ODM Secretary General Edwin Sifuna has declared the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between his party and President William Ruto’s UDA party dead, citing a betrayal of the agreement’s core intent.

Speaking during an interview on a local media station on July 22, 2025, Sifuna disclosed that he had advised ODM against entering the formal agreement with UDA, warning of potential public relations disasters that would be difficult to manage.

“I have already declared this MOU dead, ” he stated.

“I am on record having advised the party against doing this MOU with UDA, and we still went ahead and entered that MOU, but you see the beauty is that you are proven right every day,” he added.

The Secretary General criticised the government’s approach to the MoU, arguing that President William Ruto was not interested in the document’s details but rather wanted it for public relations purposes.

“The problem with doing a formal MOU with UDA is that it didn’t matter what the MOU said, the people from UDA, the government, William Ruto, is not interested in the details of the MOU… They wanted a document that they could then go and run a PR campaign around and say ‘Tumeungana‘, ‘We are together’, that is not what this document says,” Sifuna explained.

The Nairobi Senator further revealed that he has asked to be excluded from a new team being formed to review the implementation of the ODM-UDA MoU, saying it would be hypocritical to participate in postmortem discussions on a document he has already written off.

“I’m not a mortician. There’s no point in me going through a document I’ve already declared dead,” he said

Failed outcomes

According to Sifuna, the ODM-UDA agreement aimed to achieve two key outcomes: the protection of lives to prevent unnecessary killings and the sustenance of a democratic state to maintain stability until 2027.

While he acknowledged that the latter goal was being upheld, Sifuna argued that the agreement had failed critically in protecting lives.

“Ruto is getting his end of the bargain because the democratic state is getting sustained at least until 2027, but our people are not getting there. They are still being killed,” he said.

He referenced the recent death of teacher Albert Ojwang in police custody as the final straw in his assessment of the MoU’s effectiveness.

“On the day that Albert Ojwang died in a police cell, to me this agreement is dead because it doesn’t matter what else you do, Albert will not be able to enjoy that,” Sifuna declared.

Communication with Raila

Sifuna revealed that he had shared his frustrations directly with party leader Raila Odinga, explaining the challenges of defending the party’s engagement with what he referred to as a rogue regime.

“I have spoken with Raila (Baba), I’ve explained to him my frustrations, the difficulties of having to explain what we are doing with this rogue regime, the confusion that has come to my mind because this is not what I was taught,” he said.

He maintained that nothing he had said publicly was without Baba’s knowledge.

“Just know there’s nothing that I can say publicly that I haven’t said privately to my party leader,” he emphasised.