BY JOE MODIE
Nick Ruto, the son of Deputy President William Ruto, in a bid to impress his father and maybe help him fight his political battles, decided, yesterday, to defend his father and take on President Uhuru Kenyatta, whom he believes has unfairly treated his father.
However, his attempted defence of his father came embarrassingly unstuck as he was savagely outed for plagiarism.
During his Madaraka Day speech at the Uhuru Gardens yesterday, President Kenyatta indicated that that he has entirely not lost hope on the Bridging Bridges Initiative (BBI), despite it being shut down by the courts.
Now, the president and his deputy have not seen eye to eye on the issue of BBI, with Ruto making it abundantly clear that he does not have time for the initiative.
It would hurt his father
The president’s apparent revival of BBI must have angered Nick, who perhaps felt that it would hurt his father’s chances of becoming president next year.
He thus needed to do a measured rebuttal which would also leave him looking intelligent and cerebral, in the eyes of the public; so he invested in some bit of ‘research’, which landed him on the Facebook page of Daystar University scholar, Dr Wandia Njoya.
Wandia, who is the daughter controversial cleric Rev Timothy Njoya, has been a consistent critic of the president, whom she refers to simply as Muigai.
Apparently, Wandia, like Nick must have been attentively following the president’s speech, for she soon penned a treatise condemning Uhuru’s use of the phrase ‘a dream deferred’ in reference to BBI.
Nick planted it on his Facebook page
Wandia’s piece was largely ignored, maybe due to the windy and convoluted nature of her prose, despite her relatively large following on Facebook. However, this is the piece Nick landed on and planted on his Facebook page, with little in the way of acknowledgement.
Soon, the page was on fire, with commenters accusing him of stealing from Wandia. Some even uncharitably alleged that he had inherited his father’s ‘penchant for thievery’.
It is ironical that all those commenters had seen Wandia’s piece and ignored it, only to spot it on Nick’s page, where they proceeded to chastise him on plagiarism.
The page quickly turned into a battleground between the Kieleweke and Tanga tanga fanatics.
Nick later pulled down the post
Such was the barrage on Nick’s page that he later pulled down the post, but not after some Kieleweke fanatics had taken screenshots for record purposes.
So carried away by their fanaticism were some Tanga tanga adherents, that they visited Wandia’s page, perhaps for the first time, and accused her of plagiarising the Deputy President’s son.
The whole thing had turned into a hilarious farce. It was pure comedy.
Wandia, on her part, found herself in a weirdly unfamiliar territory, being accused of plagiarism, while she was in fact the victim.
That is not all, she must have been conflicted seeing as she was now caught up in the unenvious position of having to call out the DP’s son, who ironically was complimenting her condemnation of the president.
Defending his father
The was also the added discomfort of getting her post noticed via plagiarism. It must have rankled.
While Nick will be rightly lambasted for plagiarism, one can at least safely state that he had a course; that of defending his father’s embattled career.
Can the same be said of Dr Wandia – what was her cause – apart from maybe political posturing and empty theorising and sloganeering?