Why the noises of the Kenyan choir needs a master to harmonize it in 2026

President William Ruto.[PCS]

The 2025 Kenya has been a choir without an able conductor to generate harmony. The nation has been treated to a cacophony of discordant sounds that no political actor could turn into melodious political music. Not President William Ruto, former Opposition leader Raila Odinga, nor the persons in the Opposition space could turn the clatter in the political space into a useful political melody. 

As the country orbits towards 2026, a year often ignored in conversations in preference for 2027, the ambiguity persists. TIFA and Infotrak polls, only a few days ago, paint the portrait of public institutions in conflict with popular expectations. The economy has defied high-level political promises. The State has betrayed its social contract with the people. The Opposition has slept on the job. Which way Kenya, as 2026 knocks at the door?

Kenyans approach the penultimate year of the Kenya Kwanza first term nursing numerous civic wounds and pains. They are nervous about many things. They are trapped in a toxic political arena. The political market is characterized by Opposition vibes that lack deep meaning. For its part, State power is exercised in a furious style that lacks humility, direction, and emotional intelligence. 

In 2026, will President Ruto finally recognize that motion is not the same thing as performance, and that his dramatic optics across the national landscape have painted the portrait of a hapless regime, trying to run away from itself? Will he attempt a sober conversation in measured tones, instead of his deafening monotonic high speed verbal overflow?  Will the Opposition, for its part, reorganize and canalize the numerous noises in its zone into a meaningful message of hope for a nation that steadily gets disillusioned with politics across the divide? 

Will the performance of the State, especially, imbue the nation with freshness and hope; or will it push Kenyans into fatigue and cynicism? Will the Opposition wake up from ambiguous messaging, to frame a plausible electoral question, or will it dither in confused and confusing internal competition and mutual attrition? Will President Ruto place the country above himself and listen to the voices that criticize him, or will he harden his own cynicism towards everyone else and harden protest into defiant resistance?

These are some of the more critical questions for the Kenyan nation to reflect on as the curtain of time begins descending on the year 2025. For, these questions characterize the civic experience that Kenya has gone through in the ending year. It has been a theatre full of sound and fury that has mostly signified nothing, beyond the abracadabra of “wantam” and “tutam.” 

In 2025, Kenya did not exactly dialogue. She did not even argue with herself. She made noise. But if we should give the political class the benefit of doubt, 2026 should be the year that brings renewal of dialogue, without people shouting too much at one another. Already, the government has fired the first rattling shot. They are controversially calling for a constitutional referendum that seeks to correct mistakes made by both Kenya Kwanza and Jubilee before them. Failure to review electoral boundaries by IEBC was a huge blunder, born out of intransigence by individuals that would be friends in one season, only to fall out in the next.  

They would find new friends in the enemies of the last season. Together, they would take a position opposite to what they advocated in the previous season. That is how IEBC has lacked commissioners for most of the Ruto tenure. And without IEBC, constituency boundaries review failed to meet the constitutional timelines. As things stand, the country is set to go into an unconstitutional general election that risks disenfranchising parts of the electorate. 

Musalia Mudavadi, the Prime Cabinet Secretary, has been selected as the person to bell the cat. The noise is on. Will wise counsel prevail, to pave way to renewal, or will the nation rapture in 2026? In a sense, 2025 was of course not exactly lost. The country did not sink into bedlam, despite the sometimes blatant messages that held the constitution in contempt – such as establishment politicians brandishing the iron fist and promising to retain Ruto in power, by right, might and brawn. 

Political abductions, disappearances of critics, often with mutilated bodies being dumped in gutters and in the bush, disturbed the country, but they did not kill its spirit. Nor did killings in police custody, and what looked like cross border State felony between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, push progressive voices into submission. 

