Oburu: ODM to Back Ruto in Exchange for Bigger Government Stake

Kenya, 29 December 2025 - Kenya’s political chessboard is shifting, and nowhere is the recalibration more visible than inside the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), where loyalty to President William Ruto is colliding with internal resistance, ambition and raw power politics.

At the centre of it all is ODM leader Dr Oburu Oginga Odinga, who has thrown down the gauntlet: ODM will back Ruto in the build-up to the 2027 elections but only if the party walks away with a bigger slice of government.

Speaking in Nyanza, Oburu left little room for ambiguity. “We will support President William Ruto beyond 2027, but ODM must have a bigger stake in the next government,” he said, framing the alliance not as political surrender, but as strategic bargaining.

For Oburu, proximity to power is not betrayal, it is survival.

His remarks come at a time when President Ruto is aggressively courting the Nyanza vote, a region long associated with opposition politics.

The outreach has rattled ODM’s internal equilibrium, exposing sharp ideological and generational fault lines within the party.

Oburu’s position is rooted in pragmatism.

He argues that ODM’s participation in the current broad-based government—an arrangement midwifed by the late former Prime Minister Raila Odinga—has already begun to yield dividends, particularly in development.

“We are not ready to gamble with the lives of Kenyans,” Oburu said, insisting that remaining in government is the only way to protect ODM strongholds from marginalisation.

He went further, praising Ruto for what he described as a deliberate effort to integrate Nyanza into the national development matrix.

Roads, markets, housing projects and social programmes, Oburu argued, are evidence that the region is finally “feeling government.”

In his calculus, walking away in 2027 would amount to political self-sabotage.

But Oburu’s hardline stance has intensified internal feuds within ODM.

ODM Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna has emerged as the most vocal critic of deepening ties with Ruto, warning that ODM risks losing its soul by drifting too close to a president it once fiercely opposed. Sifuna’s camp argues that ODM’s identity as a reformist, opposition-rooted movement is being diluted in exchange for short-term political comfort.

Yet Oburu appears unmoved by the dissent. He has asserted his authority as party leader, signalling that decisions on coalitions and future alignments will be driven from the top.

His message to skeptics is blunt: ODM must be part of the next regime, and those who disagree can “take it to the bank.”