Has Ruto let the cat out of the bag with his lament about bad advice?

taPHOTO | JARED NYATAYA Deputy President William Ruta at a past function.  NATION

In Summary

• The message Mr Ruto was sending out last week is that the disgruntled acolytes he has been publicly disowning from his Kalenjin side of the Jubilee coalition — Alfred Keter and others — were right after all.
• The two Keters, the former a young freshman MP for Nandi Hill and the latter Senator for Kericho and Mr Ruto’s most loyal and trusted ally over the last few years, have been causing waves with claims that key figures loyal to President Kenyatta were instrumental in ‘fixing’ the Deputy President by providing evidence and witnesses for the ICC.

Following Deputy President William Ruto’s assertion last week that President Kenyatta was being misled by advisors, one would expect a whole slew of senior functionaries at State House, the Office of the President, the State Law Office, cabinet offices, and other places where advice is sought, to be taking cover.

Mr Ruto promised that those who misadvised the President into making contentious appointments outside the law would have some very tough questions to answer. No heads have rolled since, and that might be because those in Mr Ruto’s crosshairs were not a motley bunch of bureaucrats.

What the Deputy President was letting out, inadvertently or otherwise, is not that some civil servants are giving the President bad advice, but that the President acts on bad advice.

He was distancing himself from the missteps evident in the controversial appointments and throwing the buck upstairs where it belonged.

That was a remarkable development in what has hitherto been seen as dual leadership where the President and his deputy get on so famously. The bonhomie and body language the two put on is unparalleled in Kenyan leadership.

The public jokes at each other’s expense, use of first names, and generally putting on displays of affection indicated that they are the best of friends.

The message Mr Ruto was sending out last week is that the disgruntled acolytes he has been publicly disowning from his Kalenjin side of the Jubilee coalition — Alfred Keter and others — were right after all.

The two Keters, the former a young freshman MP for Nandi Hill and the latter Senator for Kericho and Mr Ruto’s most loyal and trusted ally over the last few years, have been causing waves with claims that key figures loyal to President Kenyatta were instrumental in ‘fixing’ the Deputy President by providing evidence and witnesses for the ICC.

That has been in reference to a few powerful figures from central Kenya inherited from President Kibaki’s government, notably Secretary to the Cabinet Francis Kimemia, Interior Principal Secretary Mutea Iringo, National Intelligence Service director-general Michael Gichangi and State House political advisor Nancy Gitau.

Those were more or less the same figures targeted in a rebellious spiel by President Kenyatta’s director of speechwriting and messaging Eric Ng’eno in a remarkable Op-Ed piece in the Nation. Mr Ng’eno accused unnamed figures of sabotaging the presidency from within and running their own “parallel state”.

At first, the assumption was that Mr Ng’eno was signalling a looming purge at the behest of the President, but it did not take long for it to turn out that his was a continuation of the Keter-Keter campaign that is largely grounded on exploiting Kalenjin discontent within Jubilee.

These signs of disgruntlement are seen in anything from skewed appointments to public office, domination of President Kenyatta’s Kikuyu half of the coalition in key offices and institutions, and even, bizarrely, uneven sharing of the spoils from the looting of public coffers.

When Deputy President Ruto now suggests that the President might be out of touch therefore acting on flawed advice, he seems to be escalating a few notches higher the campaign initially fronted by Charles Keter and then Alfred Keter.

It is this apparent rebellion that has exposed alleged corruption on massive infrastructure projects such as the new Mombasa-Malaba railway line where, it appears, ‘eating’ was restricted to one side of the coalition.

It is probably only in Kenya where a political fallout can be driven, not by ideological or philosophical differences, but by naked fights over looting rights. The drama continues.

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A Kenyan politician cannot be worth a pitcher of warm piss if he has never survived an assassination attempt. This is what, so far, I can make out of the alleged murder bid on Bungoma Senator Moses Wetang’ula.

However, the police explanation that Mr Wetang’ula’s car hit a wayward billboard doesn’t make sense. Only in Kenya would a motorist have to duck for low-lying billboards in addition to watching out for potholes, jaywalking pedestrians, demented matatu drivers and boda boda riders.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com