MUGWE: Ndindi Nyoro and the politics of the donkey between two bales

There was no visible advantage in choosing one over the other, no greater sweetness, no shorter path, no rational reason to turn in either direction. And so, the donkey stood still.

Unable to prefer the left bale to the right, and unwilling to move without a reason, it remained trapped in perfect indecision.

Hunger did not push it forward, neither did reason release it. It hesitated, then froze and in the end died in the very middle of abundance.

This was a thought experiment undertaken in the 14^th century by the French philosopher Jean Buridan. The donkey’s error was not that it could not choose between the two bales.

It was that it assumed that the bales will wait patiently for as long as it took him to strike a pose of judicious deliberation.

However, hay is not patient. It is perishable, the field is crowded and while one animal remains indecisive, the others are eating.

Waiting is clever only while the thing you are waiting on keeps its value. Change that, and the same caution that looked like wisdom becomes a slow way to starve. 

Which brings me to the MP for Kiharu, Ndindi Nyoro, and to a strategy our politics has long mistaken for wisdom.

On June 18, the National Assembly passed the Finance Bill 2026 at Third Reading by 122 votes to 40. Nyoro was not among them.

This was not a small absence by an obscure backbencher. It was an absence of a former chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee, a politician who has built a national profile as one of Parliament’s most vocal critics of public borrowing and fiscal indiscipline, and who had opposed the same Bill at Second Reading.

When the vote that actually counted came, he was abroad, on engagements he says could not be postponed. He later apologised and told us “nilikosea”. Then he asked Kenyans to give him three to four weeks to tell them which side he is on.

There are apologies that close a matter, and apologies that open a larger one. This was the latter.  For the problem was no longer only that Nyoro had missed a vote.

MPs miss votes all the time, sometimes for good reasons, often for reasons that insult the intelligence of the people they represent. The deeper problem was that his apology did not answer the question his absence had raised. It sharpened it.

It would be a mistake to read this as a lapse. It is the signature of a method. Nyoro is the mountain's most disciplined fence-sitter, the lone ranger every camp courts and none can claim, the man who says that the formations will all shift and that the smart move is to decide at the end of 2026.

He has built a career on the one asset Kenyan politics has always prized above policy. The option to go either way.

So, let’s read this for what it is. Our politics are not organised around ideology, but around ethnic arithmetic. This makes the uncommitted principal the most valuable man in the room.

Tribal kingpins bid for him not for what he believes, but for the sheer credibility of his threat to defect. Withholding commitment is the entire architecture of what we have politely called negotiated democracy.

The trouble is that this fence-sitting is beginning to decay, and with it, the usefulness of those who refuse to choose.

Nyoro has spent the past fortnight standing between two bales of hay. On one side sits the government from which he rose, the political formation that gave him proximity, visibility and authority.

On the other sits the rising public mood of discontent over taxation, borrowing, cost of living and a political class that speaks with the people, but votes with itself.

Nyoro has tried to stand exactly between the two, close enough to power not to be expelled from it, and close enough to dissent not to lose the applause of those outside it. His difficulty is that he now inhabits a political middle that is not neutral ground, but quicksand.

That middle was always going to become uncomfortable. The Finance Bill merely exposed it.

Begs the question. Did Nyoro request for a couple of weeks to consult or calibrate?

There is a difference between consultation and calibration. Consultation begins with a moral question of what is right, what do my people expect, what does the moment require? Calibration begins with a tactical question of where is the wind blowing, who is gaining ground, which alliance is safer, which bridge must not yet be burned?

Nyoro’s problem is that he has become too loud to be ambiguous. There are politicians who can drift because nobody expects them to steer. He is not one of them.

His political brand has been built as the man of numbers and budgets, the man who speaks on debt and taxation at every public opportunity he gets.

That brand carried authority precisely because, in a noisy Parliament, he appeared to understand the machinery behind the noise. That is why his absence from a Finance Bill vote should not be read as a diary conflict, but as a contradiction.

A politician who makes finance and fiscal courage his pulpit cannot simply disappear when finance becomes a vote. When a Finance Bill moves from debate to decision and then be absent when Parliament turns fiscal choices into law, is not a small scheduling failure. It creates a gap between rhetoric and record, and in politics that gap is where trust begins to leak.

The deeper issue, however, is that Nyoro is now an example of a wider Kenyan political habit of the desire to enjoy the benefits of opposition without paying its costs.

Many leaders want to sound independent without becoming isolated, to criticise government without becoming its enemy, to be cheered by the streets without being locked out of the state. They want the moral capital of dissent and the material convenience of proximity.

This is the new fence-sitting. It is not silence. It is selective noise. It is loud where noise is cheap and absent where the record is permanent.

It gives speeches, not votes. It issues statements, not signatures. It opposes in principle and disappears in procedure.

For many years, this strategy worked because Kenyan politics rewarded ambiguity. The parliamentary record could be buried under harambees, funerals, development tours and tribal arithmetic.

A politician could take one position in Nairobi, another in the constituency and a third in private negotiation.

But something has shifted. The citizen has become more archival. People now screenshot, count, compare and retrieve.

They are less impressed by what a politician says after the fact, and more interested in where he was when the division bell rang.

Nyoro has taken the heat because his absence carried irony, but the shame is broader. Too many MPs have mastered the art of being unavailable at the point of decision and available at the point of explanation.

They miss the vote, then return to the constituency fluent in outrage. They avoid the record, then compete for the microphone.

I concede that it is possible that Nyoro’s absence could have been inevitable. Afterall, public life is full of competing priorities, and not every absence is betrayal.

It is also true that a single vote, given the numbers, would not have changed the outcome, even if Nyoro had voted No. But his vote may have been symbolic.

And this is precisely the point. Politics is symbolic especially when the outcome is already known. The vote that cannot change the result is often the vote that reveals the person. It says I stood here. I was counted here.

The tragedy for Nyoro is that he had an opportunity to do something rare by making his absence small and his position large. He could have said, I was wrong to miss the vote but let the record show I oppose this Bill.

Although, it would not have erased the absence, it would have ended the ambiguity. Instead, the apology came with a pause button.

Finally, my unsolicited advice is to Nyoro. Leadership cannot always be instant. Serious choices require thought. But there are moments when excessive thought begins to resemble evasion.

When the house is burning, the firefighter does not ask for a couple of weeks to decide whether water or petrol is the better intervention.

When the vote has already taken place, the public anger already present and when your own apology admits error, the question is no longer whether time is needed. The question is what is time being used for?

Is it to reflect, or to hedge?

The Buridan paradox is not really about donkeys. It is about the paralysis that comes from wanting a choice to make itself.

The donkey starves because it waits for one bale to become more obviously preferable than the other. It wants the world to remove the burden of personal decisions. Many politicians do the same.

They wait for the crowd to become clear enough, the polls firm enough, the coalition safe enough, the betrayal deniable enough. Then, when the outcome is visible, they call it principle.

It is not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena – Theodore Roosevelt