In a new twist of events, elders who visited President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House in Nairobi last Saturday now say that at no point in his speech did he accuse his deputy William Ruto of planning to physically harm or impeach him.
Mr Kinyua wa Mwangi, who claims he was the master of ceremony at that meeting on Wednesday said “the matter has been grossly misrepresented to a point of creating divisions in the country,” accusing the media of “manipulating deliberations of a meeting where it was not represented”.
The claimed clarification contradicts independent Nation.Africa investigations that also claimed that the President indeed dwelt on how Dr Ruto was scheming to sabotage him nationally and in the Mt Kenya region.
“The President emotionally addressed us in the Gikuyu language and told us how he came to know that Dr Ruto was engaging in unorthodox means to undermine him,” said our independent source, who attended the meeting.
“He told us that Dr Ruto was seeking Mr Raila Odinga in 2018 with the intention of recruiting him to a scheme of combining numbers to undermine him.
“He used the words ‘ndamenya uguo ngimugua mbere, ngiteng’era naihenya na ngigeithania na mundu uyu’ (after I found out about the plot, I made haste to beat him in shaking Odinga’s hand.”
After the contentious 2017 presidential election, where President Kenyatta was declared the winner by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), his main competitor, Mr Odinga, disputed the results and the Supreme Court nullified the win.
Mr Odinga boycotted the rerun that was ordered by the court, and Kenyatta raced alone to yet another win that was upheld by the same court, and he was eventually sworn in for his second term.
While the President, Mr Odinga and State House have remained mum about the issue, immediately after the information was made public, Dr Ruto and his loyalists reacted angrily and have used it to target the ODM leader.
“I am not a mad man, neither foolish or a drunkard…I cannot help found the Jubilee government and then plot to bring it down. I helped Uhuru Kenyatta win the presidency twice in three elections. He must be mistaking me for Mr Odinga, whose plots to overthrow governments are novel,” Dr Ruto said on a tour of the Coast region.
He added that Mr Odinga had attempted to overthrow the government in 1982 and swore himself in as the “people’s president” after he boycotted the 2017 repeat elections, saying he could not comprehend how he himself could be accused of such infamy.
Mr Mwangi, who also serves as the national patron of the Kiama Kia Ma Elders, said the President spoke for one hour and16 minutes and “never at any moment did he directly or indirectly accuse his Deputy President of being party to a scheme to physically harm him or sponsor an impeachment process against him”.
The Agikuyu community has two elders’ bodies – Kiama Kia Ma Elders and the Agikuyu Council of Elders that is led by Mr Wachira Kiago.
Mr Mwangi said “the reports to insinuate such are shocking, especially for me, who was the MC from the start to the end of the meeting”.
He said that another claim being circulated is that the President summoned 3,500 elders drawn from across the country to State House, saying that “it is our chairman, Mr Wachira Kiago, who in consultations with the rest of us secured an appointment that the President granted”.
He said there is a “strange perception that members of the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (Gema) should not visit State House since doing so is associated with tribalism”.
He said State House belongs to all Kenyans and Gema is one of the stakeholders.
Speaking at the elders’ headquarters in Nairobi’s Ruaka estate and flanked by representatives from all the 47 counties, he said the authors of the narrative that the President disparaged his deputy at State House was designed to make the function lose meaning and start a crusade pitting Mt Kenya against itself.
“We want to make it very clear that we will not buy that fear being traded our way…We refuse and we will counter it by … hitting the ground to campaign for the Jubilee and Azimio La Umoja presidential candidate, Mr Odinga,” he said.
“We want to confront their lies, insults and deceptions where they are categorising all of us as mama mboga (vegetable female traders).”
Mr Kinyua also accused the “hustler nation” in Mt Kenya of hosting “politicians who are courting our curse for their uncivilised insults against the President and his family members”.
He said these people are introducing “strange politics in the Mt Kenya region, where we are even witnessing violence that is costing us lives”.
Jubilee secretary-general Jeremiah Kioni said the State House visit, which he also attended, “had nothing to do with the President gossiping about any person or group of people as being presented”.
He said the meeting “was to assert the leadership in him over Mt Kenya people, acknowledging that we recognise his good leadership as a national President and renewed his mantle to lead us for the next five years”.
The President, he said, was given the cultural powers to call his people to war, circumcise the community’s lads, decide on the colours and design of elders’ ceremonial gowns, rally his people to a cause agreed upon by the elders and take part in all forms of rituals that are sealed by spilling the blood of goats.
Mr Kioni said “we all agreed to go and sell the Jubilee Party as the Mt Kenya political vehicle and also adopt the President’s guidance that we support Mr Odinga as our presidential candidate”.
He said “it is hurting to hear the solemn cultural ceremony being manipulated to create an environment of even insulting the symbol of Mt Kenya motherhood that is Mama Ngina Kenyatta by some individuals who are not even from our community”. BY DAILY NATION