Homa Bay MP Peter Kaluma stands out as one of the loudest supporters of the Ruto-Raila coalition government. He is one of the men who dares to openly shout some of the things President William Ruto and former opposition leader Raila Odinga dare not say in public, especially on the clear strategy to demonise and isolate the populous Mt Kenya region.
Mr Kaluma is the most forthright of voices from Raila’s ODM brigade in stating clearly that the joining of forces with the governing UDA under the broad-based government was not just about providing a counterweight to the Mt Kenya exodus since the impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua last year, but ultimately about supporting Ruto’s 2027 re-election bid.
And a key component of the strategy is to mobilise the rest of the country against the Mt Kenya region, which has dominated the economic and political spheres since independence.
Over the past week or so, the MP has been active on social media pushing the game of ethnic arithmetic. He has been trying to demonstrate that even with the vaunted Mt Kenya population and allied forces being put together by Mr Gachagua in the attempt to reduce Dr Ruto to a “wantam” President, the opposition will still be no match for combined Ruto-Raila forces.
The Mt Kenya region provided nearly 50 per cent of Dr Ruto’s 2022 presidential election vote, in which he beat Mr Odinga by just a whisker. It could be presumed that nearly a wholesale flight of the vote now presumably controlled by Mr Gachagua would spell the death-knell for President Ruto’s re-election prospects. However, Mr Odinga decamping from the opposition Azimio alliance, presumably with most of his national support base beyond the Luo Nyanza bastion, evens things out.
That is what Kaluma is trying to illustrate with the ethnic arithmetic in which he assigns to President Ruto his established northern Rift Valley base and the rest of the expansive region, combined with Mr Odinga’s Luo Nyanza base, and the western region, which the veteran opposition titan shares with Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula . The Homa Bay MP also adds to the coalition vote basket Mr Odinga’s support base at the Coast and North Eastern region, complete with suspiciously inflated vote numbers for the Somali community, as well as the upper eastern region.
That is essentially the entire country, assigning to the opposition just Mr Gachagua’s Mt Kenya region, former Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka’s Ukambani vote basket, and the minority Kisii vote presumably controlled by former Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i.
The game of ethnic balkanisation—and particularly the hate campaign directed against the Mt Kenya region amid open threats to deny it development resources and re-direct them to compliant regions that were supposedly marginalised in the past—is being aggressively pushed by ruling coalition politicians.
The strategy might seem crass and backward, even dangerous insofar as it seeks to play up and exploit divisions when memories of periodic bouts of deadly ethnic violence are still fresh in the mind. But then playing the ethnic card is not a preserve of the Ruto-Raila administration. Mr Gachagua has played the game from the time he was DP. He unashamedly projected himself as the custodian of the Mt Kenya vote, which propelled President Ruto to power.
Gachagua's “morima” fixation
Since his conversion from a diehard defender of the regime to a key opposition figure, he continues to play up the strength of the Mt Kenya vote, appropriating for himself an outsize role in the anti-Ruto alliance. He does not shy away from suggesting that Mr Musyoka , Dr Matiang’i and other opposition leaders positioning themselves to run for president must sing his song if they want to win the support of the Mt Kenya base.
Mr Gachagua’s unabashed push of the Mt Kenya (“morima”) agenda has helped him to secure control of the massive vote basket, but also has unintended consequences of spreading alarm bells all round of a campaign aimed primarily at reclaiming the dominance long-enjoyed by Kenya’s largest ethnic grouping.
The more Mr Gachagua plays up his “morima” fixation, the more he plays right into the Ruto campaigns hands; as that is what rallies other communities to band together against a common threat.
What both sides are showing is that Kenyan politics still revolves around ethnic mobilisation, which takes primacy over ideology, principles and programmes.
With just a few to first weeks to the first anniversary the Gen Z revolt, both sides are clearly betraying the “tribeless” idealism that came to the fore last June.
