There is an old African proverb that says, “when you want to kill a frog, you do not wash its legs.”
If you want to destroy your enemy, you do not give him a microphone, a martyr’s crown and a stage to weep for the nation. Yet that is exactly what incumbents do, repeatedly, with the enthusiasm of a man who has discovered history.
In May 1979, Ghana’s military government arrested Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings after his failed coup. The generals could have locked him in a cell in Tamale and thrown away the key. Instead, they organised a public court-martial on radio. They wanted a funeral. They got a baptism.
Rawlings stood in the dock and did not plead for mercy. He preached that the generals had stolen enough for their grandchildren, and a soldier who steals from the poor is worse than a thief in Makola market. Ghanaians listened.
Three weeks later, young officers broke the prison gates, carried him shoulder-high and made him Head of State. The trial meant to bury him became his inauguration.
Thirteen years later in Caracas, the same script. Paratrooper Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow President Carlos Andrés Pérez and failed. He was surrounded. The President gave him one minute on national television to order his comrades to surrender, expecting humiliation.
Chavez looked into the camera, adjusted his red beret and said the line that would make him President: “Por ahora” — for now, our objectives were not achieved. That turned surrender into a promise. The elite saw a failed coup plotter; the barrios saw a man who took responsibility. They sent him to prison. Prison polished him. He came out and walked to State House.
Saul creates David. The King, threatened by the boy who killed Goliath, throws spears at him. Every spear makes David more beloved in the streets. Saul sends him to fight the Philistines, hoping he will die. David returns victorious. By trying to kill David, Saul anoints him.
King Ahab creates Micaiah. Ahab has 400 court prophets who tell him what he wants to hear: “Go to war, you will win.” He hates Micaiah, son of Imlah, because he never prophesies good about him. He jails Micaiah and slaps him. When Ahab dies in battle, as Micaiah foretold, the nation remembers who told the truth.
Ask the Democrats in America. They impeached Republican Donald Trump twice, banned him from Twitter, took his mugshot in Fulton County, Georgia, and filed 91 charges, hoping to make him unelectable. They gave him what an American populist needs: a mugshot that looks like Che Guevara and a story of persecution by the deep state.
The court became his campaign rally. He sold T-shirts of his arrest and won back the White House. As the old man said, if a man intends to cut a tree for 12 hours, he should spend 11 hours sharpening his axe. UDA and ODM wanted to cut down Edwin Sifuna and Rigathi Gachagua with blunt axes, and now the forest is laughing.
Closer home, ask President Uhuru Kenyatta . Between 2018 and 2022, Jubilee staged the public removal of his Deputy, William Ruto. Stripped of powers, he was humiliated in Cabinet meetings while his allies were de-whipped on live television.
The intention was to reduce him to a laughing stock called “Tangatanga”. The effect was to free him from government baggage and give him the slogan: The Hustler versus Dynasties. UDA was born in that humiliation. The man they tried to bury became President.
President Ruto and his new lieutenants — a coalition of UDA and ODM — have decided to repeat the same mistake with surgical precision. They have chosen to prosecute two men on different stages, for different audiences, but with the same outcome.
In Nairobi, Senator Sifuna is an articulate politician who rose to become the voice of ODM. The party has decided to publicly discipline him, de-platform him and threaten him with expulsion for speaking his mind on broad-based government. They think they are cutting a noisy branch. They forget that a man who speaks truth to power becomes a town crier for the city youth.
In the mountain, there is Rigathi Gachagua . The former Deputy President was impeached, dragged through Senate hearings, with criminal charges and threats to his properties. The plan was to make an example of him — to show that he could be removed and reduced to a village elder from Mathira. Instead, it gave him more political clout.
In both cases, UDA and ODM misread the public mood. Sifuna today speaks not as an ODM Secretary-General fighting for his seat, but as a young Kenyan asking why a party that promised to defend the people is now defending power.
Gachagua was supposed to disappear after impeachment. But the prosecution has given him what he never had as Deputy President: sympathy. In Central Kenya, the man who was mocked is now narrating a story of betrayal. “I carried this government, and they threw me out like chaff.”
Ruto will not be fighting Raila Odinga . He will be fighting the two rivals he manufactured himself. One will take bites from his urban, Gen Z and Western flank. Gachagua will eat UDA’s mountain base.
As the Gikuyu say, you do not use a sword to kill a mosquito sitting on your own cheek. UDA and ODM have used a sword. The mosquito lives. The cheek is bleeding.
