they suddenly understood what Lee Njiru meant when he described Kenya ’ s political class as political cousins who are a separate tribe of the conniving privileged .
Calling a politician , a liar is akin to calling a prostitute amoral , the noun and the adjective are interchangeable but , in the Kenyan setting , the political arena attracts criminals and thugs of the crudest nature whose only motive is to rape the country .
This is probably why there is a need to address them as honorable in the hope that using a positive word for a negative reality somehow sanitizes the rotten odor that emanates from their collective mess .
So , the president does not actually have an antidote for this moral army whose only fault is their love of the motherland and their unshaken belief that prosperity is the reward of merit and selfless devotion to ethical work .
The president ’ s error was his lack of mental acuity and an overriding narcistic tendency coupled with an overarching arrogance which prevented him from reading the ground correctly as it is impossible to believe that intelligence organs had not warned him .
So , in desperation , the president reached out to the only man who apart from being a thorn in his flesh is also the epitome of dissent and the only one who has the cajones to face the unruly youngsters since he has his own private militia of hoodlums .
Raila being the master chess player , decides to play both sides as he does not want to lose his mystic as the father of opposition but is unwilling to give up his grandiose ambitions on the African arena where he needs the government support .
In his attempt to balance the impossible in both appearing anti-government and pro-government to profit on both sides he began his slow but sure political suicide . In that moment of duplicity , he let slip a carefully choregraphed political career .
A Raila and a Ruto are different faces of the same coin , the difference being that one is suave and the other unrefined . In the moment of greed Raila has allowed the president to expose him for what he really is , a master con-man .
Now we get to realize those folklore stories of the hyena that split its body by not knowing which fork on the road to take . The shock waves are still reverberating and no amount of spin will convince the
Gen-Zs that their hero is not a sellout .
The president agreed to his so-called broad-based government for selfpreservation and Raila extracted his pound of flesh to create what essentially is a euphemism for a coalition government better known in Kenya as the Nusu- Mkate government .
We guess that the president , who will definitely face a backlash in his party , calculated that it was prudent to deal with Raila and his thugs in his camp rather than on the side of the Gen-Zs hence his radical shift and new found mojo in dealing with Raila .
Raila has over the years cultivated the art of never losing an election , though he has lost all of them , one even begins to wonder if he really ever wanted to win since what is important is his firm influence over his constituents . He is actually a political entrepreneur .
He got into a coalition with the professor of politics Moi in 2002 , he repeated the feat with Kibaki in 2008 and again with Uhuru in 2018 and in all those occasions his mantra was to create a united Kenya yet he wrought havoc and discontent within the government .
To his credit he has pulled it off again although this time he was helped by a movement totally beyond his control and which even confused his attack dogs since this is probably the only recent incidence in Kenya when a riot was not ordered by Raila .
It was Raila ’ s thugs not the governments who went to disrupt his ally ’ s presser when they had decided to abandon Raila and stick with the Gen-Zs call for Ruto ’ s ouster . That was quintessential Raila flexing his muscle to confirm who was the boss . He is Mafia .
This time around he may have overplayed his hand . Although he is a master juggler but the breakup of the Azimio coalition is not as momentous as to what may actually happen within ODM as he plays the risky double game .
There has always been dissent within ODM and there are many that resent his strangle hold on the party as he calls the shots of who vies on the party ticket . If he has overplayed his hand this time the internal cohesion of ODM may just start to unravel .
In profound despair one is forced to recall the famous book ‘ Cry my beloved country ’ and wonder how on earth were we so close to real liberation only to be betrayed by our stalwart champion ; we could taste victory but currently our faith is temporarily shattered .
But how on earth did we as a country get to this sorry state of affairs . A dispassionate look back into our political history , we realize that Ruto is not an aberration but a product of our politics that were and are still based on deception and lies .
Kenya has never been free since independence and the successive governments that have led the country were just stewards for the real owners of the land and as long as they were allowed to live like the royalty , they have not cared about the lot of the Mwananchi .
Just like we don ’ t find it upsetting or ironic to call a bunch of self-serving thieves honorable and to call county and country looters your excellencies so it is quite natural to call the person who owns nothing a Mwanainchi , probably the cruelest epithet in Kenya .
Kenya as a country did not fight for independence since the country is an artificial creation of arbitrary boundaries that depicted a sphere of influence or more correctly a sphere of exploitation . All African boundaries were to demarcate European interests .
There were many Kenyan communities that saw the so-called civilizing wave for what it was , a land grab , and put-up resistance , which explains why large tracts of Maasai land remained untouched since to occupy them would mean continuous conflict .
By a clever use of the divide and rule strategy , the colonist was able to hive off parts of Kenya that most interested his enterprise and declared them white highlands and harassed the natives into providing cheap labor .
The poll and hut taxes that were imposed on Africans were methods to force them to work for the colonist in order to pay their dues . Since technically slavery had been outlawed canny exploiters simply paid a meagre stipend to be on the right side of the law .
It was actually the Mau Mau uprising that made the country very dangerous to live in for the colonist and expensive to govern for the empire . Many settlers who had chosen Kenya for their home left during the haunting uprising that wanted the colonist off their lands .
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