The Luo should back President Ruto in 2027 without PRE-CONDITIONS and without BINDING agreements.
Pre-conditions and pre-election agreements are a waste of time and fodder for post-election betrayals. There’s nothing binding in politics.
Presidential candidates should be allowed to pick whosoever they want.
Their hands shouldn’t be tied by ethnic or gender considerations.
Some of us believed Martha Karua was a wrong choice but once Baba made the choice, we lived with it.
Women can help one’s chances or extinguish those chances, same as men.
Martha was to bring the Kikuyu vote which she never brought — and some till today accuse her of doing so little.
Doing So little?
Didn’t she attend all Baba campaigns? Didn’t she appear for the debate — and wasn’t she thoroughly clobbered? Didn’t she give it her all? “Laila ni msarendo”, didn’t she cry out in the wilderness?
Till he passed, I don’t remember any day Baba blamed Karua for not ‘delivering’ Mt. Kenya. I also don’t remember Baba ever blaming Uhuru for not delivering Mt. Kenya either.
It was his loss. Baba’s loss. He took it in his stride; and responded in his manner, pushing the state to the wall, then giving nafuu…for the state to serve the people.
On the other hand, President William Ruto won Mt. Kenya vote by cobbling a broad coalition, and working with a wide section of Mt. Kenya leaders.
No politician from Mt. Kenya can claim he/she singlehandedly ‘delivered’ the region to President Ruto.
Against the advice of many, he picked Gachagua as his DP.
It is a decision he made alone.
Most in his party desired other leaders. But they did not make the picking of any of them a deal-breaker.
Gachagua, therefore, misjudged his importance once he was perched at no.2. And that’s why it was very easy for him to be removed. Easy come, easy go. Simple and quick. Very good for our democracy.
We need the President to pick an assistant he can fire.
Government paralysis is worse when infighting has no discernible solution. Put simply, the buck must stop somehere!
We need to abandon politics where leaders are insulated by their tribes; making them out of reach of any accountability mechanism — political or judicial.
The only insulator should be the constitution of the Republic of Kenya, and the confidence the President you’re serving and those charged to impeach you, have in you.
The only demand those of us in the KUMI BILA BREAK side of things need to make to President Ruto is to pick a deputy who is PATRIOTIC to the motherland, Kenya.
He must pick a candidate who has demonstrated his/her appreciation of this vast, multi-party, multi-ethnic society.
Someone who, if he (the president) were to drop dead; the country will still remain in ‘safe hands’.
We do not need deputy presidents who dangle their tribes on our faces — regardless of how big your tribe is. Maturity. Competence. Emotional intelligence. Nothing more. Your tribe must not be an added advantage.
Here, the only thread that binds us is the territorial idea of us being Kenyans.
Anyango, Moraa, Chebet, Njeri, Hanifa, Bhoke. All Kenyans, all equal before the law.
Here, nobody owns more “shares” than the other.
The point I’m making is that we must begin to move our national politics away from pairing tribes to pairing individuals.
Let us move the contest a notch higher, on VISIONS and IDEAS.
Whose vision best represents the Kenya we want to live in?
Whose ideas resonate with your own urgency?
Remember that you elect the President, not the President and his Deputy.
You elect the President.
The Deputy is SELECTED by the President.
THE MOST IMPORTANT SEAT IS THE PRESIDENT.
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ON THE DEPUTY PRESIDENT…
In Kenya today it is very difficult to hold the President at ransom by pre-election pacts.
The realities of governance are quite different from those of campaigns.
The lesson Luos must pick from Kibaki’s 2003 trashing of his MoU with the LDP Party (the Luo party of the time) and the subsequent collapse of the UhuRuto ‘yangu kumi yako kumi’; and the current ‘tulimpigia kura akatufukuza serikalini’ WANTAM noises all point to the difficulties of honouring pre-election pacts.
The attempt to box the Luo community into a corner and have them pursue an illogical endgoal that’s neither helpful to the community nor the nation must be resisted by all Luos.
The Luo will ascend to the presidency but not through threats and bogus political calculations.
A deputy president as the principal assistant to the president cannot negotiate “as equals” with his boss who represent the interests of the entire country.
In the Kenya that’s evolving, and where even kids born in 2007 now have a say; the role of a deputy president has shifted from the community to the nation.
Kenyans want a deputy president who represent the far reaches of this multi-ethnic society.
A deputy president who saw his role as merely carrying out the selfish demands of his community, without regard to the rest, was impeached the other day, being accused of tribalism, and is out of power shouting WANTAM from morning to evening.
If Gachagua, with all the toxic tribal garbage he was spewing on behalf of the so called ‘mighty’ Kikuyu community, fell; what makes us think [that] we can chiefly carry the interests of the Luo and succeed?
The GEMA jingoists today shouting WANTAM from morning to evening deluded themselves that their man, perched at no.2, would give them all they wanted.
Today, they’re neither discussing no.1 nor no.2; and are struggling with even no.3 (prime cs).
Today, they are shopping for viable political alliances in hotels from morning to evening.
Today, they are embracing communities they considered takataka for decades and be that as it may, kamare bado ni ngumu.
Today, those they attempted to keep away from power are inside; and are not leaving anytime soon, despite the many attempts to cajole or threaten them to exit.
The Luo must learn from the mistakes of Gachagua and his Kikuyu group and keep off this emerging discussion of demanding the DP position at gunpoint. The most powerful bargainer in politics is the one who asks very little. Look at Musalia Mudavadi.
If President Ruto sees it fit to go to 2027 with a Luo as his runningmate, the consideration should be on merit, competence and emotional intelligence (maturity) and it should be his own decision, made out of free will, and not out of ethnic blackmail or party threats.
All things constant as they are today, my vote will still be with President Ruto with or without a Luo on the joint ticket.
The Luo card in 2027 is consolidation. Kamae e kaka odhi bet. Siri ni kik ugol oko. Kik watwist plot mawayudre oko. Uwinjo kuma akelo ni koso pok odonjonu maber?
