One of the more remarkable institutional maneuvers I watched from Nairobi in 2025 had begun the previous July. It was not a coup, a coalition victory, or an electoral realignment. It was a sequence of appointments and agreements that moved senior figures from Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement toward William Ruto’s administration while preserving the official claim that government and opposition remained separate.
What Actually Happened
The sequence matters. After Kenya’s youth-led anti-Finance Bill protests in June 2024, human-rights investigators documented killings, abductions, arbitrary arrests, and torture by security forces. On July 11, Ruto dismissed most of his Cabinet and promised what he called a broad-based government.
On July 24, he nominated four senior ODM figures: John Mbadi, Opiyo Wandayi, Hassan Joho, and Wycliffe Oparanya. Parliament approved the appointments, and they were sworn into Cabinet on August 8, 2024.
This was not, at first, formally presented as ODM entering government. ODM’s secretary-general said members accepting appointments would be acting without the party’s authorization. Ruto likewise denied forming a coalition. Odinga later said the party had released the four men to serve. The distinction between individual appointment and party agreement was real, but so was the political effect: some of ODM’s most senior figures now held executive office under the president they had opposed.
On March 7, 2025, the arrangement acquired a formal party dimension. Ruto and Odinga signed a Kenya Kwanza–ODM cooperation framework. The agreement explicitly said it was not a coalition. It nevertheless committed the governing party and the principal opposition party to cooperation on policy, legislation, and a ten-point national agenda.
Odinga, a longtime opposition leader who had contested Kenya’s presidency five times, did not himself become a minister. But the institutional boundary had shifted. ODM could still call itself opposition while its senior figures administered major ministries and its leadership cooperated formally with the governing party.
The Movement and the Party
The date matters here too: Kasmuel McOure, one of the recognizable voices to emerge from the 2024 protests, joined ODM on November 10, 2024, not in 2025. He described organized party politics as a route from protest to political power. Critics within the youth movement described the move as abandonment and argued that ODM had benefited from the pressure created in the streets.
Neither interpretation can be proved merely from McOure’s decision. Calling it betrayal assumes a motive; calling it ordinary participation ignores the surrounding political context. The narrower observation is institutional: a visible interpreter of a fluid, partyless uprising entered a party whose senior figures were already serving in Ruto’s Cabinet and which would soon sign a cooperation agreement with his political organization.
That is how co-optation often works. It does not require a secret bargain or a corrupt motive. It can occur through public appointments, legitimate ambitions, and sincere claims that reform is easier from inside. The system needs no confession from the person it absorbs. It needs only to change that person’s incentives, obligations, and relationship to the constituency that made the person valuable.
The Handshake Returns
Kenya already had a name for this political technology: the Handshake. The term came from the 2018 reconciliation between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Odinga, after which the country’s principal opposition leader worked closely with the administration.
Ruto had identified the danger with unusual clarity. In a March 2022 CSIS discussion, he said the Kenyatta–Odinga arrangement had “destroyed the opposition by co-opting the opposition into government” and compromised its oversight role. Three days later, at Chatham House, he called the result “a mongrel of a governance system” in which it was difficult to tell whether government was in opposition or opposition was in government.
The 2024–2025 arrangement was not identical to the 2018 Handshake. It was more layered: individual Cabinet appointments came first, a party-to-party framework followed, and both sides continued to deny that they had formed a coalition. Ambiguity became the operating form.
The Mechanism
Systems do not always defeat opposition. Sometimes they make the opposition partly responsible for governing.
Moving opposition figures into executive office changes the structure of incentives. Those who accept office gain access and the possibility of influencing policy, but they also acquire a stake in the administration’s stability. Their party must now reconcile criticism of the government with responsibility for ministries inside it. The government, meanwhile, can answer demands for inclusion by pointing to former rivals already seated at the table.
This blurs accountability. When policy fails, it becomes harder to identify who stood outside the decision and who helped administer it. When protest resumes, the opposition party must choose between mobilizing against the government and defending the participation of its own senior figures. The government has not abolished opposition; it has made opposition internally expensive.
The Gen Z movement did not disappear. Nationwide demonstrations returned on June 25, 2025. Nor would recruiting one recognizable activist have decapitated a movement that deliberately lacked a single command structure. But leaderless movements still develop public interpreters, conveners, and bridges into formal politics. When those figures are recruited individually, their independence becomes contested and the movement must repeatedly rebuild trust and coordination.
The stronger claim, then, is not that Kenyan dissent vanished. It is that the inherited architecture of opposition was blurred without an election. Cabinet appointments and cooperation agreements accomplished what electoral defeat ordinarily does: they reduced the institutional distance between the government and the party best positioned to organize against it.
Portable law: When a government absorbs the organizational infrastructure or recognizable interpreters of a challenge, it can weaken the challenge’s capacity for coordinated opposition without first resolving the grievance that produced it.
Accommodation can be sincere and co-optive at the same time. Inclusion may reduce conflict, broaden expertise, and produce reform. It may also weaken oversight and convert independent challengers into stakeholders in the system they were expected to scrutinize.
The test is therefore not whether opposition figures receive seats. It is whether inclusion produces independently verifiable reform. The 2025 framework itself named corruption, public debt, youth unemployment, police brutality, compensation for victims, and institutional reform. Those are measurable commitments. If they are implemented, accommodation may become accountability. If offices arrive while enforcement does not, accommodation becomes absorption.
This is not unique to Kenya. It is one way durable systems survive pressure that should reform them: not by refusing the challenge, but by seating part of it inside the room while leaving the terms of the room intact.
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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