By Editorial Board
With the next general election now less than 18 months away, Kenya’s opposition landscape looks disturbingly familiar: multiple aspirants, competing egos, and no coherent strategy for unseating an incumbent who, despite low approval ratings, retains the machinery of state and a war chest that grows by the day.
Raila Odinga’s departure to the African Union Commission has created a vacuum that no single figure has filled. Kalonzo Musyoka, Martha Karua, Eugene Wamalwa, and a rotating cast of younger politicians are all positioning themselves as the next standard-bearer, but none has demonstrated the capacity to build the broad, multi-ethnic coalition needed to win a presidential election in Kenya.
The lesson of 2013, 2017, and 2022 is clear: divided opposition campaigns hand victory to the incumbent. The arithmetic of Kenya’s electoral college — where a candidate must win both 50% plus one and at least 25% in 24 of 47 counties — makes coalition-building not just desirable but mathematically essential.
What Kenya’s opposition needs is not another saviour but a process: a transparent, credible mechanism for selecting a single candidate and distributing the spoils of a potential victory before, not after, the election. The alternative is another five years in the wilderness.