The arena remained tragic, however. In the last 12 months to the year of elections, there is a need for Kenya to turn a new leaf. There is, especially, need for President Ruto and Kenya Kwanza to recognize that there is an established legal order, which they have taken official oaths to protect. They must take the lead in 2026 in restoring the rule of law. Abductions, disappearances, and extrajudicial killing should rank high on the list of practices to remain behind. But restitution for past injury must also be prioritized, not for dramatic and optical reasons, but as serious commitment to duty. 

Above everything else, the State may want to consider making 2026 the year of institutional listening. All through the first three years, Kenya Kwanza turned a deaf ear to all overtures of dialogue. If the lessons of 2025 are absorbed, 2026 will be the year of listening. At the core of the expected dialogues are labour contestations, youth agendas, and loosening of the tax noose and the cost of living. 

But, perhaps most critical is the siege against corruption and splurging of public resources. It never ceases to amaze how a government that can hardly afford to fuel senior state officers’ official vehicles for regular work is perpetually on the move, splurging hundreds of millions of shillings on treating potential voters, in the name of “empowerment.” 

There is a need in 2026 for the Ruto government to listen to Kenyans on resource wastage on unnecessary travels; and on the agonies that are the social health insurance fund (SHIF). Then there is the affordable housing saga and its raids on payslips, as well as confusion in the competence based curriculum. The country could hardly afford another year of dialogue of the deaf with a recalcitrant government.  

Most of these are labour related challenges. A more honest dialogue is of the essence with teachers, university lecturers, doctors, nurses. These professionals, and many others, have been on intermittent strikes ever since this government came to power. Even if Kenya Kwanza will not remove the pain, it must restore the trust that it has eroded in government, through high-sounding eloquence that is grossly at variance with the lived reality. 

Separately, 2025 was a year when Kenya spread herself across unproductive foreign geographies. The Raila Odinga African Union debacle, at the start of the year, spoke to Kenya’s aspiration to restore lost diplomatic glory in Africa. Times were when Kenya was respected for mediation roles in conflicts in the region and beyond. That has since gone up in smoke. 

The effort in AU diplomacy failed largely due to official hubris, and carrying our absence of manners to foreign capitals. We campaigned poorly for Raila. We often made false claims of support that only embarrassed those who hosted our pitching parties in their capital cities. In the end, we returned from Addis with egg on our collective national face. 

We put on Dutch courage and pretended that the Addis debacle was nothing. We said nothing about misbehaviour by politicians in the streets of Ethiopia, where they appallingly sang songs of victory, in praise of our candidate even before the vote. They urged him to “tawala Africa, tawala!” They shocked their hosts and the rest of Africa. Africa taught us a lesson in humility. 

Meanwhile, we were meddling with the war in Sudan. Kenya hosted the leaders of the Rapid Support Forces in Nairobi, and even allowed them to announce, from the Kenyan capital, that they had formed a government in exile. Relations with DRC also remained dicey, largely due to what has been characterized as meddling in the conflict between the government of President Felix Tshisekedi and the M23 rebels. 

But did the debacle in Addis also expose the tensions between the external stature that we strive so hard to project, and our internal fragility? While we spoke of peace and stability abroad, we were also busy brutalizing our own people at home. We fomented the kind of environment that has led to collapse in the foreign spaces that we purported to rescue. 

It was telling, for instance, that while Kenya had her police officers in Haiti, attempting to wrestle the collapsed State from gangsters, the Kenyan State itself worked with marauding goons, to crush Gen-Z protests in June and July. Haiti became symbolic of Kenya’s diplomatic contradictions, almost to the point of allegory. It presented a disturbing moral puzzle, on a State that attempts to borrow legitimacy offshore, while at home it rations legitimacy!

Back to domestic political competition, the usual familiar figures were at the centre, but in fairly unfamiliar alignments. Before his sudden demise in October, Raila Odinga and his ODM Party constituted an axis of confusion. They functioned less as a traditional opposition, even as they tried very hard to characterize themselves as one. Raila’s orbiting around a national consensus of sorts with President Ruto was a paradox. 

