SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2015
President Uhuru Kenyatta (centre) with Deputy President William Ruto (right) and Majority Leader Aden Duale at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on January 29, 2014. FILE PHOTO | PSCU PSCU
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President Uhuru Kenyatta personally reined in Kieni MP Kanini Kega, telling him to drop the censure motion against House Majority Leader Aden Duale, theSunday Nation has established.
Mr Kenyatta’s concern was that subjecting his key lieutenant in Parliament to a censure motion sponsored by an MP from his TNA party would be interpreted as a tacit approval by State House.
It also emerged that Mr Kega was summoned to State House for a dressing-down by Mr Kenyatta moments before he threw in the towel.
After this, a panicky Kega went to mollify Mr Duale at his office in Parliament, pledging to stop the onslaught and explaining that, after all, he meant no harm.
The closest Mr Kega got to confirming this was when he told the Sunday Nation, “If I kept pushing this matter, I was going to shoot myself in the foot.”
Jubilee Alliance Party (JAP) vice-chairman David Murathe, who is said to have almost unfettered access to State House, said the President cannot allow political manoeuvres meant to rock his government from within.
“Some of these issues will keep cropping up but lawmakers should utilise internal avenues to sort them out. We do not want to play into the hands of our opponents.”
VOTE OF CONFIDENCE
Thus the decision to include Mr Duale as part of President Kenyatta’s delegation to Uganda during the recent state visit is understood to have been a vote of confidence in the feisty lawmaker. It was also meant to bring closure to the matter.
Mr Kega said the censure motion had started taking a larger political dimension than the insecurity agenda. “After holding several meetings with my colleagues from North-Eastern and Nyeri, we decided it was better to drop the motion to avoid splits in the Jubilee Coalition, more so at this time when we are nearing the 2017 elections,” he said.
His colleagues would later accuse him of not consulting them before dropping the idea.
But the fear of being isolated in Jubilee made the MP ditch the motion.
This is a trodden path. More than a year later, Igembe South MP Mithika Linturi is yet to warm his way back to Jubilee’s nerve centre after he championed a Bill to censure the powerful Devolution and Planning boss, Ms Anne Waiguru. Like Mr Kega, Mr Linturi chickened out at the eleventh hour.
Lawmakers, especially from Nyeri County, wanted Mr Duale censured for going back on his April promise to produce a list of financiers and sympathisers of the Al-Shabaab terror group.
The promise came after the terror group killed 147 people at Garissa University. Before this, quarry workers, mostly from Nyeri, were killed by the group in North Eastern.
TERSE POSITION
In one occasion, Mr Kenyatta dispatched his Deputy William Ruto to meet the MPs on July 23. Without mincing words, the DP passed on Mr Kenyatta’s terse position to them.
Other lawmakers who attended the meeting were Mr Ndung’u Gethenji (Tetu), Mr Peter Weru (Mathira) and Ms Priscilla Nyokabi, women’s representative.
The President was of the view that Jubilee MPs were ill-suited for “this kind of assignment even if they had concerns about their residents, who have borne the brunt of terror attacks in the North”.
It also emerged that two chairpersons appointed from both sides — Senator Mutahi Kagwe and Maalim Mohamud Mohamed — were frequently briefing Mr Ruto on the truce negotiations between lawmakers from Central and North Eastern regions.
Mr Murathe said: “The establishment never supported the censure motion.”
Do you think the DP was going to encourage Nyeri MPs to go ahead and hang Duale? Being a staunch defender of the government, Duale is going nowhere,” Mr Murathe told the Sunday Nation in an interview.
Also, the move would have triggered a host of unintended consequences, both political and religious. Tension had started building among lawmakers from North Eastern region, with muted complaints that they were being targeted. Fear of infiltration by the opposition was also real.
Mukurweini MP Kabando wa Kabando, a supporter of the motion, also adopted a conciliatory tone on the subject that had set them on a collision course with State House.
The body language of the House leadership also pointed to a wider scheme meant to defeat the move.
http://www.nation.co.ke/news/politics/Uhuru-Kenyatta-Aden-Duale-Kanini-Kega/-/1064/2834602/-/rolqp2/-/index.html
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