It is a Thursday morning on Ngong Road, and Grace Wanjiku is counting change at her smokie cart outside the Total petrol station near Prestige Plaza. She has heard the news – she always hears the news. The radio in the nearby hardware shop blares Radio Citizen in a mix of Kikuyu and Swahili, a rolling soundtrack of political opinion that never quite stops. Someone mentions the broad-based government. Grace shrugs and hands a customer two smokies wrapped in yesterday’s People Daily. “Wanafanya kazi yao,” she says. They’re doing their job. Then, after a beat: “Lakini sisi tunafanya kazi yetu bila msaada.” But we’re doing ours without help.
That shrug – half-acknowledgment, half-dismissal – may be the most precise summary of a sweeping new poll that landed this week like a quiet grenade in Kenya’s political conversation. The July 2026 Infotrak Voice of the People Poll, released Thursday and reported widely by Citizen TV and Nation.Africa, found that while 79% of Kenyans are aware of President William Ruto’s broad-based government – the arrangement that brought ODM ministers John Mbadi, Wycliffe Oparanya, and Opiyo Wandayi into cabinet – only 33% actively support it. A meaningful 37% oppose it outright. The rest sit in the fog of ambivalence, somewhere between Grace and her smokies.
On paper, the broad-based government looked like political genius. After the Gen Z protests of mid-2024 that shook State House to its foundation, Ruto reached across the aisle – not to Raila Odinga, who died of cardiac arrest in Kerala, India on October 15, 2025, aged 80, but to the ODM machine that Raila had built over three decades. ODM’s National Executive Council installed Oburu Oginga, Raila’s elder brother, as party leader. The alliance held. Cabinet posts were distributed. The Finance Bill 2026 passed 122 votes to 40 on June 18, 2026. The government, at least structurally, functions.
But here is what this story is really about: it is not about whether the broad-based government works. It is about whether Kenyans believe it works for them. And the Infotrak data suggests that, with 392 days to the August 10, 2027 general election, the answer is a polite but firm no from a demographically decisive slice of the population. The architecture of political survival built in Nairobi boardrooms is colliding with a public that is tired of watching its betters rearrange deck chairs while the matatu fare keeps rising.
The Geography of a Divided Nation
Spread the poll across a map of Kenya and the picture sharpens into something almost painful in its clarity. Support for the broad-based arrangement is highest in the Rift Valley – Ruto’s home turf, where the hustler narrative still carries emotional weight, where the smell of red soil and election-season money is already in the air. Nyanza, where ODM’s historical loyalty runs bone-deep and where Oburu Oginga has been working to consolidate his brother’s legacy, shows similarly elevated support. North Eastern, a region that has long traded political pragmatism for development promises, rounds out the government’s comfort zones.
Then you cross into Nairobi. And Central Kenya. And the numbers turn cold.
In Nairobi – this city of 5.5 million people, of Westlands coffee shops and Mathare corrugated rooftops, of boda boda riders navigating Mombasa Road at rush hour – skepticism of the broad-based government runs deep. Central Kenya, the Gikuyu heartland that once delivered Ruto his margin of victory in August 2022, registers its own quiet dissent. These are communities that feel the gap between the government\’s self-congratulatory press releases and the daily reality of a high cost of living. The Mama Mboga index – the unofficial measure of how far a hundred shillings actually goes at the vegetable stall – has not recovered. And people notice.
Dr. Gedion Onyango, a political science lecturer at the University of Nairobi, told The Standard this week that the regional divergence reflects something structurally significant. “What you’re seeing is the difference between communities that benefited from the political arrangement and communities that feel they paid the price for it. Central Kenya voters, in particular, are asking: we voted for Ruto, and what arrived in our villages was ODM. That cognitive dissonance is real.”
It is a sharp observation. The impeachment of Rigathi Gachagua in October 2024 and his replacement by Kithure Kindiki as Deputy President left a wound in Mt. Kenya’s political psyche that has not fully healed. The broad-based government, for many in that region, is not a coalition of national unity – it is a reminder of a deal that was struck without them.
The Youth Problem That Won’t Go Away
If Central Kenya is a wound, the youth data is a fracture. Among Kenyans aged 18 to 26 – the same generation that occupied Harambee Avenue in 2024, that turned parliament’s gates into a symbol of a system failing them, that buried its dead and went back to TikTok to document its grief – opposition to the broad-based government stands at 42%. That is the single highest opposition figure across any demographic in the Infotrak poll.
This is not a surprise to anyone paying attention. The Gen Z uprising of 2024 was not merely about the Finance Bill of that year. It was about a generation that has lived its entire adult life inside an economy that promises everything and delivers little. They have degrees and no jobs. They have M-Pesa accounts and nothing to put in them. They watched their peers die on the streets and then watched the politicians who sent police after them shake hands and share ministerial SUVs. The broad-based government, to many of them, is not a solution. It is the problem wearing a new suit.
“The mistake analysts keep making,” wrote Nanjala Nyabola in a recent essay for The Elephant, “is treating youth political behaviour as a phase. It is not. It is a structural shift in how a generation relates to the state. And it compounds with every broken promise.”
With 392 days to the 2027 election, that compounding is the central political risk for any party or coalition that needs young voters to show up. The goon economy is already warming up, as our earlier reporting has documented. But mobilising a generation that has already decided it is being played is a different kind of challenge – one that money alone cannot solve.
ODM’s Complicated Arithmetic
Inside ODM, the poll data lands at a particularly awkward moment. The party has been navigating a brutal internal crisis since June 22, 2026, when the NEC voted to remove Edwin Sifuna as Secretary General – a decision Sifuna is now contesting in court. The Sifuna ouster exposed faultlines within ODM that go far deeper than personality clashes. The question of whether the party\’s grassroots – those who marched for Raila for twenty years – actually endorsed the broad-based government arrangement has never been satisfactorily answered.
Oburu Oginga, now steering ODM from his elder-statesman position, faces a party that is simultaneously in government and in court, simultaneously celebrating cabinet posts and haemorrhaging credibility in its own Nyanza backyard. The Infotrak poll\’s Nyanza support figures may look encouraging on the surface, but political analysts who spoke to The EastAfrican this week cautioned that support in that region is “soft” – driven more by community loyalty to the Oginga name than genuine enthusiasm for the arrangement.
Meanwhile, the Olkalau by-election in Nyandarua County is being watched carefully as a temperature check on exactly how much the political reshuffling of the past eighteen months has moved actual voters, rather than just the elite commentariat.
A Government Known, But Not Loved
Back on Ngong Road, Grace is still counting change. The smokies are selling. The radio is still talking about politicians she has never met making decisions about a life she knows too well. Awareness, the Infotrak poll reminds us, is not the same as consent. Seventy-nine percent of Kenyans know this government exists. That is the number the government will quote in its press releases. But 33% support – that is the number that matters in a voting booth.
As Prof. Karuti Kanyinga of the University of Nairobi has argued in multiple forums, Kenyan voters have grown increasingly sophisticated at separating political spectacle from political performance. “Wanjiku is not confused,” he has said. “She is waiting.”
The question – and it is the question that will define the next 392 days – is what she is waiting for. A coalition that earns her trust, or an election that gives her the chance to say, clearly and loudly, what the shrug on Ngong Road already knows.
The answer, like Kenya itself, is not yet written.