DP Ruto is recorded on video bragging on how the two-tribe coalition is desperate to win the Nairobi governor seat even if it will mean rigging elections and ‘buying’/black mailing Supreme court judges….watch the raw video
Here is G Oguda’s take upon watching the video>>>
There is this video somebody has shared on our WhatsApp chat window. It involves Deputy President William Ruto standing on the pulpit of a Nairobi church, yesterday, and delivering a potentially polarising election war cry. Part of his careless speech reads, and I quote; “…hatuwezi kuwa tumeshinda kura ya rais wa Kenya, na tukose kushinda kura ya Gavana wa Nairobi. Hiyo haiwezekani. This time round, liwe liwalo, juu chini, kushoto kulia, lazima tupate hii kura ya Gavana wa Nairobi…”
Let me tell you something.
Nairobi is the pulse of Kenya; anyone winning it has the rare honour of controlling 50%, or 60%, or 70%, or 80% of Kenya’s total GDP, depending on who you ask. In 2013, two coalitions went to the polls head-to-head, for the race to produce the first Governor of Nairobi.
Flying the Jubilee flag was Waititu, Ferdinand Ndung’u – a stone-thrower extraordinaire who settled political matters by the force of Oldowan tools. His convoluted English was borrowed from his college days by the Ganges River. A largely impatient man, and your typical man-on-the-street, he was fleet-footed and heavy-tongued. ‘Baba Yao’, was what his vote basket fondly referred to him.
On the other hand, the CORD coalition braved the stormy weather of locking out Bishop Margaret Wanjiru, who was largely expected to breeze through the party primaries, to settle on boardroom man Kidero, Evans Odhiambo – Tom Mboya’s son-in-law and the face behind the success, or failure, of Mumias Sugar Company (depending on who you ask), and many other blue-chip firms that he wasnt being paid in bananas to head. When the final count was in, Dr. Evans Kidero garnered 692,483 votes against Waititu’s 617,839.
Jubilee have never, really, got over the grief of losing such a sumptuous fat opportunity to eat. They have been suffering silently as they wait for the next electoral cycle – and it has, finally, arrived. Kikuyu voters, from as far as Karatina, are now being mobilised to register in Nairobi to reclaim what’s “rightfully ours”.
And this is where the trouble begins, again.
Ethnic polarisation, almost, took us to the jaws of death in 2008; and we all know the names, inside that envelope, that were chiefly found responsible for the mayhem. When you go to the polls next year, before you mark the ballot paper for the Nairobi Governor, remember Deputy President William Ruto’s immortal words; “this time round, liwe liwalo, juu chini, kushoto kulia, lazima tupate hii kura ya Gavana wa Nairobi…”
Anyone who speaks in that tone, with such assured finality, has something rolled up his sleeves that not many Kenyans know of, and it points to, you can clearly see, using unconventional tactics to win the seat that they have been salivating over for years now.
This is not the first time underhand tactics have been openly encouraged, and exercised, mostly by the regime in power, to win a political seat in this country. Mazoea yana taabu. The Jubilee chaps have realised that, in politics, as in life, the end always justifies the means; and that, by and large, stolen victories, especially in Africa, rarely gets punished, or scorned at, by Big Brother America.
When Barack Obama flew down here and showed solidarity with the Jubilee government, any little doubt left in the minds of most Kenyans – who were still aggrieved after the Supreme Court bungled the Presidential petition before it – were settled after it became clear that the United States of America don’t care, anymore, how Africa leaders get to power. China is busy harassing them off the African market and they are keen not to upset the hitherto loyal base. Obama danced to ‘Sura Yako Mzuri Mama’, at State House, even though his face is far from beautiful neither is he a mother.
When you want to impress upon your host, you can dance to anything, as long as you sign deals behind closed doors. Its about bilateral interests, not whining losers who, in Barack Obama’s own words, “wants the United States to be involved when they are not in power and when they are in power, they want the United States to mind their own business.”
