President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto have a tall order indeed over the next 47 months ? remaining together meaningfully and substantively and avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of Raila?s springboard to ultimate power. If Raila bounces back, it will mean they dropped the ball.
President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto have a tall order indeed over the next 47 months – remaining together meaningfully and substantively and avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of Raila’s springboard to ulti- mate power. If Raila bounces back, it will mean they dropped the ball.
The sons of Kenya’s founding President and Vice President, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Raila Amolo Odinga, are watching each other like proverbial hawks.
One of them has all the panoply of one of the most centralised national security state edifices in Africa at his disposal and the other is finally down to one last, epic effort at capturing that state. The sons of Jomo Kenyatta and the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga are playing out a titanic political rivalry far into a second generation.
President Uhuru is determined to put in a full two-term presidential tenure and former Prime Minister Raila is hell-bent on not only confining him to one term but also foreclosing the prospects of another Kikuyu taking the presidency for several presidential election cycles.
Uhuru’s ambition is something he openly professes at every opportunity he gets at Jubilee Alliance gatherings. Raila’s intent, on the other hand, is barely discussible in polite company but it has a deep undertow and resonance in huge swathes of Kenya, including a large latency in the Jubilee alliance-compliant Rift Valley.
Caught between this face-off of titans is Deputy President William Samoei Ruto, whom Uhuru is fond of characterising as Kenya’s next President – but only beginning in the year 2022.
What Ruto does between now and 2017 is crucial to the political prospects of the presidential son who ultimately became President and the vice-presidential son who became Prime Minister.
And, make no mistake about it, Raila is betting on Uhuru and Ruto not being on the same side in 2017. In other words, the older man (he is 69) is absolutely determined to see, and even to engineer, one of the most volcanic fallouts of Kenya politics ever, between the Mountain and the Valley, inside the next 47 months.
Uhuru, 53, and Ruto, 47, are watching Raila’s every move and perceived sleight of hand. For instance, it is his voice that they hear when Nadi Hills MP Alfred Keter, a member of Ruto’s United Republican Party (URP), persists in his rebellion inside Jubilee to describe the single gauge railway project as a scam in which Kenyans will lose fully KSh400 billion.
And Keter does this despite and in spite of the fact that this gateway infrastructure project is a venture that President Uhuru explicitly and repeatedly considers to be one of the signature deliverables of his first term and key to a second term.
But Keter is not deterred. Speaking at Lessos Primary school during a thanksgiving ceremony for last year’s KCPE candidates, Keter not only repeated his claims that taxpayers will lose Sh400 billion in the rail project and passionately urged that it should be stopped in its tracks until investigations by Parliamentary committees are complete but also issued a dire warning that must be music to Raila’s ears. Keter opined that Uhuru and Ruto would be locked into only one term in power if they did not move against high-level corruption.
Keter said: “Voters may reject the Jubilee government due to corruption: Kenyans are tired of high level corruption which the two leaders must address instead of being misled that Jubilee will rule for 20 years.”
This was a direct swipe at the President, who occasionally speaks about he and his Deputy holding power in quick succession until the early 2030s.
As if this were not brazen enough rebellion, Keter then touched on a theme that seemed to resonate with Raila’s extremely controversial remarks of three weeks previously to the effect that the military were complicit in installing the UhuRuto ticket in power at the March 4, 2913 general election.
Keter claimed there was skewed employment in the military, claiming that it is dominated by officers from one community while qualified Kenyans from other counties are left out.
“For the 10 years under former President Kibaki, several officers from some communities were retired and others started dominating the military,” he said.
This is definitely not the narrative that the President and Deputy President want to hear emanating from within their ranks so early in their first term. On the other hand, to Raila and his supporters it is purest music and must have the felicity that classical music lovers find in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
The attempted militarisation of politics, even on a purely argumentative/rhetorical level, used to constitute grounds for being considered to be engaging in treasonable conduct.
