Saba Saba, the Broad-Based Government, and the Politics of Pacification
What Oburu Said
On July 7, 2026, the 36th anniversary of the pro-democracy protests that broke one-party rule in Kenya ODM party leader Oburu Oginga issued a statement calling for Saba Saba to be retired as a day of street confrontation and reimagined instead as a national holiday celebrating the "heroes" of the multiparty movement. He argued that the foundational battles of that era were "successfully achieved" in the early 1990s and later "anchored" in the 2010 Constitution, and that because those battles were won, "it is time for Saba Saba to evolve." Rather than "turning to the streets in conflict," he urged Kenyans to reflect on political gains already secured and to "protect our hard-earned democracy."
It was a tidy, commemorative message. It was also, this website would argue, a profoundly convenient one — arriving from the leader of a party that had, days earlier, publicly instructed its own members and Nairobi structures to stay off the streets entirely on the day itself
The Context of Oburu's Statement Conveniently Skips
Oburu's call to "evolve" past confrontation landed in a week when ODM's Nairobi branch, led by Makadara MP George Aladwa, had already declared that party members would not join Tuesday's march, framing the position explicitly around ODM's status inside government: "We are in the broad-based government, and we want to state once more that we will not take to the streets for Saba Saba celebrations." Government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura reinforced the same message from the other side of the aisle, insisting July 7 was "a normal working day." Police sealed off Nairobi's CBD, mounted roadblocks that paralyzed the city for hours, and declared the protest march illegal for lack of notification — even after organizers said they had filed one.
This is the backdrop against which Oburu's "let us honour our gains" framing has to be read. It did not emerge from a settled, peaceful republic looking back fondly on a closed chapter of history. It emerged from a country where the organizers of Tuesday's petition were demanding an end to extrajudicial killings, abductions, and enforced disappearances — a petition addressed to a Parliament and an executive that, by ODM's own admission through its participation in that same executive, it now shares responsibility for.
OBURU OGINGA'S statement Compensation Without Accountability Is Not
ReconciliationPresident Ruto's administration has moved to compensate victims of police brutality from the 2024–2025 protest waves. But compensation offered by the same state apparatus that continues to be implicated in fresh disappearances and custodial deaths is not accountability — it is a settlement designed to close a file, not open one. A government cannot credibly claim to be making victims whole with one hand while its security agencies are still producing new victims with the other. If the killings, abductions, and unexplained deaths in custody are ongoing — and they are, as the very petition ODM's Nairobi leadership refused to join makes clear — then any talk of "gains already secured" is not just premature. It is a rhetorical shield for a government still committing the harms it claims to be reckoning with.
This is precisely the danger of Oburu's framing. By declaring the "foundational battles" won and asking Kenyans to commemorate rather than confront, he collapses two very different struggles into one. The fight for multiparty democracy in 1990 was won. The fight against extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, and impunity in 2026 is not. Conflating the two lets a sitting political principal — one whose party sits inside the executive coalition — dress up demobilization as historical wisdom.
Oburu Is Not Raila, and the Difference Matters
Raila Odinga's relationship with Kenya's protest movements was never uncomplicated, and it does not need to be romanticized here. But for most of his political life, Raila stood recognizably on the side of the street, not against it — a fact that gave his own calls for calm, when he made them, a credibility earned through decades of risk. Oburu, by his own repeated public account, governs ODM today by "fidelity to Raila's last political decision" — the decision to enter the broad-based government with President Ruto ahead of 2027. That is a legitimate strategic choice for a party to make. What it is not is a mandate to speak with Raila's moral authority while pursuing a fundamentally different political project: one built on proximity to state power rather than pressure against it.
Asking Kenyans to stand down from the streets carries a different weight when it comes from someone who is, by his own description, in coalition talks with the very administration being protested. Oburu is a co-owner of the "broad-based government." His interest in seeing Saba Saba pacified is not separable from his party's interest in protecting that arrangement from public pressure ahead of 2027 coalition negotiations.
A Parliament Without Teeth
The deeper structural problem this exposes goes beyond Oburu personally. With Kenya Kwanza holding the majority leadership in the National Assembly and ODM — nominally the leading opposition force — occupying the minority leadership while its principals sit inside the same government, Parliament's two leadership positions are effectively drawn from the same governing project. A chamber whose majority and minority leaderships both answer, directly or through coalition arrangement, to the executive is not positioned to interrogate that executive. This is the practical cost of the broad-based arrangement: not merely that ODM has softened its opposition posture, but that the institutional mechanism designed to check executive power has been hollowed out from both sides at once.
When senior ODM figures who once built careers on confrontation with the state — party officials now comfortably embedded in government structures and events — appear alongside the President at party celebrations and joint functions, it reinforces the sense that reconciliation with State House has become the party's organizing principle, ahead of accountability to the families still waiting for answers about missing and dead relatives.
The Case for the Other Side
In fairness, ODM's defenders make a coherent argument of their own, and it deserves airing. They point out that Oburu explicitly grounded his statement in real, hard-won gains — multiparty democracy and the 2010 Constitution — and argue that acknowledging progress is not the same as denying that problems remain. Supporters of the broad-based government also argue that influence exercised from inside — through NADCO-style negotiated reforms, cabinet input, and legislative bargaining — can, in principle, deliver more durable protection for civil liberties than perpetual street confrontation, and that Oburu's insistence on measured, numbers-based coalition bargaining is a deliberate strategy to maximize ODM's leverage rather than a surrender of its values. Whether that argument holds up against the continuing toll of deaths and disappearances is, ultimately, for Kenyans — and history — to judge.
This piece is an opinion analysis reflecting Mpekuzi Halisi Media author's assessment of Oburu Oginga's July 7, 2026 Saba Saba statement in the context of ODM's participation in the broad-based government.