That was a bitter pill to swallow, no doubt, especially for those who expected the US government to directly address the maladministration by this clueless government.
It later emerged that the US are not a paragon of democratic virtue, after all. They, also, have had their fair share of electoral malpractices but choose to keep them under wraps. Even in 2000 when John Kerry was arm twisted out of the presidency by George Bush, they kept it under cover and never mentions it to the world.
But it is in 1960 when America almost went to a civil war because of an election.
This truth is self-evident, that Republicans still believe that John F. Kennedy benefited from vote fraud, in Illinois and Texas, to win the 1960 elections against Richard Nixon. These two states were important because if Nixon had carried both, he would have earned 270 electoral votes, one more than the 269 needed to win the majority in the Electoral College and the presidency. The race was a dead-heat from the word go, out of the 68 million votes cast, then, Kennedy defeated Nixon by a thin margin of 113,000 votes. That Richard Nixon was cheated out of the presidency in 1960 has become almost an accepted fact.
At the time of the brutal contest, the presidency was still with the Republican Party, under Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon always insisted that others, including President Eisenhower, encouraged him, at the time, to dispute the outcome of the 1960 vote but that he refused on grounds that he did not want to cause a “constitutional crisis, hurt America in the eyes of the world, and tear the country apart.” “Besides”, he added, “pursuing the claims would mean charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.” At a 1960 Christmas party, he was heard greeting guests, saying; “we won but they stole it from us.”
President Nixon, it is reported, nursed the electoral grudge for years, and when he was criticized for his Watergate crimes he would cite the Kennedys’ misdeeds as precedent. He felt JFK’s supposed theft entitled him to cheat in 1972 saying; “It’s an interesting hypothetical: If no doubt had been cast over the 1960 election, would Watergate have happened?”
No.
If there is one example that there is nothing Statesmanly in acting a sissy when your votes are being stolen, then President Richard Nixon is that shining light.
When the Watergate scandal implicating President Nixon reached a boil, no one in America, not even in Congress, stopped for a minute to remember the man who put his country before self by refusing to heed the call to plunge America into a constitutional crisis after being rigged out of the 1960 elections. When the unrelenting Watergate heat kept coming at his door, he had no choice but to succumb and resign halfway through his Presidency. No one cared, even for a second, not even his republican mates, on how he saved the country in 1960, when he played Statesman.
Raila Odinga was cheated out of a fair contest once, and, even though they say he played statesman by letting peace win, and accepting a junior prime minister role, no one in the PNU wing of Mwai Kibaki remembered these heroics when they were dealing with him, thereafter.
A certain Chirau Ali Mwakwere was famous for bringing out the ‘nusu carpet na choo’ issue whenever the PNU wing was unleashed on Raila Odinga. See where Mwakwere is now – a measly figure of a man posted as a diplomat in a country his employer supported the rival faction. The other one is Danston Mungatana – the young, hot-blooded chap who thought taking on Raila Odinga would earn his votes among poikilothermic crocodiles of the Tana. he’s now out of a job, and is begging on the corridors of power. The other one, who had no respect for his government boss, was William Samoei Ruto who openly showed his hot-headedness by refusing to resign after his boss Raila Odinga had fired him together with Sam Ongeri for acts of gross misuse of public office. He calls his elder ‘yule jamaa wa vitendawili’ something that even the President of this country has never attempted to do so.
It is now apparent that anyone who wants to contest for any political position – from the chairmanship of my village cattle-dip to the presidency of this rotting country – must, now, be ready to employ the Jubilee time-tested tactic, that; “this time round, liwe liwalo, juu chini, kushoto kulia, lazima tupate hii kura ya Gavana wa Nairobi…”
That clip, by William Ruto, leaves us with two take-home messages, that; (i) no one remembers who came in second’, and that (ii) statesmanship is overrated – ask Richard Nixon, in 1960, or Al Gore, in 2000, or Raila Odinga, in 2007.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Leave a Reply