Indeed, many Kenyans spent years in the detention-without-trial dungeons for voicing much less controversial sentiments than Keter’s nay-saying and dire warnings.
However, Kenya has changed and the presidency itself has evolved. In all likelihood today, Keter is not being tracked by packs of saturation-surveillance intelligence officers and other watchers with a view to being “dealt with” at the slightest nod or wink from the presidency. Valuable police man hours are surely not being expended on his every move and utterance.
What Keter is saying is finding all sorts of resonances among the broad public, the so-called silent majority. And if he keeps it up for the next 47 months, all the way to the eve of the next presidential poll, it will have consequences.
Keter’s Greek Chorus utterances and prophesying of Jubilee’s doom adds valuable ammunition to the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy’s conviction that Ruto and the Kalenjin got a raw deal in the 50-50 power sharing deal with Uhuru and the Kikuyu.
With voices like Keter’s being raised all the time, Ruto must be finding it increasingly difficult to convince his Rift Valley grassroots that he secured the best deal possible for them by partnering with Uhuru’s TNA.
When the selfsame Keter and others not long ago severely criticised the President and Deputy President’s appointments of state corporation chairmen, Uhuru and Ruto suspended all other business to spend three days in Rift Valley restating their commitment to equitable power-sharing that is nonetheless mindful of the fact that Kenya is a country and nation of 42 distinct ethnic communities.
This was clearly much easier said than done, for while the Rift Valley was demanding more appointees to state jobs, the rest of the country was mightily resentful of the fact that the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin were enjoying 60 per cent of appointments to the top positions.
These are statistics and deep-seated resentments that Raila will in all likelihood use like a veritable trampoline to bounce back from his present predicaments.
Five years out in the cold, in terms of appointments to plum State corporation posts and other opportunities, is a nuclear winter in large swathes of the country.
The prospect of 10 full years without those plum positions and all the patronage and prestige that come with them for their sons and daughters could result in the other 40 communities doing the math – and voting massively against Jubilee, ‘Tyranny of Numbers’ factor or no, with a vengeance borne of sheer desperation. A decade is a very long time in politics, and, in the long run, we are all dead. This is the stuff insurrections are made of.
Faced with 185-plus state corporation positions to distribute, and already with the Cabinet and ambassadorial posts sewn up, Uhuru and Ruto would do well not to give the rest of the country reason to dread the prospect of a decade of Jubilee, let alone two decades.
Instead, they should be competing to be seen to distribute these jobs away from their own regions. After all, the Mountain will not desert Uhuru or the Valley Ruto simply because they gave jobs to all other Kenyans.
And even if there were an internal backlash, where would the Kikuyu who was deserting Uhuru for not appointing more Kikuyus go and to whom and expecting what kind of reception? By the same token, where would a Kalenjin on not dissimilar grounds go and expecting what?
Clearly, the presidency has nothing to lose by discarding the ridiculous 60-40 per cent hogging of state corporation jobs by the Mountain and the Valley, but Raila & Co have everything to gain, the nearer the next presidential poll looms, by beating on this drum of inequity and iniquity.
Jubilee is gifting Raila with the presidency on his fourth attempt at becoming the tenant of State House if it does not respond to such manifest challenges as the powerful resentments and jealousies stoked by its winner-take-all posture and processes.
These things matter – deeply. Below the Presidency and below Raila, the most popular politician in Kenya is easily Nairobi Senator Mike Sonko, who bestrides the nation’s most cosmopolitan region and uses his wealth and networking on a completely tribe-less basis.
Some might consider Sonko’s to be a petty popularity rooted in the rootlessness of the capital city’s informal settlements or slums, but it matters mightily, and it pays handsome political dividends (remember he garnered 800,000-plus votes), that Nairobians young and old view and approach Sonko on any other consideration but the fact that he is an ethnic Mkamba.
President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto have a tall order indeed over the next 47 months – remaining together meaningfully and substantively and avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of Raila’s springboard to ultimate power. If he bounces back, it will mean they dropped the ball.
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