Ruto and Uhuru: The rupture at the heart of Kenya’s 2027 election

The president’s Nyanza tour has torn away the last pretence of civility between Kenya’s two most powerful political figures — and the fallout is reshaping the race for State House

By David Kimani

President William Ruto used a five-day tour of Nyanza this week to do something no Kenyan head of state has done in living memory: wage open, sustained political warfare against his own predecessor by name, in public, on a borrowed stage.

Speaking in Awendo during his tour of the Nyanza region, Ruto accused political opponents of being used by a sponsor to undermine his government and its development agenda, describing them as “puppets” and “people for hire.” “They have been hired by a sponsor,” he told residents. The sponsor, though not always named directly, was unmistakably Uhuru Kenyatta — the man who once made Ruto his deputy, helped deliver him the presidency and now, Ruto argues, funds the forces assembling to remove him.

In Siaya, Ruto went further, labelling his predecessor a “rebel leader” for refusing to act as a statesman and criticising him for clinging to the leadership of the Jubilee Party. The remarks were not an aside or a slip. They were deliberate, repeated across county after county, and escalated with each stop.

The accusations centre on two distinct but overlapping targets. The first is the Jubilee Party and its deputy leader Fred Matiang’i, who Ruto and his allies claim is operating as a proxy for Kenyatta’s political ambitions. Matiang’i has strongly refuted the claims, urging Ruto to cease blaming others and look for alternative solutions. The second, and more viscerally charged, target is the Linda Mwananchi movement, a populist opposition grouping led by ODM Senator Edwin Sifuna that has drawn significant crowds. Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot has accused the Linda Mwananchi convoy of being financed by “that retired man.”

The accusation has become so routine that it now functions less as news and more as a running subplot of the 2027 campaign — Uhuru the sponsor of Jubilee, Uhuru the puppeteer, Uhuru the financier of bloggers against the government. But the narrative carries a significant vulnerability. When Ruto was challenged in a newspaper interview to substantiate his repeated assertions that Kenyatta was sponsoring the opposition, Sifuna said the president admitted his only source was media reports.

That evidentiary gap has done nothing to slow the rhetoric, and it has gifted the opposition a ready rebuttal. Democracy for Citizens Party leader Rigathi Gachagua, firing back from the United States where he was on a political tour, said Ruto was trying to shift attention from the issues facing Kenyans by portraying Uhuru as his political challenger. “President Uhuru Kenyatta is not your opponent in this election. You are just trying a bad deflection,” Gachagua said.

Gachagua’s response was methodical and sharp, delivered in layers. He said the political conversation should centre on Kenyans and the issues affecting their daily lives, rather than on the retired fourth president. He listed workers, young people, businesses, patients, parents and students among the groups he said were at the centre of the 2027 political conversation. “Your opponents are the people of Kenya,” Gachagua said.

He also drew a pointed distinction on the question of opposition funding. “The leaders tasked with the responsibility of removing you from office by Kenyans require no sponsorship,” Gachagua said, adding: “Olkalou was just a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming General Election.”

Gachagua accused Ruto of deflecting criticism by invoking Uhuru’s name, insisting the real opponents in 2027 would be ordinary citizens. “Your real opponents are ordinary Kenyans, and you should not confuse them with the shadow of Uhuru Kenyatta,” he said.

The bitterness between the two men runs deeper than political competition. Ruto and Kenyatta governed together for a decade before their relationship collapsed publicly ahead of the 2022 election, when Kenyatta backed Raila Odinga against his own deputy. That betrayal — at least from Ruto’s perspective — appears to have never been forgiven. In Siaya, Ruto wondered publicly how Kenyatta could defeat him in 2027 after failing to do so when he was president. “I want to ask you people of Siaya: Uhuru Kenyatta did not defeat me when he was President. Now I am the President, and he is retired; how can he defeat me?” Ruto posed.

The Linda Mwananchi movement sits at the centre of this argument. Senator Sifuna led thousands of Linda Mwananchi supporters through Nairobi’s streets and into Jacaranda Grounds on 13 September, consolidating his position as the most visible opposition challenger to Ruto ahead of the August 2027 general election. Gachagua, reacting to the turnout, declared Nairobi “locked” against Ruto and predicted the opposition could take up to 2.5 million of the capital’s 2.7 million registered votes in 2027.

The strategic logic behind Ruto’s Nyanza tour is as important as the political combat. Only days before his arrival, Sifuna was mobilising supporters for the Jacaranda rally, while Gachagua was touring the United States positioning the united opposition for 2027. The broad-based cooperation between UDA and ODM continues reshaping Nyanza politics, with Cabinet Secretaries John Mbadi and Opiyo Wandayi now occupying senior positions in Ruto’s government.

The president is therefore playing a dual game in Nyanza: commissioning development projects worth a reported KSh700B while simultaneously seeking to neutralise the political ground on which the opposition intends to fight. If Ruto can hold Luo Nyanza — or even split it — the path to his re-election narrows considerably for any challenger.

Gachagua has argued that Ruto’s attacks on Kenyatta are a decoy to divert attention from corruption and the economic crisis facing ordinary Kenyans. Whether that framing gains traction will depend on how the electorate weighs a year of falling living standards against a government pointing an accusatory finger at a retired president.

Kenya’s 2027 election has arrived, in all but name. The question it will ultimately answer is whether voters decide the country’s problems have a sponsor — or a sitting president.

The post Ruto and Uhuru: The rupture at the heart of Kenya’s 2027 election appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times.