Rigathi Gachagua is playing the quintessential Kikuyu con game on Luos.
No Kikuyu on their way up, who needs Luo support, has any problem courting the Luo.
At the same time, drowning Kikuyus know their last straw is the Luo.
In fact, it is the Luo; when every permutation shows there’s no way, who creates the way.
What Gachagua is doing is not new.
It is Jomo Kenyatta traveling to Kisumu in the 1950s to seek Luo backing for the Kikuyu’s onslaught on the colonial state.
It is just part of the Kikuyu’s larger matrix to recapture power using Luos as ngas (moyiengi).
Once perched onto power, the Luo assumes a completely different identity.
The Luo, who was the only solution before independence, or election, immediately becomes the only problem to be quickly dispensed with.
Rigathi Gachagua said a mouthful when he was rising to power and when he was exercising power.
The Luo endured two years of toxic, unbridled and primitive tribalism from Gachagua. As recently as a month ago, Gachagua was waxing garbage on the so called meagre Luo votes which cannot make anyone President.
“How dare Ruto leave 5 million votes for 1.5 million votes”?
Gachagua spends whole days in Central Kenya telling Kikuyus how Ruto betrayed them for embracing Luos. How is it now fashionable to seek the same paltry votes that he just dismissed days ago. How forgetful are we?
The Luo will be the most stupid people to embrace Gachagua’s open attempts at conmanship.
Babu Owino whom Gachagua is hoisting as his launchpad in Luo Nyanza is just another useful Luo idiot to the now power hungry Kikuyu but he is not alone, neither is he the first.
He joins a long list of useful Luo idiots who succumb cheaply to Kikuyu conmanship at every turn.
He has just replaced Tuju, who toiled for the Kikuyus for years, wasting a nascent political career after one term, and ending up auctioned — total loss.
The Kikuyus never empowered Tuju above the pedestal that Luos had perched him. Instead, they gave him sinecure roles to the very end of his lamentably wasted political career.
The best way to deal with the Kikuyu is to let them fry in their own tribalistic oil until they realize that the Luo — an equator power at ease in or out of government— is never to be mishandled in the manner they have historically done.
The Luo will be the most silly group if we do not take this Kalenjin opportunity to exact a political revenge on the Kikuyu, and warn them that their decades old war on the Luo is un-winnable.
The Kikuyu delusion that it can defeat and destroy the Luo forever must come at a heavy cost for them and the due date is 2027.
Omiyo, embracing Gachagua now is shooting ourselves in the mouth.
Dikembe Disembe is a Political Researcher and Writer
