Uhuru Kenyatta told his tribesmen a Kenyan self-evident truth they refused to accept but which is eating them now. Kikuyus should go watch Uhuru’s Jamhuri Day speech in 2020.
Mt. Kenya people still do not know something the entire country knows, which is that the Kenya they want cannot happen.
It is a backward Kenya mired in toxic tribalism and ethnic exclusion.
It is a country of the most mediocre and incompetent occupying critical state jobs on account of their ethnicity in a power arrangement produced by an ethnic vote and sustained by state repression, subtly endorsed by the acquiescence of the backyard.
Truth is, the Ruto regime, per its vote permutation, should ideally be a Kalenjin-Kikuyu regime. This is what the Kikuyu jingosit want. Problem is, that arrangement cannot hold the state.
It can run government using carrots and sticks, but it is increasingly clear the Kikuyu-Kalenjin; Kalenjin-Kikuyu arrangement is unsustainable.
It is not for lack of trying that the government had to be opened up, and the Luo Alliance be brought in.
President Ruto had cemented his government on a largely two-tribe duopoly and it was on course for a five year reign, until Gen Zs came to town.
But even without Gen Zs, you must recall that 2023 opposition protests had nearly paralyzed government, forcing a NADCO concession.
Yet, even with NADCO concession, the Luo Alliance entry into government had been zilch. At the top, the Ruto-Rigathi personnel still ran government, with cabinet, principal secretaries, CEOs of SAGAs,parastatal heads, security sector and foreign service (the state’s top echelon) still largely intact as it’d been formed with Ruto-Rigathi takeover.
It is the events between NADCO and Gen Z that takes me back to Uhuru’s 2020 Jamhuri Day speech. Because it is those events that led to this hour.
Uhuru warned Mt. Kenya against buying into cynicism and fear as their worldview (I made a web entry of it which I have shared as first comment to this post but again, go watch the entire speech).
It is Mt. Kenya people who blew up the Ruto regime and opened it up for the Luos and others. Their excessive demands on Ruto, being pushed principally by Rigathi Gachagua, meant two things – Ruto gains Mt. Kenya but loses the country, or he gains the country but loses Mt. Kenya.
This dilemma is what Uhuru faced in early 2018. Uhuru had formed his Kikuyu-Kalenjin government post the disputed, nullified and dubiously conducted repeat election of Oct 26, 2017.
It was a kakistocracy on steroids.
By 2018, he had clobbered and gunned NASA supporters into silent defeat. In a rampage carried out by police killer thugs deep in residential areas, Uhuru was now killing babies in the arms of their mothers.
It was in this backdrop that Uhuru reached out to Raila Odinga to solve whatever political differences they had out of streets and slum dwellings. This is how handshake and BBI happened.
Uhuru’s handshake with Raila brought a sigh and revolt. To NASA supporters dying in droves, it was a sigh of relief. Repression was over.
To Uhuru’s Mt. Kenya backyard, the handshake was interpreted as an appeasement to muguruki….”Uhuru amerogwa na mchawi”. Thus the revolt and the backlash started in earnest.
Even if Mt. Kenya were to defeat the rest of Kenya and remove Ruto from power, the next person they install will still be forced by the obtaining socio-political circumstances and economic crises of the time to reach out to the defeated. Will they revolt again?
It is taking Mt. Kenya indigenes long to realize that the rule of the ethnic majority is over. The system of rule that works in Kenya is one where everyone is in government and nobody is out.
Mt. Kenya people should better start learning how to eat with everybody on the table.
Kenya is like that young man in the parable.
“Let the young man in his quest for good life go out and hunt, If he kills the elephant, his poverty ends, if the elephant kills him, his poverty ends”.
