Ruto's stature worrying big players in political field

By Oscar Obonyo

Sometime last year, as the rift between Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Higher Education Minister William Ruto began to show, Regional Development Minister Fred Gumo and his Fisheries counterpart, Paul Otuoma, held a secret meeting and hatched a plot.

Otuoma invited the Eldoret North MP to his Funyula constituency as chief guest of a soccer tournament at Sio Port. Ruto did not disappoint. He honoured the appointment and even rewarded the participating players handsomely.

Meanwhile, as the game progressed, Gumo who was in the company of Raila at his Bondo home persuaded the PM to fly to Funyula and briefly watch part of the game. What Raila and Ruto did not know is that Gumo and Otuoma had arranged a blind date for the two, "to clear their apparent differences".

According to Otuoma, elaborate plans had been made towards "healing our party", including a luncheon at the lakeside town of Port Victoria in the neighbouring Budalang’i constituency.

To date, Otuoma and Gumo remain tight-lipped as to what really transpired and why the meeting flopped. But memories of the events of that day remain fresh among residents of Funyula who witnessed choppers carrying Ruto and Raila land minutes apart and then take off.

Since that dramatic March, last year, episode, repeated efforts by ODM ministers and officials to hold their house together have been replicated everywhere with little success.

Party Functionaries

Understandably, Ruto has severally slipped through the fingers of party functionaries keen on initiating reconciliation talk.

While the PM reportedly exhibits an attitude of indifference, some of his foot soldiers are yet to give up on Ruto. This is indeed the curious thing about the Raila-Ruto relationship. While they seem to have severed links, their henchmen are preoccupied with compelling them towards working together.

Ruto’s exploits go beyond ODM. Like a gadfly, he has emerged as Kenya’s most controversial, yet tolerated politician. He whizzes around his political foes disturbingly, inflicting measured pain.

Although anticipated, the referendum results are a painful sting on ODM that swept the boards in North and South rift regions in Rift Valley Province in the 2007 presidential elections.

In fact, Ruto has become the proverbial "msemeno unaokata pande zote mbili (a seesaw that cuts on both edges)". And if Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta had doubts about this reality, then the referendum poll has offered them the answer.

Political Alliance

Believably united in a political alliance, Ruto staged a spirited campaign in the backyards of the DPM and VP, eating up a sizeable chunk of votes from the latter’s Eastern Province home turf.

To many pundits, Ruto is not easy to tame. The more you accommodate and spare him as ODM has done, the more he bites back. And if you get hard on him, he stages an even harder reprisal.

Head of University of Nairobi’s political science department Philip Nying’uro points out that Ruto’s case is one that ODM needs to act on swiftly if it hopes to regain lost ground.

Criticising the party’s approach to pluck the minister from Government, Nying’uro nonetheless opines ODM has every right to get Ruto out of the way within the party machinery to enable it to recruit officials afresh and build support at the grassroots.

Probably aware of this, Ruto has declined to budge. To ODM, he has become the rogue member the party would wish to kick out through the window and probably unleash on political rivals. Yet to the rest of the political class, especially Government, Ruto has assumed the enviable role of Kenya’s most pampered ‘political kid’.

He has done much that many a politician would not dare and got away with it. He has severally rubbed the nose of the political heavyweights, especially that of his party leader, at one point inviting dismissal by the PM, but survived disciplinary action. He has been rewarded almost with everything he has demanded yet this has not stopped him from asking more.

Although he was the last of the so-called ODM Pentagon members to join the Raila-led camp, following a split with Kalonzo, he quickly moved to upstage other players from his Rift Valley Province.

The Higher Education minister was stuck with Kalonzo up until the eleventh hour when he reportedly realised that the ground had shifted in favour of Raila.

Legwork For The PM

Before re-uniting with the rest, ODM Chairman and Industrialisation Minister Henry Kosgey and Agriculture counterpart, Sally Kosgei, spearheaded the legwork for the PM.

Having pulled the rag under the feet of the two, Ruto outsmarted Water Minister Charity Ngilu to the slot of Prime Minister, in the ODM pre-election negotiation. Ngilu was the only woman in the Pentagon.

But owing to the 2007 poll fiasco that compelled the party to operate under a shared government, the Eldoret North MP negotiated himself into the high profile Agriculture ministry, which boasts of over 20 parastatals.

With the plumiest ministry assigned to ODM under his wraps, Ruto then set his eyes on the bigger post of deputising Raila as party leader. He kicked off a storm in the run up to the party’s National Delegates Conference at Bomas of Kenya in December 2008. The result? ODM bent rules to accommodate him as joint deputy party leader alongside Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi.

Three main factors work for Ruto — his astuteness in playing hard politics, numbers from his populous community and youthful age. How far he rides on these factors remains unclear.