Eliud Owalo: From Presidential Strategist to 2027 contender

For years, Eliud Owalo was more comfortable behind the political curtain. He advised presidential candidates, helped shape campaigns and moved between political formations with the instincts of a strategist who understood that, in Kenyan politics, the person designing the campaign is often more important than the person delivering the speech.

He was there for Raila Odinga’s 2013 presidential campaign. He worked with Musalia Mudavadi.

Then came William Ruto, first as a political ally and later as the President under whom Owalo served as Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Now, Owalo says he has had enough of working for other people.

“Times are gone when I used to work for other politicians. It’s now my time to work for Kenyans,” he says.

It is an unusually direct declaration from a man whose political career has largely been built around proximity to presidential power.

His decision to leave government, he says, was not an act of political theatre. It followed what he heard while travelling across the country inspecting government projects.

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions. I left government because I wanted to lead Kenya’s third and final liberation,” he said.

Owalo’s political argument begins with a history lesson, but ends with an economic one.

Kenya’s first liberation, in his telling, was independence from colonial rule. The second was the move from one-party rule to multiparty democracy. The third, and the one he now wants to lead, is economic emancipation.

His diagnosis of Kenya’s problem is blunt. Legacy politicians, he argues, have become too invested in elections, ethnic arithmetic and the distribution of political power, while ordinary Kenyans remain trapped in the daily economics of survival.

“The economy is not doing well, so long as people don’t have money in the pocket and they are struggling to put food on the table, in my view, it’s a zero-sum game,” he said.

That puts Owalo at odds with the political vocabulary Kenya has become accustomed to. Ask him about his stronghold, and he refuses to name a county, community or region.

“My strongholds are farmers who cannot exploit their potential because they do not have the requisite farm inputs,” he says. 

His definition of political geography is therefore economic rather than ethnic. It is also a rejection of the coalition-building model he has spent much of his career mastering.

Owalo says the political formations visible today are unlikely to be the ones Kenya takes into the 2027 election. Having worked on presidential campaigns, he argues that the real alliances emerge much later.

“Real coalitions for purposes of elections are usually constituted about six months before the general elections,” he says.

For now, he says, he is looking for transformational leaders, but refuses to name them.

There is another political calculation behind his departure from government.

Critics have suggested that his exit could be part of a quieter effort to weaken opposition’s support among Luo voters. Owalo rejects the idea.

“That is the most illogical argument I have heard. If I wanted to work with him, I’d stay on in government. I don’t see why I would leave government to work with him in the shadows. I am not the type of person who will play certain cards under the table,” he said.

Instead, he is presenting himself as something Kenya’s political system rarely rewards on its own, a technocrat asking voters to judge him by the performance of the state rather than the size of his political machine.

He wants income tax reduced from 35 per cent to 20 per cent, VAT from 16 per cent to 10 per cent, corporate tax reduced by five percentage points and digital tax scrapped. He wants government services fully digitised, corruption cases reopened, and public health and education substantially re-engineered.