Kenya’s Shaky Handshake Deals

The country has a long history of power-sharing deals that are sealed with a handshake. The truth is that this type of political bargaining typically does more harm than good.

By Alexander Noyes

March 2025

Earlier this month, Kenya’s President William Ruto agreed to a handshake deal with his former rival, the longtime opposition leader Raila Odinga, after months of political tensions that emerged during large antitax demonstrations last summer. While previous power-sharing accords in the country helped ease intense political violence, this most recent deal risks doing real harm to the country’s still fledgling democracy.

The agreement between the two parties, Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, spans ten broad areas. These include inclusivity of political parties and ethnic groups in budgets and public appointments, the strengthening of government decentralization, investments in the country’s youth, fighting corruption, and supporting the rule of law.

The pact has already led to the creation of six new government departments, which are to be led by Odinga allies. Ruto announced: “These changes are driven by the need to harness opportunities within emerging sectors of the economy, as well as to address challenges affecting Kenya’s social fabric.”

Handshake Politics

Kenya has a long history of fluid political parties and aisle-crossing power-sharing deals, with the eighty-year-old Odinga being the common denominator across many of them. As far back as 2001, Odinga decided to join forces with long-ruling president Daniel arap Moi, first becoming Moi’s energy minister and then merging his party into the president’s the following year. Yet Odinga fell out with Moi after he picked the then very inexperienced Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s founding father, as his successor. Odinga then teamed up with Mwai Kibaki, who won the country’s 2002 election. Kibaki later reneged on sharing real power with Odinga, however, leading to their fallout.

The country’s most well-known example of formal power sharing took place after its near descent into civil war in 2008. This violence followed a bitterly disputed and fraudulent election between Odinga and Kibaki that left more than a thousand dead. After the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan brokered a deal between Odinga and Kibaki, a “grand coalition government” was formed with Kibaki as president and Odinga in the freshly created position of prime minister. This inclusive government served from 2008 to 2013, coming to an end after Odinga lost to Kenyatta (Kibaki was limited to two terms) in the 2013 election.

As detailed in my forthcoming book on power sharing, Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa, Kenya’s 2008–13 unity government was flawed, but likely the country’s least bad option at the time. While far from perfect, the accord brought Kenya back from the brink of civil war and helped to deliver some crucial and long-sought democratic reforms.

These included the landmark passage of a new constitution in 2010 and some real, if halting and short-term, progress on reforming the country’s abusive police forces. The unity government’s overall record, however, should be viewed only as a qualified success, as it failed to rein in corruption or prosecute perpetrators of the 2008 postelection violence.

Following contentious elections in 2017, once again between Odinga and Kenyatta, the country experimented with another, less formal version of power sharing in 2018. Odinga was able to secure support from Kenyatta after the president fell out with Ruto, who was then the vice-president, leading to an infamous March 2018 “handshake agreement” between Kenyatta and Odinga.

This informal deal then led to a constitutional-reform effort, purportedly to unite the country. Known as the Building Bridges Initiative, the plan sought, among other things, to permanently restore the post of prime minister, which was only a temporary position created by the 2008 power-sharing deal and ceased to exist after the unity government ended in 2013. Kenya’s judiciary ultimately blocked the initiative, however, ruling that it was unconstitutional in 2021. Despite support from Kenyatta, in 2022 Odinga again lost the presidential election, this time to Ruto.

With the March 2025 handshake deal between Ruto and Odinga, the latter has now agreed to some version of power sharing with every Kenyan president this century. As the Kenyan commentator Dennis Kabaara wryly noted, the country seems to have “no term limits for handshakes.”

Compromised Coalitions

Kenya, however, is far from the only country to use power-sharing approaches. In fact, such pacts have almost become the default response to violent conflict around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. In the past, this popular conflict-resolution tool was used primarily to help ease long-running civil wars, but now power-sharing models are deployed in the wake of a variety of less intense conflicts, such as electoral violence or coups.

Yet power sharing frequently leads to compromised coalitions. Under the right conditions, the model can deliver a window of peace to achieve some democratic reforms, as seen in Kenya under the 2008–13 unity government. Yet such coalition governments also bring with them a host of pitfalls. These include the rewarding of political violence and incumbent power grabs, bloated cabinets, and the weakening of political opposition and democratic accountability, since the main political parties are all in government.

My research offers a framework to help policymakers and practitioners decide when power sharing might be a viable, if imperfect, way forward and when it should be discarded entirely. ​​Because the negatives of these compromised coalitions often outweigh the positives, conflict mediators should use the postelection power-sharing model only where three conditions are met: 1) there is no clear election winner; 2) dire civil war appears imminent; and 3) all other options, such as an internationally monitored rerun of a disputed election, have been genuinely tried and exhausted.

If used, however, power-sharing arrangements should only be temporary, transitional mechanisms, and they should include strong external third-party enforcement to push inclusive reforms and break political logjams.

The recently announced pact between Ruto and Odinga does not satisfy any of these criteria. Indeed, the only one of Kenya’s various power-sharing deals that has is the 2008 comprehensive accord.

Likely downsides of the handshake agreement — to which Ruto and Odinga likely agreed to boost their electoral chances in 2027 — include exacerbating poor economic governance (a primary cause of the demonstrations last summer) and the weakening of healthy democratic competition and accountability. Expanding the government for political purposes is the opposite of disciplined economic management.

Moving forward, Kenya’s regional and international partners, including the United States, should urge Kenya’s political leaders to resolve their political differences through existing democratic channels and only to revert to handshake deals in the most dire of circumstances. Outside actors should also encourage Kenya’s government to genuinely tackle corruption and strengthen the rule of law, which are critical to improving economic performance and good governance.

As the United States scales back global democracy-promotion efforts, other Western powers, especially the United Kingdom, should step in to fill the void. They could begin by ramping up support for security reform in Kenya and increasing efforts to strengthen political parties and civil society organizations focused on democratic accountability.

In the meantime, the latest handshake deal in Kenya is likely to do more harm than good.

Alexander Noyes is a fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Post-Conflict Power Sharing in Africa, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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