Strip the labels off the latest cabinet roster at Harambee House and you would struggle to find the opposition. The Treasury sits in the hands of John Mbadi, Raila Odinga’s chief economic whisperer for the better part of two decades. The Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs portfolio belongs to Hassan Joho, the Mombasa political baron whose ODM membership card is in good standing. Cooperatives and the wider MSME docket are run by Wycliffe Oparanya, a former Kakamega governor and ODM deputy party leader. The East African Community portfolio is held by Beatrice Askul, an Odinga loyalist from Turkana. Yet on the question of whether the Orange Democratic Movement is in government with the Kenya Kwanza administration, the party’s official answer remains, with a straight face, no.
This is the architecture of Kenya’s “broad-based government” — and President William Ruto has just expanded it again. Over the past fortnight, the head of state has nominated another tranche of ten cabinet appointees, with four positions reserved for figures with deep links to Mr Odinga. Parliament received the list on Tuesday, May 12. The president’s team has briefed allied media that more is coming, including in mid-tier state corporations and the diplomatic service, where Mr Odinga is reportedly being given latitude to install professional friends.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Mr Ruto faces three problems heading into 2027: a Mt Kenya political base that has not forgiven him for the 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests, a Gen-Z electorate that does not trust him, and an economy in which the cost-of-living squeeze is still the only number that matters to voters. Bringing ODM inside the tent does three things at once. It defangs the country’s largest organised opposition machine. It complicates any 2027 candidate who would try to assemble an anti-Ruto coalition. And it shares blame for any economic pain. If Treasury fails, it now fails under an Odinga-aligned Cabinet Secretary.
For Mr Odinga, the bargain is harder to read. The ODM leader has consistently insisted that his party remains in opposition, that the cabinet positions are individual decisions, and that ODM will reconstitute itself for a fresh national contest in 2027. None of this is plausible to anyone who has watched Kenyan politics for ten minutes. A party whose senior figures hold the Treasury, Mining, Cooperatives and the East African Community docket is, in any meaningful sense, in government. The fiction is being kept alive because Mr Odinga still believes — or still hopes — that he can have it both ways: harvest the patronage of office while retaining the moral standing of opposition. He has done this before, after 2008 and again after the 2018 handshake. It is, in his career, a recurring move.
The political cost will not be paid in Nairobi. It will be paid in places like Kisumu, Migori, Homa Bay and parts of the Coast, where ODM voters still expect the party to oppose. The cracks are already visible. ODM MPs in those regions are increasingly critical of their own party’s leadership, and the youth wing has begun staging quiet revolts at branch meetings. The broader anti-Ruto sentiment has not disappeared; it has been forced to look for a new political home — and that home is being built, slowly, in church basements, on TikTok, and at funerals where eulogies turn into politics.
That is the structural risk for both principals. Kenya has a long history of voters punishing elite consolidations they were never consulted on. The 2002 vote rejected an imposed succession. The 2013 vote rejected a coalition that had absorbed too much of the post-2007 dispute without resolving any of it. The 2024 protests, in turn, rejected a Finance Bill that was negotiated entirely inside the executive. The Ruto-Raila cohabitation is precisely the kind of pact that breeds an electoral backlash because no voter ever signed off on it.
Watch three things in the next sixty days. First, Parliament’s vetting of the new nominees: how aggressively does the National Assembly probe the four ODM-leaning picks, and what does that say about the strength of Mr Ruto’s whip? Second, ODM’s National Governing Council, expected to meet later this quarter: does the party formally bless the alignment, or does it perform another round of strategic ambiguity? Third, the by-elections in Emurua Dikirr, Porro and Endo this Thursday: if government candidates underperform in places they should win, the explanation will not be local. It will be that voters have noticed the merger.
For now, Mr Ruto’s bet is that absorbing the opposition is cheaper than confronting it. He may be right, but absorption is a defensive move, not a winning one. It buys quiet, not consent. And in a country where consent is what the 2024 protests demanded, quiet is the one thing the political class cannot afford to mistake for victory.
