First I thought it was some kind of a practical joke when I heard that the Deputy President is accusing his boss Uhuru Kenyatta of instigating violence in the country and should be under the ICC radar together with Raila Odinga.
Of course, everybody knows that Ruto’s main agenda against Raila Odinga was to portray him as that violent Luo who should never be anywhere near state power. It was a recipe that was supposed to be easy to cook and quickly gobbled down to your fill.
That has not worked and Raila is now emerging as a formidable national leader who is appealing to Kenyans across all ethnic lines. That has terrified Ruto to his bones. That is not the Raila he was waiting to throw his nonsense at. This Raila is too complicated and too frightening to Ruto and the panic mode is in full blast.
In a letter addressed to President Uhuru Kenyatta and copied to the ICC, Ruto’s UDA accuses Uhuru of “inaction and connivance by the state” in alleged violence against them.
The Ruto team claims that the violence has all gone unattended by Uhuru’s office. “This negligence on their part is not only dismaying to all law-abiding Kenyans and disappointing to the UDA fraternity but it also explicitly signals the state’s approval,”
UDA’s letter to ICC claims there is state-sponsored violence ahead of the August elections.
Those are very serious allegations and they tell us one thing. Ruto is begging President Uhuru to smack him in the head politically and finish him off completely.
You don’t make those kinds of stupid allegations to a sitting president and expect them to just sit there and do nothing about that.
Ruto is asking for a knock-out punch from Uhuru, not in the mouth but at the ballot box and he might get just that. When you call in the ICC you are talking about state-sponsored violence. Otherwise, if it is just regular violence then the Kenyan state should be able to deal with it.
Read: DP Ruto to President Uhuru: Your government enabling violence for ODM
A deputy president threatening his own boss with jail at the ICC is unheard of anywhere in the world but in the Ruto era, the deputy is free to be a menace to his boss.
The one reason Uhuru chose to go with Raila and his team could very well be the loose mouths surrounding Ruto who had been making all sorts of allegations and direct attacks on President Uhuru Kenyatta and his family. That is just a no-go zone. Ruto has avoided that for the most part.
Now a panicking Ruto is going to the wire to confront his boss and even threaten him with a letter to the ICC to indict the president whom he accuses of approving violence on politicians who do not support his alleged candidate. That is as foolish as it gets in politics.
I thought it was just some unthinking Ruto wild cards who believed that Uhuru is now a lame-duck president.
I thought Ruto was smart enough to know that in Africa there is no such thing as a lame-duck president.
African presidents only need one day in office to do whatever they want and don’t confront them thinking oh you have only so many days left in office. That is a suicide, political and otherwise.
Maybe Ruto should ask his new buddy Hassan Omar to start investigations about state-sponsored violence and start getting witnesses who will testify against Uhuru and Raila at The Hague.
Hassan Omar as a vice-chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) was instrumental in the investigations against Uhuru and Ruto himself in relation to the ICC indictments against the duo after the 2007/8 Post Election Violence.
Hassan Omar probably knows a lot of the witnesses they had for the ICC case before they were disappeared and murdered by the accused including his present boss. It is a pity that doesn’t bother him at all. But I always support the fact that everybody has a right to food and to a livelihood. I will never judge people by the choices they make to have money and stay alive.
Here is Hassan Omar joining in the accusation against Uhuru as engineering state-protected violence.
Hassan Omar using the 2017 General Election as a reference, argued that there is a similar pattern of State complicity when it comes to violence and the use of intimidation to suffocate political vehicles purportedly not affiliated with the government, in this case the DP.
“What is shocking about this turn of events is the perpetrator of these acts of intimidation and State-sponsored complicit violence is actually Raila Odinga,” Omar said.
Omar wants to have it both ways. They write a letter to the ICC which basically means they want Uhuru indicted and jailed, but they are also want to appeal to Uhuru supporters so they tell the president that okay we have written to the ICC but it is only Raila whose head we want not yours.
President Uhuru is not an idiot. He knows what it means to get ICC involved in the affairs of any country. He has been there before. His head as the president is on the table. It is as simple as that. Raila does not run the Kenyan state. It is Uhuru who does. So he knows what that UDA letter to the ICC means.
And of course, it is the same Ruto and co who told us so many times that the ICC has no business bugging African governments who should be left alone to handle their own issues.
Not now when the same Ruto is facing political oblivion. You can learn a lot of things from people when they face tough situations.
A lot of Kenyans who are worried about violence in the August 2022 elections have been saying that an election is not a matter of life or death and all the rival aspirants should take it easy win or lose.
The truth of the matter is that the 2022 elections is actually a matter of life or death for some aspirants.
We all heard William Ruto claiming that Raila has promised to put him in jail if Raila becomes the next president.
Of course, Raila never threatened to jail Ruto. That is up to the courts.
Read: Raila scares the hell out of those robbing the country blind. They know themselves
The truth of the matter is that there are some aspirants in the 2022 elections who know very well the number of crimes of theft of Kenyan assets that they have committed over the years.
Those thieves know that they have committed crimes that could land them in jail and the only reason they are free and still committing the same crimes is that they are able to use the political power they have to keep justice away from them.
Once they lose that political power, justice will come knocking at their doors and it is game over.
For those thieves, this election is absolutely a matter of life or death and that is why we are seeing this level of panic eight months to the election date.
Some of these thieves and criminals will be at the airport when the votes are being counted and as soon as they lose the elections they are heading to Zamunda as refugees.
Those criminals are going to do all sorts of desperate things as we approach election day and if things start to look gloomy for them they are going to do crazy things. This is just the beginning.
Those stupid stone-throwing incidents are nothing. They are going to mean nothing much. It is the desperate politicians frightened of losing power and possibly facing justice that is going to be a source of terror to Kenyans.
Adongo Ogony is a Human Rights Activist and a Writer who lives in Toronto, Canada
