The Choreography of Power and the Mirage of Change:
Kenyan statecraft has long resembled an ever-mutating masquerade, in which a narrow coterie of elites incessantly reshuffles partners, costumes, and slogans, while the material script remains obstinately the same. Presidents and members of Parliament switch from sworn foes to bosom allies with vertiginous speed, baptising each new arrangement as a “national unity” initiative, a “roadmap to peace,” a “national dialogue,” or, more recently, a “broad-based government.” To grasp the cyclical theatrics at play,one only needs to recall President William Ruto’s May 2025 memorandum with perennial opposition doyen Raila Odinga. It was hailed, with sanctimonious flourish, as a “God-sent” formula for stability.
Yet beneath the decorative political speeches lies a structural reality as solid as granite: Kenya’s ruling class, regardless of its internal quarrels, remains united in the relentless extraction of surplus from labouring Kenyans and in its capitulation to international finance. In this dispensation, elite quarrels are mystified as ethnic vendettas, piecemeal “development projects” function as pacifying baubles, and the working oppressed masses are cajoled into risking their livelihoods on alliances that are, in truth, exquisitely counterfeit.
Anatomy of the Kenyan Ruling Bloc: Ever-Shifting Coalitions of Convenience
To the casual observer, the post-independence Kenyan polity appears fissile, perpetually riven by factional feuds: Uhuru Kenyatta’s acrimonious divorce from William Ruto; Raila Odinga’s oscillation between bitter adversary and indispensable consigliere; Rigathi Gachagua’s meteoric fall from deputy-presidential grace to truculent outsider.
But a historical-materialist appraisal reveals these ruptures to be less ideological cataclysms than skirmishes over access to cash-laden state machinery. The bourgeoisie, whether domiciled in Kiambu, Sugoi or Bondo, shares one immutable imperative: commandeer public coffers and broker concessionary deals with transnational capital. Thus, coalitions congeal and dissolve according to the calculus of property, not principle.
The Ruto–Odinga compact illustrates the paradigm. Having spent two decades casting each other as embodiments of venality or dynastic entitlement, the pair abruptly clasped hands when it became mutually profitable: Ruto desperate for the aura of “national reconciliation” amid youth-led street uprisings and Odinga anxious to buttress his party’s dwindling war chest. In this arrangement, the state is re-engineered not to liberate labour but to stabilise circuits of accumulation.
Ethnicity as Opium: How Bourgeois Politics Masks Class Exploitation
Because naked class rule would provoke instant revolt, Kenya’s power-brokers deploy ethnic essentialism as a narcotic. Each elite faction slyly recasts its patrimonial appetite as a communal birthright, insinuating that Kikuyus, Kalenjins, Luos, Luhyas, Waswahilis (or whichever bloc is momentarily excluded) have been “short-changed” unless their patriarch commands a ministerial perch.
In the 2025 realignment, media outlets blared that “Luos are now in government” while “Kikuyus have been ejected,” as if pipelines of maize, fuel or anti-poverty syrup were suddenly rerouted along tribal cartography. The rhetorical sleight-of-hand recycles the colonial strategy of indirect rule: cobble together an ethnic clientele whose grievances can be ritually placated with performative appointments, thereby forestalling a unified anti-establishment front of millions of unemployed youths and their oppressed counterparts in Mathare.
Such mystification is amplified by a comprador commentariat that equates the installation of a Luo Cabinet Secretary or a Kikuyu Principal Secretary with socioeconomic emancipation for entire communities. In reality, capital accumulation remains confined to a minuscule stratum of politically connected businesses, whose shareholders dine together, irrespective of their surnames. Marx defined ideology as the process whereby “the real relations between men appear in the inverted form of their reflection.” Nowhere is this inversion more flamboyant than in Kenyan ethnopolitics, where exploitation masquerades as communal empowerment.
Development as Spectacle: Pork-Barrel Projects and the Continuum of Deprivation
Every political ceasefire among elites is promptly marked with ribbon-cuttings for roads, stadiums, and dams in the regions whose kingpins have just re-entered the presidential fold. The Ahero–Kisii highway, the “affordable housing” movie, the Raila Odinga Stadium in Homabay, the Kakamega Level 6 Hospital and many others. Each is trumpeted as empirical proof that the latest coalition is delivering the elusive dividend of peace.
