Whereas removing President Ruto from power is a top objective of the primitive tribalists from Mt. Kenya but the other equally significant, long running objective has always been the total destruction of the ODM Party.
This obsession with destroying ODM predates Mt. Kenya region’s current desperation to remove Ruto. In fact, Ruto’s rise to the top after 2007/08 post-election violence was fueled by this murima obsession to destroy the ODM Party in general, and Raila Odinga in particular.
Mt. Kenya region first embraced Ruto after the 2007/08 post poll violence in an attempt to break ODM and weaken Raila Odinga.
The radical purges of the Kalenjin group following NARC’s 2002 victory had alienated the Kalenjins, who formed an alliance with the ‘betrayed’ Luos from 2004, to challenge Mwai Kibaki.
This Luo-Kalenjin alliance defeated Kibaki in the 2005 referendum and cornered him in 2007, but then you read…
Beginning 2009, those planning Kibaki succession turned to the then Agriculture Minister William Ruto and his Rift Valley ODM MPs, subsidizing them throughout the grand coalition government.
Ruto, perhaps already plotting the dry days ahead, amassed a fortune during this period.
It was around this time that he even acquired weston hotel, with the Kibaki state facilitating both the financing and the legal transactions!
It was the Kibaki state that put Ruto on national display, first as agriculture minister and later as higher education minister, all while Ruto was an ODM elected MP.
In Ruto’s ministries, the duration between allocation and disbursement was always deliberately drastically reduced.
Allocations to Ruto ministries were quickly disbursed and Ruto became ‘a top performing minister’, a phrase the equally GEMA dominated Nation Newspaper and several murima radio stations started using while referencing him.
For the other ministries, especially those helmed by hardcore ODMers like Kajwang’, Nyong’o and Orengo; delays in funds disbursement were the order of the day.
Ruto was treated better under Kibaki than even Raila Odinga, the then ‘prime minister’ on paper.
There was not a day Ruto had field activities that the state never displayed its presence.
Raila, despite being the Prime Minister, always suffered state abandonment.
When it got out of hand, Raila once publicly complained about the failure to properly provide even the most basic services for a prime minister on government assignment — the toilets etc.
As university students around the time Ruto was education minister, we benefited briefly from these murima political games, for HELB never delayed when Ruto was at the helm of higher education.
To date, the Ruto years at agriculture and higher education are still fondly remembered!
We build solid campus ‘relationships’ on steady HELB fund disbursements. As Luo boys, we even used HELB to pay for circumcision!
Short-lived as good things usually are; the transition from Ruto to Prof. Hellen Sambili saw the end of the “disbursements on time”.
With Ruto gone, higher education was plunged back to the normal fund delays that faced other ministries.
Many relationships started suffering and student-on-student ‘divorce cases’ really went through the roof!
I remember as student leader, we now had to travel to Nairobi from Eldoret to pile pressure on HELB, then headed by Benjamin Cheboi, to release funds.
Destroying ODM entirely failed, however, the Kibaki state managed to split it and take away the Kalenjin group ahead of the 2012 polls.
They would extract Najib Balala and Musalia Mudavadi too.
By the 2013 elections, what in 2007 was known as Pentagon had all but collapsed.
Raila Odinga responded to this by building a new team of younger leaders. Hassan Ali Joho replaced Balala in coast. Oparanya replaced Mudavadi. But there was never a replacement for Ruto. That void was never entirely filled.
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Dikembe Disembe is a Political Researcher and Writer
