Something has died inside the Orange Democratic Movement, and most of its leaders are too comfortable to notice — or too complicit to care. The party that once defined opposition politics in Kenya, that carried the weight of millions of ordinary Kenyans who believed in democratic accountability, has quietly surrendered that identity at the altar of William Ruto’s power. This is not a political realignment. This is a betrayal.
ODM was never just a party. For a generation of Kenyans — especially young people who grew up watching Raila Odinga absorb teargas, imprisonment, and electoral theft without breaking — it represented something rare in this country: the idea that power could be checked, that the state was not above the people. That legacy is now being traded away, piece by piece, while ODM stalwarts smile for cameras at State House functions.
What exactly did ODM sign up for — and what happened to it?
When ODM entered the broad-based government arrangement with President Ruto, it came with conditions attached. Raila Odinga himself anchored the deal around a ten-point agenda — a concrete framework meant to steer Kenya out of the governance crisis that had exploded into deadly Gen Z protests. The agenda was not decorative. It was supposed to be the price of ODM’s political legitimacy, the thing that justified abandoning the opposition trenches. Without it, ODM’s participation in government is simply absorption — and absorption is not coalition politics, it is surrender.
That ten-point agenda has been quietly buried. The foundational commitments that were supposed to make this arrangement meaningful — accountability, reform, protection of civic space — have evaporated. What remains is ODM leaders enjoying the perks of proximity to power while Ruto’s government continues the very tactics that ODM once thundered against from the opposition benches. State abductions of critics and perceived opponents are happening now, under a government that ODM is part of. The silence from the orange corner is deafening.
Why does this matter to you, specifically?
If you are a young Kenyan who has ever believed that your vote or your voice could shift something in this country, ODM’s collapse into Ruto’s orbit should alarm you — not because of party loyalty, but because of what it signals about accountability itself. When the main opposition force stops opposing, the entire architecture of democratic pressure collapses. There is no one left to name what is wrong. There is no credible political home for dissent. The government faces no serious internal friction, and ordinary Kenyans — already squeezed by taxation, unemployment, and the cost of living — lose the one institutional lever they had.
Consider what ODM’s silence enables:
Raila Odinga spent decades being the man the establishment could not buy. Whatever you thought of his politics, that stubbornness was a structural asset for Kenyan democracy — it kept the ruling class honest enough to know there was someone watching. His party has now become the thing he spent his career fighting against: a vehicle for the powerful, dressed in the language of the people. The orange has faded. What is left is not opposition, not reform, and certainly not legacy. It is just politics — the worst, most cynical kind.
