Businessman Jimi Wanjigi now claims President William Ruto’s regime wants to eliminate him, weeks after daring the Head of State to go for him for funding anti-government protests— an action he says is not a crime.
Mr Wanjigi, 61, has been a man at odds with Kenya’s last two governments: President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee regime, which he helped ascend to power in 2013, and now Dr Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza administration.
In an interview with Citizen TV on Tuesday, August 13, night, Mr Wanjigi said his bile with the two regimes stems from a 2009 pact he entered into with Mr Kenyatta and Dr Ruto.
"At that time, Uhuru Kenyatta and Ruto approached me...they were facing International Criminal Court (ICC) case bred of the 2007/8 post-election violence that claimed over 1,100 lives, displaced thousands and left others maimed...properties also lost. They considered it to be a huge problem," he said.
"They came to me to help them chart a way to power with the objective of using the power of the people to unshackle themselves from the yoke of the case. They feared jail, losing what they had, and the shame.”
Safina Party leader Jimi Wanjigi (right) and his wife Irene Nzisa accompanied by friends addressing journalists during a presser at their residence in Muthaiga, Nairobi on August 9, 2024.
Photo credit: Bonface Bogita | Nation
He said that he accepted and they had a covenant that "after I save you, you must save the country by creating a new way of doing things".
After they won, he said, they reneged on the agreement and started serving their personal interests.
He said that when he pushed them to honour the agreement, "they published me in an obituary as a way of giving me a death promise… ".
"When I started supporting Odinga [for 2017 polls] they knew in their gut who can remove them from power...and my tribulations that have run this far with President Ruto were heightened. Like now, the president is unleashing a siege against me and my family in my house".
Both Dr Ruto's and Mr Kenyatta's governments have tried unsuccessfully but dramatically to arrest him at his posh Muthaiga home.
Last week, police camped at the residence for more than 24 hours, hunting for the Safina party leader in vain— only managing to rough up some of his staff who are now facing charges of illegal possession of weapons.
He has since obtained a court order blocking his intended arrest. He, however, maintains that what happened during Mr Kenyatta’s and now Dr Ruto’s tenure, are “criminal activities” intended to send him to the grave.
“I think it is me that they seek. On both times, it has been about me,” Mr Wanjigi said.
“Why come and say I have grenades?” he posed, explaining that “to say I have grenades is to say that I am waging a war on this country using arms. I have been talking [about] only one subject— Money.”
In the two incidents, he explained, they had “planted guns” at his home.
“Now they are saying there are smoke bombs, grenades, teargas and god knows what else.”
When asked why two different governments would be on a collision path with the same person, his response was: “It is them who fear me. This has never happened to anybody else under those regimes.”
His immediate family – his wife, his children and his mother – watched and suffered movie-like horror as police dramatically hunted for the man the regime believes has been at the centre of its troubles with the youth.
His kin, he said, “were very strong and resilient” to that pressure.
“Even those that wanted me to stand up, they were telling me no. If these people catch you, they will kill you. They won’t kill us. They may threaten us, they may take us in. But it would be too much to kill us”.
Over the weekend, police raided Mr Wanjigi's home and took away some of his belongings in an operation that opposition politicians Martha Karua and Kalonzo Musyoka denounced as a witch hunt.
After obtaining a court order, the businessman resurfaced from his hideout and taunted the police for going on a wild goose chase.
In the 2017 raid, ODM party leader Raila Odinga slept at Mr Wanjigi’s home, creating a buffer zone that saw the police back off from a search to arrest the businessman.
Mr Wanjigi said he did not speak to Mr Odinga when he turned up at his home because his family felt it was unsafe.
The opposition chief has since become President Ruto’s ally, a camaraderie has seen him donate some of his party men to run the government, in what has been described as a broad-based government.
Both Dr Ruto and Mr Odinga, at every opportunity, have defended the decision to work together in this arrangement.
On Tuesday, Mr Odinga claimed that Mr Kenyatta, who campaigned against Dr Ruto in the 2022 elections, reached out to the former premier to rescue his successor’s government in the face of the unprecedented youth uprising.
But the new alliance and its defence, Mr Wanjigi said, was “not a script that is unusual.”
He said that globally, whenever there is an uprising of the people, the first thing the government of the day usually does is "form a unity government" by bringing all political leaders under one ship.
This, he explained, tames its most perceived threat, which is mostly the opposition, with a strategy to deny the people a viable and foreseeable option.
“President William Ruto wants everyone to be in his sinking ship so that the masses do not have an alternative voice. He’s just invited people into a sinking ship,” said Mr Wanjigi.
“We were already united and we were united in economic pain…We are still united in that economic pain. They can do all they want up there. I can assure you, they are in a sinking ship and Kenyans will not join them. They will sink themselves.”
He wondered why his friend Mr Odinga had both feet everywhere, claiming to be out of the government even as the latest development tells of a different story— that he is in government.
On Mr Odinga’s decision to donate some of his “best minds” to rescue the government, most of whom were in the ODM party leadership, Mr Wanjigi said, suggests that “maybe he has not understood the gravity of the problem and how deep this ship has sunk.”
He said the newly installed National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has a good mind "but will not solve the economic mess that is President Ruto's regime".
And while casting aspersions on the move, he said it would be interesting to watch how it pans out.
“Let’s wait and see how long they last… because they may jump out just before it completely sinks,” he said.
Even as he kept his cards close to his chest, he said the country may as well proceed to a general election before 2027 as a way forward.
"Not in the too distant future you will see practical templates of actualizing this playing out. We have a president who has broken the law, and a parliament that has disrespected the Constitution...We have a script," he said.
He said he has templates "that we developed a long time before....and I want President William Ruto gone like yesterday... But I'm hoping he would do the honourable thing and exit, we get the transition plan before 2027".
Mr Wanjigi intended to run for president in the 2022 General Election using his Safina Party but the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) disqualified him over lack of a Bachelor’s degree.
"It is a passion that I have...something that I believe in...that I want President Ruto out of office as early as yesterday," he said.
“…Because there are many pots in the pie, I will not on this show tell you how it is going to climax and what the end game is. I’ve been in this long enough, you don’t put all your eggs in front of everybody to see.”
In the lead-up to the formation of the Government of National Unity, Dr Ruto’s regime was tottering on the brink of collapse under the weight of the youth revolt that saw Parliament attacked and the economy depressed.
The youth were angered by the passage of Finance Bill 2024, which contained punitive taxes that Kenyans had rejected.
To make peace, the president declined to ascent to the bill and days after, fired almost his entire Cabinet.
“He is in big trouble,” he observed, adding that if he were the president, “I would cut off the chain of debt” and use the money to provide services to Kenyans and stimulate the economy.
Given a chance, he said, he would decree that the country rebel on repaying both international and domestic debts by declaring them as odious.
Odious debt is what a new regime finds as its liability but develops an inclination not to honour it on grounds that it was incurred outside moral benchmarks.
Mr Wanjigi said predecessor governments misappropriated money they had borrowed hence why Kenyans should not be held responsible for them.
But National Treasury economist Festus Wangwe said odious debt was not an established principle of international law, but a populist political slogan to repudiate previous debts.
