A secret night meeting on New Year’s Eve at the home of Senate Majority Whip Irungu Kang’ata gave rise to the bare-knuckle letter he fired to President Kenyatta, warning of an imminent flop of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) in Mt Kenya, the Nation can reveal.
The meeting, the Nation has established, was a culmination of a series of others following the December 15 Jubilee Party loss in the Gaturi ward by-election to a Deputy President William Ruto-backed candidate.
Intelligence sources document events on New Year Eve, when Mr Kang’ata hosted a strictly vetted meeting at his Murang’a town home.
Deliberations of the gathering resulted in him igniting the current raging fire as well as stirring trouble in Mr Kenyatta’s Jubilee wing and the restive political bastion of Central.
The sources put the number of the meeting’s attendees at 24— three from each of the eight sub-counties — as well as a summit of some other eight strategists. The agenda of the gathering, sources say, was “founding of candidate Kang’ata for 2022 Murang’a gubernatorial bid.”
A source inside the meeting confided that it ended being a surgical analysis of Tangatanga and Kieleweke, and, in the end, Mr Kang’ata was tasked to report to the President that all was not well on the ground.
He was instructed to tell Mr Kenyatta that Mt Kenya was complaining of “being forced into unpalatable political formations, was reeling under policy-driven business hardships and that, generally, the President had become a stranger to them hence rebellion against him and his administration was at its peak.”
In the meeting, Mr Kang’ata was also put on his defence over his association with the Kieleweke faction of Jubilee Party.
Mr Joshua Kimani from Kigumo sub-county confirmed to Nation that the lawmaker was informed that the ground was so much in favour of the Tangatanga faction that backs Dr Ruto’s presidential bid in 2022.
“The senator urged us to be as truthful possible with him because he wanted to ensure his 2022 contest for Murang’a governor would be premised on the political pulse of the county. We were all unanimous that; first, he was in the wrong wing of politics. We told him point-blank that how he was used by Kieleweke to de-whip Tangatanga loyalists had eroded his standing in Murang’a and that, unless he remedied the situation, he was walking into his political gallows,” he said.
He was reminded that there had been public chaos pitting Tangatanga and Kieleweke supporters, the climax being the October 4 incident in Kenol town where two youths allied to Kieleweke were allegedly murdered by Tangatanga followers.
“We made our case very well and backed it with actual evidence that is in public domain. We told Kang’ata that if the Kieleweke 2022 ticket was the one being sold by the Handshake team with Mr Raila Odinga as President and Peter Kenneth as his running mate, then he had better kiss his Murang’a gubernatorial ambitions goodbye,” Mr Kimani told Nation , adding that they reminded him that he was yet to lose a political contest.
A man who prides himself on having not lost a single election since he joined politics, Mr Kang’ata’s fast-rising career has seen him become Kiharu MP, Murang’a senator and Senate Majority Whip all within eight years.
Mr Kang’ata confirmed that their meeting was stormy and “as a Jubilee diehard loyal to President Uhuru Kenyatta, I saw it wise to collect that intelligence and compile it and bring it to the attention of my party and its leader.”
While the Kang’ata letter is dated December 30, a day before the meeting, it is believed that it is after the New Year’s Eve meeting that the letter was actually written, before it hit media headlines on January 3, causing a storm in President Kenyatta’s Mt Kenya backyard.
The letter, which Mr Kang’ata sent to the Jubilee Party leader through secretary-general Raphael Tuju, has stirred Kenya’s political landscape and put at risk the senator’s plum job in the House.
The letter has also rattled President Kenyatta’s partners in the ‘Handshake’, ODM, with some of its officials saying the implication of the letter was so huge and “there is more than meets the eye”, according to ODM national treasurer Timothy Bosire — a turn of events that now threatens the peaceful co-existence of the coalition partners.
One of the notable angling of Mr Kang’ata’s letter is its advocacy for two pet lines that the Dr Ruto has been pushing in BBI debate — a consensus driven process with multiple referendum questions — hence casting the senator as a man plotting too hard instead of expressly announcing that he was rejoining Tangatanga that he all along belonged to until after 2017 elections when he joined Kieleweke.
The letter hints at BBI being unpopular in Mt Kenya, with Mr Kang’ata employing ‘scientific’ justifications to his deduction that in every 10 people, six oppose, two support and two had no stand.
Continuing supporting it in its current form, he added, is tantamount to pinning himself “permanently in the pillar of the shame of the spectacular defeat.”
The letter was also copied to the majority leaders in both Senate and the National Assembly, with the reasons behind BBI’s alleged unpopularity being the perception that it was a Kieleweke and Mr Odinga’s project that seeks to burden the taxpayer more in supporting a bloated government and that even president’s allies were being marginalised in campaigning for the draft ahead of intended referendum.
Intelligence sources tipped the Nation that Mr Kang’ata had since December 15 become panicky after Tangatanga shrugged off opposition by Kieleweke, the Handshake and Governor Mwangi wa Iria’s Civic Renewal Party (CRP) to win the Gaturi by-election.
“He started holding meetings on the ground. He would be in night meetings too and we became interested. He started asking around extensively about BBI and its chances, ratings of the President, Mr Peter Kenneth, Mr Odinga and Dr Ruto. He was a man who was walking a defining journey and we are not at all surprised by this turn of events that have culminated in the explosive letter,” said a source.