Ruto himself previously characterized such a paradox as a mongrel government, when Raila entered a similar arrangement with  President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2018. Then, a visibly angry and restless Ruto often wondered, a bit too loudly, what to call “the thing” Uhuru and Raila had fashioned. Was it “government in the opposition, or opposition in government?” He suggested that scholars should unravel the mystery. Today, with the boot on the other foot,  he calls the mongrel “a broad-based government.”

Before his demise, Raila was, once again, the enigmatic disruptor who brought stability to those whom he disrupted. His diehards called him a statesman. His adversaries thought he had abdicated responsibility. While he denied the country a clear division between the government and the Opposition, the confusion that he left behind still goes on, especially in the Orange Party that he left behind. 

A parasitic class of ODM politicians that survived on his political DNA has swiftly found in Ruto its next host. This lot has driven its suckers deep into Ruto. At the close of 2025,  it is calling for Ruto’s re-election in 2027. Naturally, it has run into confrontation with Raila’s ideological orphans. Led by the party Secretary General, Edwin Sifuna, Raila’s orphans are clinging onto what is left of the leftist liberational politics that Raila professed, and appeared to practice, when not in handshakes with the man in State House. 

ODM dives into the year 2026 in the style of biblical rival twins, the younger one holding onto the elder’s heel. Can the younger twin dominate the elder one as in the Bible? There are accusations in the younger camp – let us call it the Jacobite Camp -  that the elder camp has auctioned the party to President Ruto. And Ruto is himself behaving like the boss and owner of the Orange party. He graces its formal functions and speaks with proprietary  authority and confidence. The Orange party could be headed for a loud and messy separation in 2026, under the supervision of President Ruto. 

Elsewhere, impeached former Deputy President, Rigathi Gachagua, flounders from blunder to blunder. He gets increasingly assertive in restricted and restricting ethnic spaces that embody unresolved succession in the Mt. Kenya region. Wide national appeal seems to be the least of his concerns. His voice seems more sharpened for intra-Mt. Kenya negotiation and recognition. Beyond that, focus is on a future power-sharing dialogue with whoever wins the 2027 presidential race. Does Gachagua seem to see a political pawn everywhere he looks, even as those around him see the presidency?

Kalonzo Musyoka and the rest of the United Opposition hover in the arena as the alternative deal, when they should actually claim the tag of the real deal. They are an “alternative” that has not yet found its narrative. Even at its most basic level, the integuments of the right narrative would seem to stare them in the face. 

With all the agony that the Ruto government has inflicted upon Kenyans, the conversation in 2026 ought to be about Ruto against the entire Kenyan population. Ruto versus Kenya is the mantra. Why they cannot frame it and break it down is difficult to understand. Hopefully, they will do so in 2026. But they must also stop stalking each other, and skirting around one another, like unsure boxers, who are afraid of the fellow in the other corner of the ring. 

Between Kalonzo and Fred Matiang’i, especially, they must in 2026 crack the flagbearer’s nut. However, they cannot afford to confront the cracking with focus on self. It is, rather, more of a question of what they want to do for the country. They must understand and expound on why the people of Kenya believe that the 2027 race is between Ruto on the one hand, and the entire country on the other hand. They must cause the loyal birds around the President to begin flying away in 2026, or be ready to be humiliated in 2027. 

As they go about this assignment, they will possibly be reflecting on how to rope in the Opposition of the Robe. Chief Justice Emeritus, David Maraga, Busia Senator Okoiti Omutatah, and business mogul Jimmy Wanjigi, among others, may be Oppositionists of the Gown, for now. Yet the premium they bring to a presidential ticket is not to be taken for granted. Early 2026 is the time for dignified discourse with them. If 2025 has not diminished the moral and institutional capacity of the nation, 2026 should offer renewal. 

Dr Muluka is a STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS ADVISER