President William Ruto returned last week from his Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan junkets, and on to the most urgent agenda items. No, it wasn’t to offer leadership on the transport sector strike over high fuel prices; his priority was the premature election campaigns under the guise of launching, inspecting or opening various development projects.
In Mombasa, where the luxury private jet that called the lie to his calls for austerity landed, the president immediately launched into his usual condemnation of the “tribalists” allegedly out to set back the country into ethnic fiefdoms.
No translation of his coded message was necessary. It now well understand that the targets of regular ire are former deputy Rigathi Gachagua and former president Uhuru Kenyatta; and by extension the Mt Kenya populace that has done a u-turn in shifting decisively against the Kenya Kwanza regime.
The irony is that it is the president himself running a campaign whose primary strategy is the stoking of ethnic divisions. His campaign rhetoric shows a clear attempt to rally the rest of the country against a populous community that has dominated the political and economic space since the pre-independence period.
This is the approved Kenya Kwanza messaging template that is then relentlessly echoed by politicians at election campaign rallies across the country and gleefully spread by the campaign keyboard warriors. The talking points are intended to rally the party faithful in a replay of the ‘41 versus 1’ strategy of the 2007 election.
The intention is to demonise and isolate a populous and supposedly privileged community which gave Dr Ruto nearly half of his total vote in his victorious 2022 campaign, but has now turned against him since Mr Gachagua was impeached and forced out of the deputy president’s mansion in 2024.
It can then be understood that when Mr Hassan Omar Hassan spewed out some ethnic bile in Mombasa last week, he was simply echoing President Ruto and the approved party line. His angry outbursts were not those of some over-enthusiastic loose cannon, but a reinforcement of the campaign messaging from none other than the Secretary-General of UDA, the biggest party in the Kenya Kwanza coalition. That is why his belated apology after negative reactions came on the official UDA letterhead, rather than as a personal statement.
This kind of rhetoric is an established script that has been parroted across the country for a considerable period now. Kenya Kwanza politicians and their ODM allies under the so-called broad-based government have seemingly been primed to use whatever available platforms to frame the 2027 elections as a mortal combat aimed countering a community that has over generations enjoyed more than its fair share of the national cake, at the expense of other groupings that have been condemned to marginalisation and deprivation.
One could look at that kind of insidious messaging as just the regular Kenyan political discourse. It is a fact Kenyan political competition is built around ethnic mobilisation rather than any edifying ideology or principle.
That is a reality we cannot escape from. But even so there is need to recognise that there can be a fine line between healthy competition and a beating of the drum of war, especially where communities are incited to take up weapons against ‘outsiders’, over generational land and economic grievances. The history of bloody ethnic clashes that mar our democratic evolution is testimony to the fragile state.
President Ruto must, however, realise that encouraging or promoting that dangerous agenda will be counterproductive. Even if Mt Kenya is fleeing him, holding on to a chunk of that populous vote will be key to his re-election prospects. Instead, his campaign is driving it all away. He might be advised to look for the enemy within.
Meanwhile, it must also be recognised that Mr Gachagua and the hordes he leads are their own worst enemies. The former DP has every right to solidify his ethnic base just like the president and others do with theirs, but he needs understand that the ‘murima’ obsession which had him run out of the eating trough serves only to turn the rest of the country against his community.
When in national office, he projected himself as DP of Mt Kenya, understandably raising alarm in many quarters. Now as the key driver of the Opposition, it is evident in undisciplined rhetoric that Mr Gachagua projects himself first and foremost as a champion of Mt Kenya interests, over and above the interest of any other community. He might also be advised to look for the enemy in his mouth.
Mr Gaitho, an independent journalist, is former NMG Managing Editor for Special Projects. [email protected]
