One of the more remarkable institutional maneuvers I watched from Nairobi in 2025 was the absorption of Raila Odinga's ODM party into Ruto's government. Odinga — who had spent decades as Kenya's opposition figure, who had run for president five times — accepted a cabinet arrangement that put ODM ministers inside the administration that had, the year before, overseen the killing of protesters demanding accountability.
The protesters called it a betrayal. Kasmuel McOure, one of the Gen Z movement's visible faces, joined ODM in November 2025. The movement interpreted this as co-optation — the mechanism by which systems absorb threats by offering the threat a seat at the table that they control.
The Kenyan political establishment has a name for this. "Handshake." Ruto himself had criticized the previous Kenyatta-Odinga handshake as producing "a mongrel of a governance system." He then did the same thing with a different partner.
The pattern is predictable: institutions under pressure from accountability movements create apparent accommodation. The accommodation absorbs potential leaders. The movement loses its institutional focal points. The underlying accountability deficit remains.
This is not unique to Kenya. It is how durable systems survive pressure that should, by rights, reform them.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.
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