SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2014
Kakamega Senator Boni Khalwale (right) with Amani Coalition leader Musalia Mudavadi during a past event. Dr Khalwale has said that the Musalia presidential bid might very well turn out to be the most disappointing and tactless endeavour that he went through. PHOTO | FILE.
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As debate rages over a proposed national dialogue, Kakamega Senator Boni Khalwale talks of the blunders made by Mr Musalia Mudavadi in the run up to the 2013 election.
According to Dr Khalwale, Mr Kenyatta called Mr Mudavadi, the leader of the UDF party, and drove to his Riverside home just when the UDF leader’s allies were preparing to attend an ODM rally at Uhuru Park.
Mr Mudavadi had quit Raila Odinga’s corner a month earlier and in the deal Uhuru and Mudavadi signed, they were to battle it out on who between them would be the Presidential flag bearer.
Many in government at the time were said to favour Mudavadi because of the crimes against humanity charges facing Mr Kenyatta at the ICC.
The pact was signed on December 4 2012, the deadline for depositing pre-election pacts with the registrar of political parties, effectively closing the door for any change of mind.
Dr Khalwale, who was Mr Mudavadi’s right hand man in the last election, told Saturday Nation Friday that all this took place the same day Cord was holding a rally at Uhuru Park which “seemed to have sent shivers down Mr Kenyatta’s spine.”
“On seeing the threat of Cord from the large crowd at Uhuru Park at 10.30 Uhuru Kenyatta panicked and immediately came to Mr Mudavadi’s home at Riverside,” he said.
Dr Khalwale said he was then summoned together with former Malava MP Soita Shitanda to witness the signing of the agreement.
Dr Khalwale said Mr Mudavadi had earlier told them that he was the choice of the establishment.
“Mudavadi called me and Shitanda and told us in confidence that he had reason to believe that he was going to be the presidential candidate of choice for the status quo and that he needed our support,” Dr Khalwale said, adding that President Kibaki began sending signals which appeared to buttress this belief.
But the UDF brigade joined Raila after Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto began campaigning in earnest and “State House signals all but dissipated.”
After the Mudavadi pact, Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto moved and signed their own deal on which they rode to victory.
The commission declared Mr Kenyatta the President with 6,173,433 or 50.07 per cent of the votes cast. Mr Odinga got 5,340,526 votes (43.3per cent) while Mr Mudavadi secured 483,981 votes (3.93 per cent.)
Mr Mudavadi would again sign a post-election pact of co-operation with Jubilee, lending credence to claims he had been in the loop all along to help Kenyatta ascend the presidency.
“Signs that there was an inner circle unknown to us became evident in the end. But I don’t know whether money was involved,” Dr Khalwale said.
After the stinging defeat of your bull Kwayumba in March have you slaughtered him?
Kwayumba was actually retired. In bull fighting, we do not use the word slaughter as doing so offends the spirits. Bulls graduate to spirits. The reason he lost the fight at Khayega was because of failing eyesight.
Why did you abandon medical practice for politics?
I realised that some of our patients did not die because there was no health personnel to attend to them; they died because there were no medical supplies and drugs. This is how I decided to seek public office to correct this sad state of affairs.
I am a student of Ernesto Che Guevara, a doctor of medicine, who left teaching to sanitise politics in Argentina.
Steve Biko also left medical school and went to the rural South Africa to re-awaken the Mandela dream when the patriarch was in prison.
My teacher Prof Arthur Obel also taught me organised thinking and these are the same skills I use today in politics. You must have noticed that I do not read speeches in public gatherings.
What are you reading now?
Why Nations Fail by James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu. It is relevant on what is happening in Kenya today. It speaks of origins of power, poverty and prosperity.
I am also reading, The Amazing Grace which is about William Wilberforce, the politician who single handedly fought slave trade in the House of Commons.
In the face of so much corruption in the country, I am also reading The Godfather by Mario Puzo. It offers a diagnostic narrative on the beginning of corruption, the black world and the underworld which controls the black market.
From where did you draw the courage to look at the President in the eye and tell him he would be impeached?
It is in a monarchy where kings rule by decree. His powers are not defined, they and the king is a notch just slightly lower than God. None of the issues I raised were borne out of malice or figment of imagination. That security is a problem in this country is a fact.
You were the chair of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee. What don’t Kenyans know about these Anglo-Leasing payments?
The President knows the people who should be investigated and whose property should be confiscated and proceeds from such used to pay the so-called debts.
