Kenya's politics has shifted from tribalism to development, says Ruto

President William Ruto has argued that Kenya has entered a new era of political competition, one he characterises as driven by concrete service delivery promises rather than the ethnic mobilisation that defined much of the country's post-independence electoral history.

Addressing supporters at a public function, Ruto said voters are increasingly evaluating leaders on the basis of roads built, hospitals equipped and economic programmes implemented rather than on the basis of community identity or historical grievances.

The claim carries both political weight and complexity. Kenya's ethnically diverse population of approximately 56 million has long seen voting patterns closely correlated with the ethnic composition of constituencies, a dynamic that international observers and domestic analysts have documented across successive election cycles. Critics argue that framing this as resolved risks obscuring structural inequalities that still shape access to government resources and appointments.

Ruto himself rose to national prominence through carefully managed ethnic coalition-building in the 2022 election, securing wins across the Rift Valley, parts of central Kenya and pockets of Coast and western regions through alliances calibrated partly along community lines.

Nonetheless, proponents of the president's view point to genuine shifts. The broad-based government that absorbed ODM, a party with a strong Luo and Coast following, has at least symbolically diluted the sharpest ethnic binary that characterised the Jubilee-NASA contest of 2017.

Development-based politics has a theoretical foundation in Kenya's history — former President Daniel arap Moi often campaigned on infrastructure — though critics note the record of delivery rarely matched the rhetoric.

Whether the 2027 elections confirm or contradict Ruto's thesis will depend substantially on economic conditions and the credibility of government programmes in the intervening period.