Poisoned chalice: ODM rushes to drink from Ruto's 'golden cup'

ODM party leader Oburu Odinga and Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga during former Prime Minister Raila Odinga's memorial service at Sony Sugar Green Stadium in Awendo, Migori County, on November 6, 2025. [Anne Atieno, Standard]

Is President William Ruto the poisoned chalice in the lap of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) Party? ODM looks internally ruptured and bleeding, especially after the demise of Raila Odinga. If it is not dying as a political machine, is what it has stood for dying, or perhaps even dead?  

President Ruto has been personally present in ODM’s significant moments these past three years. He was there during the suffocation of the giant in August 2022. He ensured that it did suffer in intensive care in 2023, after the mortifying 2022 defeat. And in 2024, he began taking over death bed duties.

Today, Ruto is presiding over what looks like ODM’s graveside rituals. He is reading ODM’s Rite of Committal, even as he prepares to transform himself into the coffin fly that will derive benefits from ODM’s post-interment season. The coffin fly survives in the grave and feasts on the dead.  

It was always as if President Ruto wanted to devour the giant orange whole; but he found it too big to swallow at once. Accordingly, he has been chopping it into pieces, small enough to ingest one at a time, until the whole thing is securely in his political belly. Any residues will be cast into the political dump yard.   

In a sense, Ruto began his assignment with the Orange party even before the demise of Raila. Raila himself appeared to have finally thrown in the towel, after the 2022 election defeat. He surrendered himself to Ruto; and his politics to fate. But what really happened, and which way the stormy petrel that now portends a veritable political tsunami? 

The August 2022 election defined the politically wounded Raila as the twin permanent conscience of the Opposition, and its prisoner. He was an exhausted perennial election loser, with a five election loss record. The losses brought with them heavy emotional burdens. Then there were the huge financial implications. The Opposition captain was also aging. And ODM was aging with him, too.  

The gravity of Raila’s political predicament inexorably goaded him towards ODM’s poisoned chalice – his nemesis, Ruto. A calculating and master dissembler, Ruto made it undesirable, even unsustainable for Raila to remain outside power. He was acutely aware of the favourable season Raila had previously enjoyed with President Uhuru Kenyatta, even if he had not liked the arrangement himself.  

The March 2018 handshake enabled Raila to exercise power in the Uhuru government without the burden of responsibility. Another handshake – with Ruto – was very tempting. But with it, too, was the drive towards the poisoned chalice and the kiss of death. Ruto knew that it was just a matter of time, and he would have his foremost critic at his side, his political outfit in atrophy, and himself on political free range, even as ODM was annihilated, blow-by-blow.  

Everything around Ruto was tailor made for accommodation and rapprochement with Raila, but also for sounding the ODM death knell. Ruto had power, but lacked the legislative majority. Then there was unyielding street power against him from myriad directions. From teachers to doctors; and from nurses to university lectures; and from the political Opposition to Gen-Z protesters as the pick of the basket.  

Raila’s dilemma intersected snugly with Ruto’s legitimacy challenges; the need to neutralise street protests, and the urgency to balance parliamentary arithmetic in his favour. Put together, Ruto’s challenges led him to tease ODM into his political high dependence unit in government. When he saw the Kairos moment, he grabbed it. Raila swallowed the bait of the broad-based government. The rest has been a history of political giants who became slow punctures – the political party, and the owner, so to speak.  

Ruto administered both punctures. The relationship between him and his UDA party on the one hand, and Raila with ODM, on the other, has not been a question of love, or even a common visionary agenda. It has been a factor of mutual fatigue that has  intersected with the doctrine of necessity. Raila was already losing rebellious MPs to Ruto, from as early as 2023. Apart from openly defiant individuals like Elisha Odhiambo (GEM), Karoli Omondi (Suba), Gideon Ochanda (Bondo), Phelix Odiwuor (Langata), and Prof Tom Ojienda (Kisumu Senate), significant numbers in both the Senate and the National Assembly were quietly working with Ruto. 

Once the defections had begun, gravity took over. Staying outside the circle of power began looking suicidal, not just for Raila, but also for the rest of the ODM MPs, except the red-eyed dyed-in-the-wool radicals. Raila had little choice beyond throwing in the towel. He accepted a handshake with Ruto in private. And with this, Ruto’s poisoned chalice.  

It was not always the sweet poison that Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga, CSs Opiyo Wandayi and John Mbadi are comfortably sipping today. It was more like bitter wormwood that often led Raila to deny that he had the goblet on his lips. He initially disowned the appointment of loyalists for example, when Whycliffe Oparanya, Hassan Ali Joho, Mbadi, and Wandayi were called to the Ruto Cabinet, in August 2024. He denied that he had been consulted. The arrangement had been privately negotiated between Ruto and the politicians, he said. Not too long after, however, he would begin crowing about lending Ruto “experts” to help him boost performance in the government. 

Yet, it was a boast that also woke up other voices in ODM, to begin distancing themselves from the experts and the Ruto government. Led by the party secretary general, Edwin Sifuna, ODM radicals have been vehement. They have rejected the “broad-based” government that Ruto formed extra-legally with Raila. Yet, the more they fight it, the more Ruto flaunts and rubs it in, driving the divisive wedge in ODM even deeper.  

It is as if Ruto is aware that the broad-based thing is the bacterium; the yellow dragon disease that will kill the orange, all the way to the roots. Armed with the carrot and stick, Ruto is ever present during high profile ODM forums, where he acts as the virtual captain. The de jure new party leader, Dr Oburu Oginga, bows down before Ruto. He speaks with the humble cadence and submission of a schooled chapter chorister, in praise of the de facto party captain –Dr William Ruto – and the broad-based affair.  

