March 9, 2013: President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta with family at the
Catholic University soon after being declared the fourth prsident of
Kenya. The March 4, 2013 election brought to an end the rocky
power-sharing arrangement between then President Kibaki and Prime
Minister Raila Odinga. PHOTO/FILE
The March 4 election brought to an end
the rocky power-sharing arrangement between then President Kibaki and
Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
The election saw Mr
Odinga, hitherto touted as a front-runner in the presidential race, lose
narrowly to Jubilee Coalition’s Uhuru Kenyatta.
Mr Odinga and his running mate, Mr Kalonzo Musyoka, rejected the results and moved to the Supreme Court.
On
March 30, 2013 the Supreme Court upheld Mr Kenyatta’s victory in a
unanimous judgment, asserting that the Independent Electoral and
Boundaries Commission (IEBC) had conducted the polls in a free, fair,
transparent and credible manner.
The historic
five-minute judgment set the stage for the swearing in of the
President-elect and his running mate, Mr William Ruto, on April 9.
It
took Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto another nine days to release their list of
ministries but it was not until April 23 that the first four nominees
to the cabinet were named.
These were former banker
James Macharia (Health), university lecturer Fred Matiang’i (Information
and Communication), former Treasury official Henry Rotich (Treasury)
and former PS Amina Abdalla (Foreign Affairs). Two days later, Mr
Kenyatta named 12 more cabinet secretaries, including politicians
Charity Ngilu and Najib Balala.
On April 27, the
country woke to the shocking news that outspoken Makueni Senator Mutula
Kilonzo, a leading light in Mr Odinga’s Cord and one of Mr Kenyatta and
Mr Ruto’s fiercest critics, had been found dead at his Maanzoni ranch in
Machakos County.
His death would set the stage for a
bitterly contested by-election that saw Jubilee pull out all the stops
to stop his daughter Kethi from succeeding him.
Ms
Kilonzo had made her name during Mr Odinga’s election petition and was
viewed as a front-runner to succeed her father on a Wiper ticket before
former Kibwezi MP Agnes Ndetei challenged her candidature, saying she
was not a registered voter.
A tribunal set up by the
IEBC ruled that Ms Kilonzo was indeed not a registered voter and was
ineligible to contest, forcing Cord to replace her with her brother,
Mutula Kilonzo Junior.
Jubilee on the other hand
“poached” former Wiper member Philip Kaloki to run on its ticket but he
was whitewashed by the young Kilonzo.
The Jubilee
government suffered a major credibility crisis in May when it emerged it
had hired a private jet for Deputy President Ruto, at an estimated
Sh100 million, to fly to Nigeria, Ghana and Central African Republic.
A
few months later, President Kenyatta disbanded a high powered team
tasked with organising the Kenya@50 celebrations after it submitted a
staggering Sh2.5 billion budget.
September proved to be
a challenging month for Jubilee following the start of Mr Ruto’s trial
at the International Criminal Court.
The government
went into a diplomatic offensive, mobilising the African Union to
petition the United Nations Security Council to have the trial either
blocked or heard without Mr Ruto’s presence in court. The efforts,
however, came to nought.
The Jubilee government’s faced
its first major security threat on Saturday, September 21 when heavily
armed terrorists stormed the Westgate Mall and shot dead 71 people.
December
2013 brought pleasant news for Mr Kenyatta after ICC Prosecutor Fatou
Bensouda declared she did not have sufficient evidence to proceed with
the case facing him.
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