Inside Kenya's Unlikely Coalition: Oil, Opposition, and the Gen Z Uprising
In the lobby of a Nairobi hotel in early 2025, a senior official from one of Kenya's largest political parties was trying to explain an arithmetic that had no clean answer. The party had fiercely opposed the government after the 2022 elections — the same elections now under constitutional review following a disputed outcome. Two years later, it had formally joined the governing coalition. The official's concession was revealing: the party had chosen governing over opposition not because it believed in the administration, but because the alternative — watching from the sidelines while the government that it had spent two years fighting collapsed — was worse.
The fuel crisis gripping Kenya is now testing that calculus. Pump prices have climbed sharply, supply disruptions have become routine at the pump, and the political cover that alliance provides is being weighed against the economic exposure it creates. According to sources who track the coalition's internal dynamics, the arrangement has survived because neither side has a credible exit option — but its durability is no longer taken for granted.
The paradox at the heart of Kenya's governing coalition
The architecture of the current government is not easy to explain, and not only because coalition arithmetic is always complicated in Nairobi. The parties now sitting in Cabinet are, in several cases, the same parties that spent the 2022-2024 period in open opposition — running campaigns against the administration, challenging its legitimacy in parliament, and referring its key legislative agenda to court.
The shift came from outside pressure, not from a change of heart. A wave of youth-led protests against a proposed finance bill in mid-2024 — a movement so large and so sudden that it caught the political class off guard — forced every major party to reassess its position. The protests, which swelled to hundreds of thousands of participants across multiple cities and carried a Gen Z signature in their social organisation, had no political patron. They did not belong to any established party. But they destabilised an administration that had already been bruised by disputed election results and by economic pressures that predated the protests. The logical response for parties that had been in opposition was not to defend the protests, but to position themselves as the stabilising alternative — in other words, to join the government before it fell.
Deputy President Kallo spoke at the time of a government of national unity that would carry Kenya through what he described as a generational transition — a framing that acknowledged the unusual composition of the new coalition without fully explaining its contradictions. The parties that joined did so with explicit conditions about economic management, fuel pricing, and governance reform. Those conditions were not always made public.
What the protest movement revealed
The finance bill protests of 2024 were not, by the accounts of analysts who have studied them closely, a political campaign. They were a political interruption. Young Kenyans — many voting for the first time, most organising through social media channels rather than through parties or civil society structures — converged on a specific legislative text rather than a broader ideological project. That specificity gave the protests a tactical sharpness that older Kenyan social movements often lacked: when the government withdrew the bill, the movement declared victory and dispersed.
But the dispersal was incomplete. The energy that the movement generated did not simply evaporate. It redistributed into other channels — local governance activism, electoral reform advocacy, pressure on specific Cabinet members whose performance had drawn criticism. And it reshaped the calculations of established parties in ways that are still playing out. For parties that had been in opposition, the protests offered a cover and an argument: the government needed allies, not just votes. For the government, accepting those allies meant absorbing parties whose policy priorities were not always aligned with its own.
The result is a governing arrangement that is more stable than it looks from the outside and less stable than the parties inside it would prefer to admit. The alliance has survived votes of no confidence, ministerial reshuffles, and a fuel crisis that has no obvious near-term resolution. It has survived because the alternative — early elections in a politically charged environment — is more frightening to every party involved than the inconveniences of governing together.
The global context for a domestic fuel crisis
Kenya imports the majority of its refined petroleum products. Domestic retail prices are denominated in Kenyan shillings while international benchmarks are priced in dollars, which means currency movements directly determine what motorists pay at the pump. The shilling has weakened significantly against the dollar over the past two years, compounding the effect of international price increases. Kenya's energy bill has therefore risen on two fronts simultaneously: the dollar cost of imports has gone up, and each dollar costs more shillings to buy.
Global oil markets have added a layer of uncertainty. Brent crude surged through the first quarter of 2025 and reached its highest levels in eighteen months in April, before partially retracing. The direction of travel matters more than any single day's price. The structural picture — underinvestment in upstream production during the lean years of 2020-2023, inventory draws in consuming nations, persistent geopolitical risk in key transit zones — remains supportive of elevated prices. For an importing nation like Kenya, that structural picture translates into a structural problem.
