Whatever you think of that view, it has the consequence that the nationalist coalition wasn’t simply an elite arrangement: it was responsive to popular demand for land, representation, and a national programme; and its responsiveness to that demand for a national programme was a cause of its fall.
I'd say his view (and mine) is much more cynical than you put it. To quote: "But while these ideological differences existed in rhetoric ... they served more as 'mobilizing agents' for the opposed factions rather than explanatory variables for any real ideological differences"
Earlier, he gives two examples of two consequential ideological differences: land (what to do with it? How to distribute it?) and the point of the state (where should accumulation happen?)
He then points to Mboya’s ideological line (the social democrat who disdained “socialist adventurists”). Since Mboya was the right’s main weapon against the KANU left, and since he was ideologically motivated by Nyong’o’s own admission, and on two of the central issues that split the nationalist
coalition, I think there’s enough evidence of ideological conflict to justify us in turning down your interpretation of that sentence.
I still disagree and could elaborate, but we've also gone way off track. We're in agreement that the left-liberal faction is too brittle to stop the right anytime soon, and that one cause of liberalism's decline is having been made to admit its stated principles are not sincerely held.
Those principles are deemed legitimate only as part of a compromise in a latent social conflict, and the factions of that conflict tend not to value the compromise for itself. Liberalism is trying to 'play for a draw' but that's not coherent.
He views it as a story of struggles for personal ambition with the masses' discontent providing dialectical constraints, forcing the erection of a dictatorship by the nationalist elite. Arguably something similar happened with Napoleon and the French revolution: the man affected whatever political
or religious belief would lead him to power, and his rise and rule had little to do with any sincerely-held ideology on his part.