Public funds are not managed through presidential decrees like we saw him authorise payment to shadowy figures. People with access to the president now, the kind of access they could not get under President Kibaki, are abusing that access by persuading or coercing him to pay them. Now Kenya is fast galloping towards a failed state.
But your critics accuse the Opposition of pontificating without offering solutions.
The long term solution to the insecurity problem, for instance, is to withdraw KDF from Somalia.
Second, if I were the president of Kenya, I would persuade other presidents of the East African Community to admit Somalia into the regional bloc.
With such mutual ties, it would be hard for them to see us as enemies. Today due to such ties, it is almost impossible for Kenya to go to war with Uganda or any other member country.
Cord has given an ultimatum for dialogue failure to which it will call for mass action. Do you want to stoke a revolution?
It is a question of semantics. But the new constitution provides for peaceful mass action. If the President does what we are asking him to, we will call it off.
But for God’s sake, it could happen that the President is removed via the will of the people through peaceful demonstration. It happened last month in Thailand. Article 73 of the Constitution provides that the Presidents acts honourably.
Is Dr Khalwale an honourable man?
I drive some very good cars and do so proudly to remind people that you can still own the good things of life without stealing from the public.
I don’t have anything I can’t account for. I have a house in Mombasa which I bought from my private medical practice. I have a home in Nairobi which I bought through the mortgage that Parliament gives when you win an election. I have a home in Kakamega which I built partly from my medical practice as well as what I am paid as an MP.
But Budalangi MP Ababu Namwamba once labelled you a gun for hire saying your non-affiliation to any political divide makes you an ideal choice for your benefactors.
When you do not know somebody, you can say anything about them. But today Ababu would find it impossible to think or imagine that I am a gun for hire. He had not walked with me long enough to know me.
What book would you recommend President Kenyatta?
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
You were the soloist of the chorus which hounded Finance Minister Amos Kimunya out of office. From there things never went well for the Kipipiri politician. Do you sometimes regret that you could have ruined his life?
Choices! I knew the impact of what I did to his career. I was choosing between his personal interest and that of Kenyans. At that time too, many theories were advanced that I was a gun for hire but it has come to pass that there was substance in what I was saying because Kimunya has since been charged in a court of law on related charges.
Then you passionately backed Musalia Mudavadi’s presidential bid. What went wrong?
The Musalia presidential bid might very well turn out to be the most disappointing and tactless endeavour that I went through.
Mudavadi called me and Soita Shitanda and told us in confidence that he had reason to believe that he was going to be the presidential candidate of choice for the status quo and that he needed our support. President Kibaki in his pronouncements also began sending signals to this effect.
Although we were in different political parties, I thought about it and I fell for it. I folded my party, New Ford Kenya, and entered some entity called UDF whose origin I had no idea.
Upon seeing Cord’s mammoth crowd at Uhuru Park at 10:30 that day-it was clear that Raila was winning and Uhuru Kenyatta panicked and immediately came to Mudavadi’s home at Riverside.
I was summoned to go to Mudavadi’s home and a pact was signed. Little did I know that was just a red herring to draw our attention from the people’s voice that was now echoing from Uhuru Park.
We were joining Raila that day. The other blunder was the naming of his running mate.
We had settled on Gideon Moi because of his Rift Valley background, but when the day of unveiling his running mate came, Mudavadi threw a shocker. He named Jeremiah Kioni, a greenhorn.
My people in Kakamega told me: “We have been hearing stories of project, do not take it lightly. Why did he take somebody from the community with the strongest presidential candidate (as per the opinion polls?) They asked. They told me an underhand game was being played on us.
That is the time I realized Mudavadi had other people who were part of an inside ring I did not belong to.
How were you going to share power?
Mudavadi was going to be the President, Ruto his deputy and Uhuru the Majority leader in the National Assembly. But I became apprehensive when they told us that the fine tuning would be done later.
A while back you said that Kijana Wamalwa died fighting Raila and that his orphans are supposed to carry on the fight. What informed the turn around, now that you are firmly in his court?
Any issues we have had with the former Prime Minister have never been personal as that might suggest. And again I have not joined Cord. I was not elected on a coalition, nobody was.
But I cannot just sit back as the government violates the constitution and fail to speak out just because Raila’s coalition is doing it.
While ‘Baba’ was away, Cord’s activities all but ground to a halt. Can the Opposition hold without Raila?
Kenya is not looking for a strong leader but a strong team. We already have that strong team and in that rally I said come 2017, they will get Neymar (an attacking mid-fielder at Barcelona Football Club). I am Neymar, I will join them.
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