By Ngunjiri Wambugu via fb
WHY A UNITED MT KENYA VOTE BLOC IS DANGEROUS TO RUTO
If you pick the voter register and results of the 2017 elections you will realize that the Mt Kenya region has a united vote bloc of 6.5 Million registered voters.
In the 2017 elections Uhuru mobilised a total of 4.8M votes from this bloc as it is his stronghold. Ruto mobilised 1.3M votes from the RV Kalenjin vote bloc. The total votes from the two strong holds were 6.1M votes.
Ruto wants to be the President in 2022. He starts off with ~1.5M votes from his strongholds. He needs the 4.5M votes from Mt Kenya to have a head-start over anyone else competing with him. This is why he has made a lot more campaign trips to Mt. Kenya region than to any other region.
But Ruto has a problem. In 2013 and 2017 he used his 1.5M votes to negotiate for the DEPUTY PRESIDENCY AND 50% of GOK for himself and his allies. What can he offer Mt. Kenya for their 4.5M votes?
He could give them the DP and 50% of GOK like he got – as unfair as that is to them considering his votes were one third of theirs. But he knows that if he does that he the rest of the country will gang up against him for perpetuating a 60-yr Kikuyu-Kalenjin alliance for the Presidency. And he will lose in 2022.
But if he doesn’t offer Mt Kenya something substantive in his post-2022 government they will not support him. In fact they will support someone else.
The problem is that Ruto knows that with 4.5M votes ANYONE Mt Kenya supports – as long as it’s not one of them – will beat anyone else running in 2022 hands down; including Ruto himself.
William Ruto must therefore do something about the Mt Kenya vote. He has two options.
One; Invite them to ‘repay’ the debt they owe him for supporting their son Uhuru Kenyatta in 2013 & 2017 by supporting him in 2022 without asking for anything in return. But this idea failed to sell despite some efforts immediately after 2017 elections. They have already said ‘hatuna deni’. They publicly say that they know he did not support their son for nothing, so they cannot support him for nothing. So this option will not work.
The second option is to split the Mt Kenya vote bloc. He can split off the RV Kikuyu into one bloc; the Meru & Embu into another; Kiambu and Nyeri into a 3rd bloc; and Muranga, Nyandarua & Kirinyaga into a fourth bloc (this fourth bloc will be split off from their central brothers by being told that they haven’t produced a president so they should strategise separately).
This option splits the 4.5M votes into at least 4 smaller blocs of around 1M votes each. Mt Kenya will then be split evenly between the top four presidential candidates; of which one will be Ruto.
This will also completely neutralise the region’s capacity to negotiate for anything jointly in the post-2022 government2022, or to affect that election in any meaningful way in favor or against, any candidate – including Ruto himself.
#TWIMENYE
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