When Kenyans woke on Wednesday to find petrol at Sh206.97 a litre and diesel at Sh206.84, the numbers carried more than sticker shock. They signalled the collapse of a political argument President William Ruto has defended since 2023: that the Government-to-Government petroleum import arrangement would insulate the Kenyan consumer from global price volatility. The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority’s latest monthly review, which lifted super petrol by Sh28.69 and diesel by Sh40.30, says the opposite.
The G-to-G framework, rolled out in March 2023, was meant to be elegant policy. Kenya abandoned open-tender imports in favour of a direct arrangement with three state-linked Gulf suppliers — Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Emirates National Oil Company — stretching payment terms to six months and, in theory, easing pressure on the shilling. For a while it worked. The currency stabilised, pump prices dipped, and Ruto trumpeted the deal as proof that clever statecraft could bend markets.
That story unravelled this week. Super petrol is now more expensive than at any point in Kenya’s history in nominal terms. Diesel is punishing matatu operators, farmers and manufacturers in equal measure. Kerosene — the cooking fuel of the urban and rural poor — has followed in lockstep. EPRA cites a rising crude benchmark and freight costs. Opposition politicians cite something else: a hidden architecture of middlemen, commissions and political patronage wrapped around a deal that was supposed to eliminate all three.
On Wednesday the United Alternative Government — the opposition formation built around former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, Kalonzo Musyoka, Fred Matiang’i, Eugene Wamalwa and Justin Muturi — gave Ruto seven days to convene a special sitting of Parliament and scrap the G-to-G framework. They named Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi directly, accusing him of presiding over “one of the greatest fuel scandals in Kenya’s history”. Senator Ledama Ole Kina, now anchoring a Senate probe into fuel pricing, alleges a cartel is manipulating the price build-up at the landing stage. None of these claims are yet substantiated. They do not need to be substantiated to bite. They only need to be plausible — and in a Kenya where petrol has become unaffordable, plausibility is a low bar.
Ruto’s response has been a mix of defiance and damage control. In Gusii on Tuesday he told opposition leaders to “show your track record” before attacking his, then announced a Ksh6.5 billion stabilisation kitty and a cut in Value Added Tax on fuel from 16 to 13 per cent for three months. His earlier pledge to slash VAT to 8 per cent ran into the VAT Act itself, which caps executive adjustments at 12 per cent — a legal detail the President’s strategists appear to have discovered after the announcement. The fiscal arithmetic is also unforgiving. Fuel VAT is one of Treasury’s most reliable revenue lines; a three-month cut is a donation to motorists that will have to be clawed back elsewhere, likely in the Finance Bill the Kenya Kwanza coalition cannot afford another street battle over.
For Kenya, this is more than a pump-price argument. It is the first real stress test of Ruto’s post-Gachagua political model — the “broad-based” government that absorbed sections of ODM and was sold as a coalition of stability. Stability is a story that only survives while living costs do not bite. With 2027 campaigning effectively under way, the President has lost the rhetorical shield of cheap fuel just as his rivals have consolidated into a single opposition vehicle. The G-to-G deal was designed to be his signature macroeconomic win. It is now the frame through which every future cost-of-living story will be told, from unga to electricity tariffs.
There is a regional signal here too. East African governments have watched Kenya’s G-to-G experiment closely; Tanzania and Uganda have flirted with similar direct-supply arrangements. A visible failure in Nairobi will cool that appetite and strengthen the hand of the continent’s open-market voices at the African Union — an institution Ruto himself recently called “not fit for purpose”. Africa’s energy politics is shifting from ideology to price discovery, and Kenyan motorists are currently financing the discovery.
What to watch next is straightforward. If Parliament is recalled within the opposition’s seven-day window, Ruto is negotiating. If it is not, the streets will. Either way, the question is no longer whether G-to-G survives in its current form — it is how much of the President’s second-term agenda survives with it.
