President William Ruto, ODM leader Raila Odinga and Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.
The government in Wales has promised to introduce legislation making it an offense for politicians to tell lies. The law would disqualify those found guilty of deliberate deception from being members of the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament.
I wish we could have such a law in Kenya, not just for the legislature, but also for the Executive, starting from the President going down.
The Kenyan leadership classes would be decimated. The National Assembly and the Senate would be left empty, and the offices of President, Deputy President and the entire Cabinet and senior civil service would fall vacant.
For us, you see, lying is not an issue, but rather a qualification of leadership.
Our leaders lie left, right and centre. They lie to the citizens; they lie to each other; they even lie to themselves; and they come to believe their own lies.
Just in the past few days we have seen President William Ruto and Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, the self-proclaimed ‘Truthful Man’, lying to each other.
And from the other side, we are seeing opposition leader Raila Odinga lying to everybody that he is still in the opposition, yet he is busy in the Kenya Kwanza government feeding trough.
Let us start with the top two. On a tour together of Mr Gachagua’s restive Mt Kenya backyard, the President and his deputy sought to reassure everybody that they had no problems with each other, that reports of a fallout were grossly exaggerated, that they remained, to use the most apt analogy, as thick as thieves.
Undue harassment
They were both lying. They were lying to the people, to the platform dancers of accompanying politicians, to each other, and to themselves.
Everybody knows that president and deputy are no longer reading from the same script. The DP has over the past month or so been telling everybody who would listen that the President has set the attack dogs on him. The insidious secret police machinery has been trying to link him to financing and organisation of the Gen Z protests that had President Ruto quacking in his boots and reaching out to Mr Raila for a lifeline.
The DP says his phone calls are being monitored, and that his aides and political allies are being subjected to undue harassment and intimidation by security agencies. Even assassination attempts.
This being Kenya, everybody knows that the Director of Criminal Investigations Mohammed Amin and the Director of National Intelligence Noordin Haji, cannot unleash their secret political police squads on a person of the stature of the DP without the express sanction of State House.
Mr Gachagua, through proxies if not directly, has indicated that he is not going down without a fight. He boasts the capacity to hit back by going on the political offensive, with the threat to withdraw Mt Kenya political support from the President and redirect it to his own bid or elsewhere come the 2027 elections.
Nothing has changed in the last few days to signal a political truce. President Ruto and DP Gachagua only agreed, at most, to suspend public spats during the Mt Kenya tour, but they will still be going hammer and tongs at each other. Each is still holding a knife behind his back. Everything else is a lie.
ODM surrogates
And then we have the ‘former’ opposition leader. Mr Odinga jumped into Mr Ruto’s bed while all along lying that there was no political marriage.
He nominated his ODM surrogates to take key positions in President Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza Cabinet, while still proclaiming fidelity to the Azimio la Umoja/One Kenya opposition coalition.
He has committed a monumental lie, a fraud against our democratic system when his people serve in the Executive, and at the same time insist on retaining leadership of minority caucuses in Parliament.
If Mr Odinga wants to be honest, the least he can do is officially effect his divorce from Azimio, freeing him to formally consummate his marriage with Kenya Kwanza. In both the National Assembly and Senate, ODM must relinquish the posts of Minority Leader and Minority Whip, and of course cannot be allowed chairmanship and opposition representation in the Public Accounts Committee and other watchdog committees.
We would rather have an opposition that is small and committed, rather than one that is large, but compromised.
On the government side, we must also ask why Mr Gachagua remains as DP. We asked the same question when then DP Ruto was leading an internal insurrection against President Uhuru Kenyatta in the run-up to the 2022 elections. Let us outlaw dishonesty in leadership.
[email protected]; @MachariaGaitho
