By JOE MODIE
Things have unraveled rather fast since the Court of Appeal put a brake on the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).
President Uhuru Kenyatta, who had maintained studious silence even after the High Court trashed his BBI baby, came out the other day to announce that although he disagrees with the court’s decision, he nonetheless accepts it.
His Handshake brother, ODM leader Raila Odinga, also grudgingly accepted the Court of Appeal ruling. Amani Congress leader, Musalia Mudavadi, firmly stuck to the fence when he said that he had all along been opposed to BBI – only for social media netizens to pull out pictures of him signing the BBI petition.
Though lukewarm in support of BBI, Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka, has at least been consistent in the noises he has been making to show that he was pro-BBI.
This leaves us with Deputy President William Ruto, who has been overly strident in his opposition to BBI.
When you ignore the small fact that his stand was a direct contradiction to his boss, Kenyatta, you will realise that his rejection of BBI has, for the four years it has been in existence, been the wind that has been helping sail his presidential ambitions.
For one, he never missed an opportunity to deride the ‘reggae project’, boasting how he and his hustler battalion would bring an end to it.
Well, he ‘succeeded’ in bringing an end to reggae and celebrated its demise with a jubilatory press conference at the ‘hustlers’ mansion’, where the assembled journalists could not bring themselves to ask questions despite him inviting them to do so.
Now with Jubilee dead and shorn of his favourite boogieman, DP Ruto is waking up to new reality that things on the ground are different, as it were.
He is slowly coming to the painful realisation that not all who opposed BBI were necessarily his supporters. BBI had diverse groups that opposed it for diverse reasons.
DP Ruto was the only constant. In him, those that were against BBI, found a powerful ally, the fearless battering ram, whom they hoped would help them defeat BBI.
Remember what they say; an enemy of my enemy is my friend. This was largely a marriage of convenience. There were a lot of people who opposed BBI as it was perceived to be beneficial only to the people of Mt Kenya. Those in this group were Odinga’s supporters but felt betrayed by him for supporting BBI.
There was also the group, from Mt Kenya that could not countenance working or supporting Odinga in the Handshake project. They felt Uhuru betrayed them in forcing them to support Odinga in the Handshake project.
These two groups found succor in DP Ruto’s column.
With the defeat of BBI in the courts, a very large portion of those that opposed BBI now have nothing in common with the DP and are ready to unsheathe their knives, all directed at Ruto; he was never their favourite anyway.
If you listened to what former Agriculture CS Mwangi Kiunjuri said the other day, you will realise that DP Ruto could be in more trouble than he must have thought.
Kiunjuri is now revisiting the One-Man-One-Vote-One-Shilling, which was set to benefit the people of Mt Kenya, and which was a key the BBI.
He is saying that the only presidential candidate that will get votes in Mt Kenya, is the one that guarantees more resources in the region, as well as more parliamentary seats.
“We cannot be the region that has the most votes on the ground, but very little say in Parliament, where it matters most,” said Kiunjuri. “Our voices are drowned out in Parliament as there are very few of us there.”
This puts Ruto in a quandary as his troops were quite vocal when the motion to allocate more funds for Mt Kenya was soundly defeated in the Senate.
By now DP knows that the ground in Mt Kenya, where he had an almost free reign, has shifted.
Kuinjuri and Gatundu South MP, Moses Kuria, are now spreading the gospel of Ruto negotiating with Mt Kenya, the way his URP party negotiated with Uhuru Kenyatta’s TNA in 2013. It is either that or nothing.
This is the same gospel Nyeri Town MP, Ngunjiri Wambugu has been spreading since 2018, the whole time Ruto has been campaigning in Mt Kenya.
Ruto has been quite unwilling to cede any ground, saying that he would not enter into any coalition, particularly with Mt Kenya, as he thought he had the region snuggly in his pocket.
He had become overconfident to a point of getting haughty and arrogant.
Clearly, a day in politics is a long time, and we have a whole year before the 2022 elections.