Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and Speaker of the National Assembly Moses Wetangula. [File, Standard]
When President William Ruto assembled his Kenya Kwanza juggernaut ahead of the 2022 General Election, his most prized trophies were Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula.
The duo pledged to deliver a decisive 70 percent of the Luhya vote to the Kenya Kwanza basket. Four years into that improbable bargain, the math still does not add up, and Ruto's political foundation in Western Kenya is smoldering.
Rather than cement the Kenya Kwanza government's foothold in western, Ruto's collaboration with Mudavadi and Wetang’ula is, instead, eroding his authority. The reality on the ground across Kakamega, Bungoma, Vihiga, and Busia counties is unflattering.
It is not necessarily the opposition that is undercutting Kenya Kwanza in Mulembe nation; it is its own proxies and struggling local leaders. By acting as buffer zones rather than effective bridges, these kingpins have reduced themselves to spectators in State House corridors, thus alienating the electorate.
Adding to this leadership decay is the dismal performance of local governors. Recent opinion polls by Infotrak, the ‘CountyTrak Performance Index’, underscore a serious governance crisis: Three of the country's worst-performing governors hail directly from Western Kenya: Bungoma, Busia, and Kakamega.
Deeply unpopular on their home turf due to lagging service delivery and stalled development, these county bosses have tied their fate to the ruling coalition not out of shared ideological conviction, but out of self-preservation. Their reliance on Ruto’s re-election for their own political survival only worsens public disillusionment, turning what should be local anchors for the administration into political liabilities.
Unless Ruto changes tack, abandons his seeming over-reliance on these compromised figures, and engages the grassroots directly, Western Kenya will not serve as his springboard for a second term. It will instead become the battleground that undoes it. The political capital of Mudavadi and Wetang’ula is trading at an all-time low.