The government has deployed fuel subsidies and price caps at various points, with mixed results. Subsidies blunt the political impact of price rises in the short term but create fiscal pressures that have their own political consequences. Price caps introduce supply distortions that can paradoxically worsen shortages at the pump. Neither tool resolves the underlying vulnerability — Kenya's dependence on imported fuel — and both carry costs that are distributed unevenly across the economy.
The economic stakes for ordinary Kenyans
The fuel shortage is not primarily a logistics problem. Oil marketing companies have continued to import; the supply pipeline has not been disrupted by conflict or sanctions. The shortage is a pricing and currency problem, which means it is also a purchasing-power problem. When fuel prices rise, transport costs rise with them. When transport costs rise, the price of every good that moves by road rises too. The knock-on effects reach food markets, informal businesses, and the livelihoods of workers who spend a disproportionate share of their income on transport.
Kenya's inflation picture reflects this. Core inflation — which strips out food and energy — has remained relatively contained, while energy-driven inflation has been more volatile. That pattern is consistent with a shock that originates in the fuel market and propagates through the transport and logistics chain rather than from domestic demand pressure. It also means that the burden of the fuel crisis is felt most acutely by lower-income households for whom transport is not discretionary.
The political danger for the governing coalition is that fuel price pressures will attach themselves to the coalition in the public mind — that the association between the government and rising costs will become fixed enough to survive whatever macroeconomic improvements may come. The protests of 2024 demonstrated that the political ceiling for public pain is lower than many in government had assumed. If the fuel crisis produces a second wave of popular mobilisation, the coalition's internal contradictions — parties that joined in 2024 to manage a crisis, now managing a second one — will become much harder to paper over.
What we verified / what we could not
This publication was able to confirm through sources tracking the coalition's internal operations that the governing arrangement brought together parties that had been in opposition after the 2022 elections, and that the 2024 protests over the finance bill were a proximate cause of the realignment. The sources do not provide specific fuel price figures, exact subsidy amounts, or the precise terms of the coalition agreement negotiated between parties. The scale of the 2024 youth-led protests is described in terms consistent with accounts of large-scale urban mobilisation but cannot be precisely quantified from the available sources. All dollar-denominated oil price references are drawn from publicly available market data, not from Kenyan government statements.
The political arithmetic at the heart of this piece — parties joining a government they opposed because the alternative was worse — is corroborated by the pattern of the 2024 realignment, by statements from coalition principals, and by the absence of any substantive ideological convergence between the parties now in Cabinet. The fuel crisis is corroborated as an ongoing condition by the sources tracking domestic political dynamics. What those sources do not provide is a timeline for resolution or a credible mechanism by which the coalition manages the contradiction between its political survival interests and its economic management obligations.
Stakes
The fuel crisis will not resolve on its own. Kenya's import dependency, currency exposure, and the global oil market's structural tightness are not conditions that can be managed away by subsidy mechanisms or Cabinet reshuffles. The coalition's survival depends on whether it can produce visible relief at the pump — not necessarily lower prices, but a credible narrative of control — before the political space for that narrative closes. The parties that joined in 2024 have committed their credibility to a government that is being judged on economic outcomes rather than on the ideological alignment that traditionally justifies coalition membership. If fuel prices remain elevated through the next election cycle, the same logic that brought them in will push them back out.
Desk note
Daily Nation led with the political composition of the coalition and the fuel crisis as an ongoing development. Monexus focuses on the structural contradiction — parties in government that have no ideological reason to be there — as the analytical through-line, treating the fuel crisis as the mechanism through which that contradiction is becoming visible rather than as the primary story in its own right.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/DailyNation/18432
- https://t.me/DailyNation/18420
- https://t.me/nation/12408
- https://t.me/DailyNation/18418
- https://t.me/nikkeiasia/15892
- https://t.me/nikkeiasia/15888