Ruto and Oburu Are Taking Their MPs to Naivasha

President William Ruto and ODM party leader Oburu Oginga are convening a joint parliamentary group retreat in Naivasha, bringing together leaders from Kenya Kwanza and the broad-based government to plan for 2027.

A joint PG meeting between a governing party and the party that opposed it in 2022 is not a gesture. Parliamentary group meetings are where a party's members are told what the position is, and holding one jointly means the two sides intend to have a single position.

What such a retreat has to settle

Four things, in ascending order of difficulty.

A record to run on. What the broad-based arrangement has achieved, and what it has not. Every joint campaign needs an agreed account of its own performance.

The legislative agenda. What has to pass before the end of the term, and aligning it with the electoral calendar.

The structure of the coalition. Whether this becomes a formal pre-election coalition with a deposited agreement, or remains a working understanding.

The running mate. The hardest, because there is one slot, the incumbent Deputy President has said publicly it is his, and reporting on the talks has indicated ODM has sought it.

Why the fourth item is the whole retreat

Everything else can be agreed by people who like each other. The running mate cannot, because it is indivisible.

A ticket that keeps the current Deputy President keeps Mount Kenya East inside and gives ODM something else. A ticket that moves the slot to ODM delivers Nyanza and tells a region that has already produced heavy by-election defeats that it has been displaced.

Neither option is free, and both have to be chosen a year in advance because everything downstream — nominations, zoning, resource allocation — depends on it.

The arithmetic behind it

Kenya's presidency requires more than half the national vote plus at least 25 per cent in more than half of the 47 counties.

A UDA-ODM ticket is an attempt to assemble that from the Rift Valley, parts of the coast and north, and the Nyanza and Western blocs — with Mount Kenya contested rather than assumed. That is a coherent map, and it depends entirely on ODM's base following the party rather than the politics.

Which is precisely the question a rally in ODM's heartland by a removed former Secretary-General is designed to test.

What it means for members in the room

An MP or MCA whose party has entered an arrangement faces the same question every Kenyan realignment produces: does your local support follow the party?

In some wards it will. In others, particularly where the arrangement is unpopular, it will not, and the member will discover that in a primary rather than in a retreat.

The only insurance is a personal structure — coordinators you recruited, volunteers who work for you, members you signed up — that survives whichever way the coalition goes. That takes the twelve months remaining, not the twelve weeks before nominations.

Related: ODM after Raila.

What a broad-based arrangement costs the opposition function

Worth stating, because it is the constitutional argument rather than the partisan one.

A parliamentary system needs an opposition to do specific work: scrutinise legislation, question the executive, chair public accounts oversight, and provide an alternative the electorate can choose.

When the largest opposition party enters a working arrangement with government, that work has to be done by somebody smaller, or it does not get done. Kenya's Finance Bill 2026 passed 122 to 40 with 187 of 349 members absent, which is what a weakened scrutiny function looks like in practice.

That is not an argument that the arrangement is illegitimate. Parties are entitled to make arrangements. It is an argument that the scrutiny gap is real, and that whoever fills it — smaller parties, civil society, the press — is doing constitutional work under-resourced.