Deputy President William Ruto has trashed President Uhuru Kenyatta’s track record and accused his boss of ruining the country’s economy among other failures.
Flanked by scores of MPs, Ruto spoke amid anxiety over President Kenyatta’s secret meeting with his handshake partner Raila Odinga at the Coast.
Besides crafting a giant coalition, there are speculations the President could engineer a radical reshuffle to eventually kick out all Ruto-allied officials and reconstitute a “succession government”.
Raila flew to Mombasa on Wednesday evening without any of his confidants. