parallel elite bargaining that is already in the grind, ahead of next year's elections. Unfortunately, until fidelity to the Constitution becomes habitual, Kenya's politics may continue to resemble an eating railway drama. Government will remain a shaky eating wagon on wheels, periodically stabilised by expanding the passenger list, only to confront fresh turbulence when the next struggle for the locomotive begins. Kenya's philosophy of government must itself first change from the gravy train to service. In this regard, the voter who expects to be treated to material inducements before voting in a given way is also a problem to be addressed before these agendas are consigned to the dustbins.

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