Yet the same communities soon confront a poignant paradox: new asphalt road arteries expedite the export of raw commodities and the influx of imported consumer goods, but they do not stimulate the development of local agro-processing plants or create living-wage jobs. Villagers cheer as excavators roar, only to watch, months later, as Chinese contractors decamp and the tarmac morphs into a conduit for lorries hauling unprocessed tea and avocado to Mombasa for export.
Moreover, such projects are overwhelmingly financed through Chinese capital, euro-bond flotations, and IMF-sponsored loans, whose conditionalities mandate austerity measures, including the removal of subsidies, VAT hikes, and the decimation of public health budgets. President Ruto’s abortive Finance Bill 2024 (which provoked mass demonstrations until it was theatrically “shelved”) epitomises the vicious circle. Thus, the glitter of infrastructural concrete obfuscates a grim reality: burgeoning sovereign debt, regressive taxation, and the relentless commodification of basic services.
The Working Class in Perpetual Limbo: Unemployment, Instability, and Taxation Without Provision
Kenya disgorges roughly 800,000 new entrants into the labour market annually; formal sector absorption hovers below 15%. The remainder navigate a Darwinian informal economy – hawking mitumba, selling tomatoes or sikuma-wiki, baking their bodies at Jua kali, piloting boda bodas, engaging in prostitution, committing crime, or dispensing mobile money services for fractions of a cent. Successive regimes promise “bottom-up” resuscitation yet replicate the same neoliberal dogma: imposing sin-taxes on bread, kerosene, and mobile transfers while offering tax holidays to multinationals. Under such conditions, the ostensible ethnic identity of cabinet grandees is academic; hunger is ruthlessly national, if not cosmopolitan.
Health infrastructure languishes. A diabetic worker in Kisumu sells a goat to afford insulin; a pregnant domestic worker in Mathare improvises with a traditional birth attendant because user-fees at the county hospital remain prohibitive. When floods ravage the Kano plains, relief arrives via NGOs, not the state, whose coffers have been depleted by inflated dam contracts in Elgeyo-Marakwet.
The impoverished worker on a starvation wage, lacking class consciousness, is cajoled into defending “their” ethnic patriarch in the mistaken belief that his accession will trickle benefits to the village. What ultimately trickles are: the tenders for the patriarch’s in-laws, an appointment of an uncle to high office and the inevitable police baton attacks and bullets against protesters demanding justice, accountability, jobs and an end to looting and plunder of state coffers.
Toward a Proletarian Praxis: Building Class Consciousness Beyond the Wheelbarrow and the Handshake
How might impoverished Kenyan workers and the mass of unemployed youth extricate themselves from this cyclical ritual? First, the myth of tribal salvation must be systematically dismantled through revolution-based civic education, ideological awakening, cell-oriented study circles, and the activation of organic intellectuals that transcend county and clan boundaries.
Second, social media has proven a formidable accelerator of class agitation, as evidenced by the 2025 Gen Z-led protests that forced the regime to rescind punitive levies. Digital spaces must be weaponised not merely for episodic outrage and meme wars, but for sustained organising: simplification of complex ideological concepts through video clips, live discussions about a political alternative to capitalism on Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms, archiving political education on blogs, podcasts, and YouTube, and so on.
Third, progressive formations must articulate a revolutionary political programme that marries immediate bread-and-butter demands (affordable food, universal healthcare, debt moratoria) with structural imperatives: land reform, value-added industrialisation, public ownership of strategic sectors, abolition/smashing of the capitalist system and the proliferation of political education focused on replacing ethnic-based politics with a class-based politics.
Radical change will not emanate from boardrooms where erstwhile enemies toast imported cognac to their newfound fraternity. It will be performed on the streets of Nairobi, in mobile theatres, on Bunge la Wananchi platforms, office spaces, on narrow slum pathways in Kibera/Mathare, and in congested estates in Eastlands where victims of exploitation are active in everyday life.
Unmasking the Charade
The ruling class in Kenya, like its counterparts from Lagos to Lima, thrives on the dramaturgy of difference while preserving the architecture of accumulation. Ethnic grandstanding, bipartisan “handshakes,” and headline-grabbing road inaugurations constitute the stage-managed events that distract the masses from the enduring substratum of class domination.
To demystify these theatrics is the first step; to replace them with a politics anchored in collective material interest is the urgent sequel. Only then will the working people of Kenya cease to be extras in a tragedy authored by elites and begin to script their emancipatory narrative.
Okoth Osewe
KenyaStockholm.Com
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