We are fighting for certain principles we seek to entrench in Kenya which we believe is the correct way to live in a multicultural and multi-ethnic society. These principles are equality, equity and unity.
These principles are ODM Party founding principles.
There are communities and individuals in this country who are opposed to these principles and always run away whenever ODM Party appears on the scene because ODM seeks to entrench these principles.
To these communities and individuals, the current Ruto-Raila pact is unacceptable.
From the moment it was known to them that President Ruto was reaching out for a political settlement with Raila Odinga, which happened soon after the election, they started putting all kinds of traps. All kinds of mitego. They used to brag to all who cared to know…
*** Earlier during Uhuru, the same group did the same thing. They obsessively supported Uhuru when Uhuru was committing worst atrocities on CORD supporters — Kenyans.
Between 2013-2017 when there was no pact, they backed Uhuru through and through. Despite the near collapse of public sector with teachers, lecturers, doctors, nurses, civil servants and students striking month after month, they stuck with Uhuru.
When Uhuru froze employment from Dec 2013, thousands of graduates found themselves equipped for jobs that were never created. Those of us who graduated from the university a year after Uhuru know this too well — we got fucked.
And yet, even with the jobs freeze, Uhuru backing regions stayed in line behind him, and returned him to power on a ‘wembe ni ule ule’ banger.
*** Uhuru’s stranglehold of parliament was worse. The current CS Opiyo Wandayi (then first term Ugunja MP) was banned from parliament for months for merely whistling to protest Uhuru’s rule. Bad laws the opposition protested their enactments found their way into the books. Whenever we approached courts and these laws were annulled, the response was always punitive, and stretched to harassment of judicial officers.
*** Audit of government? Until he left power, Uhuru never saw eye-to-eye with AoG Edward Ouko. His audit of Eurobond and the conclusion that the money could not be traced to any particular project led to a permanent ban of Ouko in the senior echelons of power. Because they couldn’t remove him, they sought to empower his deputies. In the end, the state withheld his terminal benefits.
*** Prudent utilization of resources? We are the people who went to the streets to protest the manner in which Eurobond was handled; and proved that the money never reached Kenya. It was borrowed abroad and stolen abroad with the connivance of international loan sharks.
When in 2024 they now came to the streets to protest taxation measures, they acted as if we hadn’t warned them. The cheap loans of the Uhuru era, now very expensive with interests and fines, have to be paid.
*** Security begins with you. There was a time when the state’s response to the people’s demand for security was that security begins with you. What the state attempted to do was add more laws that denied people fundamental rights and threatened the cardinal principle of innocence until found with guilt, after a competent trial. The security laws attempted to put people behind bars for 90 days, without charge. We went to court and won.
So these people cannot lecture us on good governance or wanting a Kenya run on better terms. That has been us for years, and still us today. We did not harangue people in churches demanding mandatory solidarity.
What these people are angry and bitter over is the changed circumstances. These are pathetic tribalists bitter over their failure to lengthen a two-tribe mediocrity.
To ensure we do not have a state run by two ethnic groups whose legendary mediocrity sometimes plunges all of us in a bottomless pit of misery and disaster, the state must be expanded.
Kenya cannot exist as democratic state with tribal government. Why? Because tribalism limits the pool from which state officials are picked from after elections.
A tribal government is one where members of certain ethnic groups dominate the levers of government at the expense of others, and use their dominance to entrench power structures that maintain their dominance.
*** Until those who seek to entrench their dominance realize that they cannot long endure, they will keep trying.
It is important that we continue defeating these people inch by inch, reducing their power and influence on state organs and rendering them irrelevant in the larger scheme of things until such a time when none of them will exist on the face of the earth.
Equality. Equity. Unity.