Even in his least favourable pronouncements, Oginga speaks in the subjunctive mood, and with classical hesitance. He is unsure, for example, of whether or not ODM will field a presidential candidate in next year’s elections. “If ODM decides to field a presidential candidate, we know who it will be, according to the party constitution,” Oginga has recently said; conditionally, freakishly, indicating that he could run.  

Day the chase begun

The hunt for ODM began the moment Ruto understood that he would lose Rigathi Gachagua, and a massive chunk of the Mt. Kenya support base of 2022. There would be a need for a replacement of the huge support he enjoyed from the Mountain. If only he could inherit Raila Odinga’s base, everything would be tidy, home and dry; seeing that he had only beaten Raila with a paltry 228,000 votes, or thereabouts. A solid transfer of the entire Raila base to him would see him beat any 2027 opponent with a landslide.  

Yet this has been easier said than done. The spin-off has not been the massive support that Ruto dreamt the broad-base would achieve. There has been a split in the Orange, the loss of lower Eastern (and especially Ukambani) that had voted for Raila in 2022, as well as a looming rebellion in Luhya Western. The Luo Nyanza vote is also troubled. The coast looks shaky, and the Maa and Kisii communities are also not certain. All these despite recent hugely State managed by-elections that gave Ruto significant comfort about what seems to be a formidable political standing in the country Today.  

Yet, the vibes in Lumakanda, during the burial of Ruto’s former boss in the Youth for Kanu ’92 years tell a different story. The broad-based government is scuttling ODM, with Ruto as the prime factor. But it is also scuttling Ruto’s own dreams in the West Kenya region, with the popular following leaning away from the broad base. When Sifuna and Siaya Governor James Orengo spoke against the base and the goings on in ODM, the people said, how well they spoke!  

And when Busia Governor, Paul Otuoma, and his Nairobi counterpart, Johnson Sakaja, spoke, the people shouted them down, forcing them to stop their addresses in the midstream. When National Assembly Speaker, Moses Wetang’ula and Prime Cabinet Secretary, Musalia Mudavadi spoke in favour of Ruto, the people grumbled in repressed angst. And when Uhuru spoke against killing political parties, the applause was deafening.  

Two things would appear to be happening here. President Ruto is successfully scuttling ODM. His graveside pronouncements are valid. Yet, secondly, his dream to be the coffin fly to enjoy the returns seems to be just that, a dream.  

In Luo Nyanza, recriminations abound on the subject of “auctioning ODM to Ruto. Wanga and Oburu have been figured as the bailiffs, an accusation they vehemently deny. Yet, as party leader, Oburu does not seem to know where he is leading the party to. His pact with Ruto seems to leave him in a quagmire; between the rock that is his party, and the hard place that is the broad-based government.  

Traditionally, ODM was the ideology driven party. It stood for what could be loosely described as social democracy. This is a centrist political-economy location that pursues elements of both socialist and capitalist economies. But of major significance is interest in social justice; the belief in a democratically governed, just, free and fair society, where – at least in principle – everyone has an equal chance to compete for the opportunities in society.  

The pillars of what ODM previously believed in were free and fair elections, war against corruption, national unity among the peoples of Kenya, and fidelity to the rule of law generally. If President Ruto is presiding over the death of ODM, it is not just about the institution of the party and its following, it is also about the death of what it has believed in, and stood for. Before the 2018 handshake, Raila sought alliances with other leaders and parties that shared some of the basic political beliefs that he espoused.  

Later engagements in ODM are, however, not about political beliefs and ideological orientations. They are not about the kind of political, social and economic leanings the government and Kenyans should embrace.

If ODM is on the organizational and institutional deathbed, is there validity in the thought that it has died ideologically? Latter-day philistine individuals shout from rooftops about not wanting to be in the Opposition. “We don’t want to be in the Opposition. We must be in the next government. The Opposition space is too cold.”  

When a political formation is driven only by the singular concern of “being in the government”, regardless of what kind of government; and the reputation of the partners in that government, then the formation is ideologically dead, or dying. Is that where ODM is headed? And is William Ruto in the driver’s seat? 

From Ruto’s poisoned chalice, ODM is drinking visibility at the expense of ideological coherence. It is this fading coherence that Edwin Sifuna, Godfrey Osotsi, Caleb Amisi, Babu Owino, and James Orengo, are leading the thinkers in that space to firmly hold on to, even as Ruto and Co. seek to disfigure the party out of recognition.  

Ruto invited ODM into his space, seeming to know that even houses of power dissolve in corrosive acid, especially for those who have no keys of their own. And ODM is dissolving. It is thawing in a political pool of power without content. When you listen to Oburu, you hear a formulation that contains no values, no red lines, no policy commitments, and no moral exclusions. The silence in these crucial spaces speaks to nihilism.  

Regrettably, Oburu, Wanga and Co. are not alone. Within the party, even some of the more erudite and previously promising youthful leaders, like Moses Kajwang and Peter Kaluma (Homa Bay), have joined the nihilist bandwagon. They crow about William Ruto, and supporting his second term bid.  

ODM and Ruto could probably combine to win the next presidential election. Would that mean that they are still alive? No. A party that only wants to be in government lacks a moral compass. It has no sense of direction, nor knowledge of what it wants to do with power. ODM is at a crossroads between memory and meaning.  

At this juncture is what the party has been before, what it has stood for, and what it would not trade in for anything. As it leaves that juncture, it is becoming a party of access to anything, a broker of numbers, and a negotiator of anything on the plate, without conditions. ODM may not be dead. However, it is ideologically drowsy, having drunk from President William Ruto’s poisoned chalice.  

In ODM’s drowsiness, it will probably win offices in next year’s elections. But it will lose history, and conscience. Perhaps these things don’t matter anymore, anyway? Including memory of who Raila Odinga was. After all he took ODM to Ruto? 

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke