ODM's challenge is short-term and personal politics
Opinion
By
Ken Opalo
| Feb 14, 2026
One of the key challenges facing Kenya is the fact that we have elites who are hopelessly unable to coordinate around a set of values, common national objectives, and a strategic understanding of our place in the world.
This problem gets worse when one considers that the same elites cannot coordinate around advancing their own interests. They lack mains running water and have to rely on boreholes. They have generators because they cannot get their act together in getting reliable grid power. They buy big cars because coordinating on good roads is beyond them. And they live a much lower quality of life than their peers elsewhere because they care not for aesthetics or cultural production.
Perhaps nowhere else is this problem illustrated as well as it is in our politics. Our politicians really struggle to craft durable political parties and alliances. This is for the simple reason that most of them are perfidious charlatans struggling with impulse control.
They readily stab each other in the back for quick gratification and are more likely to settle for small, short-term gains over much larger long-term benefits. And since they know each other, they are unable to trust each other. Consequently, few of them are credible.
Take the ongoing split in the Orange Democratic Movement. At the heart of it are two problems: the sharing of the windfalls from participation in the broad-based government and party nominations ahead of the 2027 elections. The institutionally ascendant faction in ODM is firmly in the broad-based government and appears to be hoarding the windfalls from the rest of the party.
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This is in terms of actual access to rents and a willingness to fight for the party and its base (in terms of statutory fund allocations and addressing issues raised on behalf of those killed or injured during recent protests). The same ascendant faction is also hell-bent on subordinating intra-party nomination processes to the dictates of the broad-based relationship.
Put simply, short-term gains from being part of the broad-based government have completely swamped any consideration of party institutionalisation for the long haul. The short-termist camp does not want to hear any talk of strengthening the party’s bargaining position for the long haul. Or the fact that a split party will become weaker, including within the broad-based arrangement. One need not be a supporter of ODM to lament its demise – especially since it is completely avoidable. Typically, parties split if there are irreconcilable ideological differences or if there is a fight over a prize that is not divisible. Neither case applies to ODM. The party’s populist/oppositionist ideology applies to both camps.
And the windfalls of being in the broad-based government are certainly divisible. The problem, therefore, is no more than an inability to think beyond short-term gains and a commitment to personalist politics. The claims about external interference in the party are nothing but a red herring. If there are dissatisfied people within the party who are looking for friends elsewhere, it is because the party has failed them.
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University