Opposition must escape Ruto's trap and audit his performance
Barrack Muluka
By
Barrack Muluka
| May 03, 2026
Kenya’s opposition leaders may need to change tack in the face of a runaway rhetorical President. They need to slow him down, stop chasing him, and reshape the political arena through more meaningful conversations.
President William Ruto needs a genuine delivery audit. He must be moved from endless loud performative drama across the country to a proper reckoning with his promises.
Ruto has discovered a simple but potent political formula: govern loudly, campaign endlessly, delegitimise criticism, keep opponents distracted, and never allow yourself to be audited.
This is why Kenyans are not discussing the 47 county charters he signed in 2022. His own promissory instruments are not the central texts of national political conversation. Why have they disappeared?
Instead, the President engages the country in endless self-congratulation. His politics is loud, emotional, and relentlessly theatrical. He is perpetually on the move: “launching projects,” addressing roadside rallies, extolling “achievements,” and attacking critics.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders appear trapped in a reactive loop. Ruto baits them from event to event. They rebut insults, amplify outrage, and answer provocation with provocation.
This is not a strategy. It is a strategic capture. The result is a reciprocal spectacle. Yet beneath what sounds like presidential verbosity lies a deeper logic. Ruto is not merely campaigning early.
He is setting the political tempo, shifting attention away from what matters. Tempo is power. An incumbent enjoys structural advantages unavailable to the opposition: state platforms, official visibility, logistical machinery, symbolic authority, continuous media coverage, and the ability to turn every governance tour into politics.
To chase him at his preferred speed is to risk exhaustion; organisationally, financially, emotionally, and narratively. The opposition must refuse to be dragged into Ruto’s theatrical trap.
This is where the President is most vulnerable. In 2022, he campaigned on concrete promises. He signed 47 county charters, one for each county, detailing commitments to local electorates. He also signed sectoral and demographic charters for women, youth, persons with disabilities, and other constituencies. These were not campaign ornaments. They were promissory instruments.
They transformed political pledges into documentary commitments. They should now form the backbone of national political debate. A disciplined opposition has a simple task: refuse the theatrics, disrupt the tempo, and metaphorically sit the President down and ask simple questions. What was promised in County A? What has been delivered? What has failed?
Repeat this county by county. No drama. No insults. No emotional detours. Just evidence. This is precisely what is missing. Instead, the political arena is a noisy chamber, where everyone is shouting, and almost nobody is listening. This benefits the incumbent. Ruto’s most consequential promises are directly measurable.
Cost of living, taxation, borrowing, affordable housing, universal healthcare, corruption, employment, and economic recovery are not abstract ideological propositions. Citizens can test them against lived experience. Food prices, taxes, and debt are measurable. Jobs and hospital experiences are measurable, too.
Reality is simply stubborn. This makes structured audits politically dangerous. Ruto knows this. His rhetorical aggression is therefore politically functional. When critics are described as “stupid,” “brainless,” “tribal,” or “criminal,” something important is happening. Criticism is being delegitimised without being engaged.
Arguments are deflected from substance to character. Opponents are framed as “defective actors” to be dismissed, not interlocutors to be answered. Politics becomes spectacle. It energizes supporters while demoralising opponents. Most importantly, it changes the subject.
Politics dominated by insults and personality warfare leaves little room for auditing signed promises. Noise displaces accounting. This is the heart of the matter. The opposition must replace Ruto’s emotional acceleration with political accounting. It must disrupt his runaway rhythm and deny him narrative control. He is often only too desperate to control the conversation.
Ruto appears to understand that in a noisy democracy, velocity can substitute for scrutiny. Move fast enough. Speak often enough. Provoke regularly enough. Opponents may never get time to count. This is, unless, of course, they finally stop running after him and begin calling him to proper audits. They have their own template to use. If they cannot do this, then they must operate in the space of strategic surrender.
One last thing, they must get their act together on the little matter of internal cohesion, beyond the rhetoric of calling themselves “the united alternative government. With this in place, they can invest the rest of their energies in auditing the incumbent, against his own existing written promissory documents.
Dr. is a strategic communications adviser