The sudden gravitational pull of ODM leaders toward the “Two Term” agenda is not confusion. It is not cowardice. It is memory. It is survival. It is the cold arithmetic of political trauma accumulated over decades in a republic where ballots are ceremonial, but power is decided elsewhere—in backrooms, barracks, and the invisible circuitry of state machinery.
ODM is not drifting toward William Ruto’s orbit out of ideological conversion. It is retreating into the fortress of proximity to power because it understands a brutal truth: in modern Kenya, elections are not won. They are survived.
ODM has lived this truth in flesh and blood. Its members have inhaled the tear gas, buried the dead, endured abductions, and watched victory dissolve into legal fiction on live TV screens. They are veterans of electoral war, not naive recruits. They know the price of standing outside the gates of power when the gates slam shut. And now, they are choosing to stand inside.
The Ghost Of Rigged Victories: Odm’s Collective Memory Of Political Betrayal
ODM is not theorizing about electoral theft. It has experienced it repeatedly, violently, and decisively. Raila Odinga, the party’s towering colossus, was not merely a candidate; he was a phenomenon. He possessed what few politicians in modern Africa have ever commanded: a street machine capable of paralyzing the state machine. He could summon millions into the streets with a whisper and convert ordinary days into national shutdowns. Yet even this formidable force could not overcome the deeper network of power.
Raila won the crowds, the momentum, and, by many accounts, the votes. But the state retained something more decisive: the instruments of final declaration. The guns, the electoral commission, the judiciary’s interpretive authority, the intelligence services, the media propaganda apparatus, and the monopoly on violence. Each time Raila surged toward State House, the invisible ceiling descended. Each time victory appeared within reach, it evaporated into negotiated settlements—handshakes, coalitions, and the bitter compromise known in Kenyan political folklore as nusu mkate.
ODM learned that charisma cannot overcome infrastructure. Courage cannot defeat mafia-like architecture. Numbers cannot defeat control. And Raila, the only man who could mobilize the street into a counter-state, is now absent from the frontline. Without him, ODM is not just exposed but has effectively collapsed into a meditative posture.
The System Is The Bandit: Why Ideology Has Collapsed Into Survival Instinct
Kenya has changed presidents, but not its systems. Power rotates faces, but the underlying economic and political structure remains intact—an extractive capitalist order designed not to distribute wealth, but to concentrate it. Politicians campaign as populists but govern as custodians of accumulation. They mobilize tribes to capture votes, then mobilize capital to capture wealth as tribes languish in poverty.
This ideological bankruptcy has hollowed out opposition politics. ODM, like its rivals, does not operate within a revolutionary ideological framework. It operates within the same capitalist-neo-liberal gravitational field. Its leaders do not seek to dismantle the system. They seek to navigate it. And navigation requires realism, especially after revolutionary violence has ended in hundreds of funerals after every rigged election.
To stand in opposition in Kenya is to stand outside the protective shield of state power. It is to face tear gas without commanding it. It is to confront bullets without controlling those who fire them. It is to exist in political limbo, perpetually mobilizing but rarely governing.
To align with power, even uneasily, is to acquire insulation. Protection. Access. Survival. ODM’s broad-based arrangement with UDA is not an ideological surrender. It is a strategic positioning within an unforgiving political ecosystem where opportunism is the religion, the masses the congregation, and the thieving ruling class the high priests cloaked in “Governors, MPs, Senators, and MCAs” dirty gowns. Once ordained, bible at hand, they congregate to eat and puke on the legs of the electorate.
From Street Machine To State Machine: ODM’s Calculated Withdrawal From Electoral Martyrdom
ODM’s shift toward the Two-Term agenda is not passive. It is calculated. It is the decision of a wounded army that has chosen not to charge blindly into fortified artillery. ODM knows what happens after contested elections. It knows who bleeds. It knows who buries the dead. It knows who disappears into police cells of murder and who cries at the Supreme Court after “hot air” emissions while election thieves occupy offices. Isn’t the soul of Albert Ojwang resting in eternal injustice?
For decades, ODM supporters—ordinary wananchi—have paid the price of electoral confrontation. They have faced the state’s full coercive arsenal while ODM leaders negotiated settlements from positions of exhaustion. Now, ODM is choosing a different vantage point. It is choosing to observe rather than absorb. It is choosing to stand beside the machinery of power rather than beneath its crushing weight.
This is not a betrayal of principle. It is recognition of structural reality. Raila Odinga’s political authority was forged through baptism by fire—detentions, election theft, protests, bullets, tear gas, and relentless confrontation. No current ODM figure possesses this combination of mass legitimacy, psychological endurance, and mythic stature. A new Raila is not yet born.
Without such a figure, and still in mourning, frontal confrontation becomes not heroic, but suicidal. ODM understands this. It understands that proximity to power offers safety, relevance, and continuity. Opposition offers purity—and annihilation. This decodes Oburu Oginga’s “we want power” mantra that is reverberating on social media.
The Silent Language Of Political Survival
ODM’s quiet alignment with the Two-Term agenda is not a declaration of loyalty to Ruto. It is a declaration of loyalty to its own survival. It is the behaviour of a political organism adapting to a hostile environment where the rules of competition are opaque, the key opponent controls the referee, and the penalties of resistance are ruthless, lethal, and outrightly bloody.
Having spent decades at the epicentre of electoral confrontation, ODM is no longer driven by the romance of resistance. It is driven by the logic of endurance. It is stepping aside—not out of fear—but out of knowledge. For now, after Raila, no one can awaken the ODM beast that defies bullets.
ODM has seen how power is preserved, how victory is manufactured, and how opposition is neutralized by the State’s instruments of violence. And now, for the first time in its history, ODM is choosing not to stand where the bullets land, but where the decisions are made.
That is the quiet resting place of the “Two-Term” agenda in the hearts of millions of silent ODM victims of repeated State terror. They have chosen to watch events from a safe distance as the clock ticks towards 2027.
Okoth Osewe
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