EXPERT COMMENT: Coast will be a battle ground between Ruto and opposition

President William Ruto coming down to Coast to consolidate the coastal voting bloc is being done using the ODM structures and fraternity. UDA on its own has no influence.

At the moment, UDA does not have that kind of political muscle, despite having a secretary general (Hassan Omar), who comes from Mombasa county.

What is clear is that, he (Ruto) has consolidated part of the ODM, which is the Oburu Odinga-led group headed by CS Hassan Joho (Mining) and partly through the Speaker of Senate Amason Kingi.

He is also using the network of CS Salim Mvurya (Sports), who was a governor in the region in Kwale county.

So far, those are the major counties where they have some semblance of influence through third parties.

In Tana River county, they are somehow closely working with the ODM governor but it has not been as strong as these other three counties—Mombasa, Malindi and Kwale.

In essence, you can see, it is not a direct UDA effort, it is an effort through alliance members that are assisting the Kenya Kwanza coalition to make inroads.

Whether that will work or not, is a different story because there has been a lot of influx of the Edwin Sifuna-led team, which has captured the ground quite strongly through the youth.

There is going to be a lot of competition ahead of next year’s general election.

Taita Taveta county in itself also has quite a number of votes but UDA does not have any advantage, same to ODM led by Oburu.

It is going to be a very tough competition with the opposition, because the opposition does have a lot of influence.

The demise of Raila Odinga definitely has had an impact on Ruto’s chances in the region.

Raila as a person had quite many years of relationships with the people in this region, if you remember Balala (former Tourism CS Najib Balala), there was a very serious relationship and Raila was liked by the people generally.

With Raila, Ruto could pull the region easily but with his (Raila) demise, you can see they (ODM) have already broken into two factions and the one that is led by Oburu does not seem to push in the direction that it should have.

  The Gender and Governance analyst spoke to the Star