How negatives outweighed positives in 2025

 

As the year 2024 slid into history, there was the usual end-of-year exuberance, “Happy New Year” chants and resolutions to improve. However, 2025 has ended in disappointing ways. The disappointment was in strange deaths, in rising taxes and cost of living, while a select few swam in insulting luxury and in peculiar entanglement with ‘nchi jirani’. It also arose from the breakdown of expected services to the public, in the perceived surrender of Kenyan sovereignty to external forces while collaborating in abductions and renditions with foreign forces, in selling pipe dreams to camouflage gross mismanagement of national affairs, and in reversing long-held positions of foreign policy principles. The search for the positive in 2025 has been overpowered by many negatives.

The positives had their exciting moments. Among them were Kenyan political enthusiasts flooding Addis Ababa to dance and celebrate Raila Amolo Odinga becoming ‘President of Africa’. They had no votes and Raila lost. It was not the first time for Raila's followers to prematurely celebrate an elusive electoral victory; they forgot to vote in 2022 but still started celebrating and handed victory to Ruto.

In sports, Kenyan athletes excited people by winning marathon after marathon and the football team thrilled Kenyans in the African Cup of Nations. A young woman entered the Guinness Book of Records by ‘hugging’ a tree for three days. The national excitement that those happenings created, however, could not cover up the apparent national misery experienced at many levels of Kenyan society.

Strange happenings captured Kenyans' imagination throughout the year. Two deaths involving a teacher, Albert Ojwang, and a politician, Cyrus Jirongo. The police explanation that Ojwang had died banging his head against the wall in a Nairobi police cell was not believable. The year ended with a political heavyweight, Jirongo, mysteriously ramming his Mercedes car into a bus in Naivasha, but what was intriguing was that the reported 65 passengers in the bus could not be traced.

There were also abductions, seemingly at the behest of either ‘nchi jirani’ or of an increasingly influential extra-continental power using vulnerable governments to harass targeted refugees in their countries. The Kenyan government was vulnerable, switching positions on long-held policies regarding refugees and Western Sahara. It seemingly helped ‘friendly’ governments in abducting and handing refugees to the requesting country. Besides making Irungu Houghton’s Amnesty International busy, the deaths and abductions made the government look bad and complicit in serious infractions of human rights and international law.

There was also the fallout, political and social, from Raila’s death in India, which showed a country whose real security was questionable. ‘Security’ at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and the Parliament, usually tight, failed to contain crowds, which disrupted official ceremonies. In the name of mourning, unauthorised people boarded the plane looking for Raila’s body; they made body viewing impossible at Parliament, and disorganised Kasarani. The funeral services at Nyayo Stadium and in Bondo were spectacles of political infighting as politicians jostled to 'inherit Raila'. The star, however, was Uhuru Kenyatta easing tension by talking about his ‘gumzo’ with Raila while being served ‘kakitu’, which he explained was ‘uji’. Others wanted that ‘uji’.

Fear also reverberated across the nation in 2025. Rumours of militias abounded. Statements about registering foreigners as voters and stealing elections spread anxiety. After chewing/swallowing ODM, Ruto implied extending his presidency beyond the constitutional 10 years as he promoted a Sh5 trillion Singapore political mirage. While the United Opposition appears disunited, ‘Cousin Steve’ Kalonzo seemingly has the upper hand, watching Rigathi Gachagua’s and Fred Matiangi’s stars dim. Although the leaderless Mountain is in political wilderness, a few names like Ndindi Nyoro and Governor Irungu Kangata, still on the political fringes, keep cropping up as men to watch despite national dismay.