Despite the fact that Uhuru has not been actively campaigning (as a former president his hand are tied). Despite the fact that he has NOT been on the rooftop of his car in every village in Mt Kenya region.
And despite very few brief appearances in the region…
He has today turned around his situation from the most hated politician in Mt Kenya (towards the tail end of his presidency) to the most loved politician in the region and well beyond.
So… how the heck did he pull it off?
Indeed former President Uhuru Kenyatta has serious political skills and is extremely smart, something that some of us found out when it was too late.
His political opponent and rival, current President Ruto has been quoted as saying now is not the time to be popular. Insinuating that when elections are just around the corner he has a magic switch that will make Kenyans fo9rget why they hate him so much and suddenly push him back to popularity. I guess all dreams are valid.
Ruto fatal error number two
Assuming that the intelligence community can solve all problems for him
In retrospect, it is now clear that during the 2022 presidential elections (especially when Wafula Chebukati “cooking” election results at Bomas), Ruto had his people deep inside our intelligence service.
Indeed this was a key component in his plan to win the presidential elections with less votes than the real winner.
And so it is easy to understand why somebody like Ruto would assume that since it worked at a very critical moment to make him president, it will always work.
It is super fascinating and indeed instructive that this is the same mistake that the second President of the Republic of Kenya Daniel Toroitich arap Moi made in the 80s and '90s. You see his intelligence boys came up with a plan of ensuring that nobody would ever dream of opposing Moi in the distant future by creating a fictional thing called Mwakenya.
For the sake of younger Kenyans, what was Mwakenya? The Mwakenya Movement was an underground socialist movement in Kenya in the 1980s formed to violently overthrow the Moi government (that was the narrative of the government).
Yep, in case you didn't know it, Mwakenya was pure fiction. The intelligence Community at the time planted seditious anti-Moi documents amongst a few disgruntled people and critics of the government. Especially in institutions of higher learning in the country.
In other words they framed these poor Kenyans for being members of a fictional thing that did not exist and then crashed that fictional Mwakenya ruthlessly. Thus creating so much fear in the country that Kenyans understood that there were better ways of committing suicide than being seen as opposing Moi.
I was one of the victims of the fictional Mwakenya and Moi’s terror campaign to get Kenyans to fear him. And in those days I was just starting out in my journalism career and yet to write a single political article. But I was still a victim only because I was a freelance writer for somebody who was a Mwakenya suspect. And I was therefore suspected to be guilty by association, according to the then Special branch intelligence unit. That was the only reason.
And the intelligence boys caught up with me and I was a guest of the state for four horrifying days that I will never forget. Now during one of those days at a police station (because they were moving me from one police station to another, every few hours, to avoid relatives or senior cop dad knowing my whereabouts. This happened at the Kamukunji Police station cells where I realized I was a celebrity. Cops were coming from all over town just to see me and what I looked like. And so I was there a terrified young kid but they did not see that. They saw a dissident a very brave young man who had dared to dream of overthrowing Moi by violent means. The kid who was not scared of dying for what they believed in.
But even after all that terror from the Moi regime, where many Kenyans lost their lives for nothing, did Moi and his KANU still end up going home? Oh yes they did. In fact in my opinion those activities of the intelligence community at the time speeded up KANU’s exit from power. It did the exact opposite of what it was intended to do.
Bottom line, the intelligence community can never keep an unpopular leader in power. And this has been proved time and again, all over the world.
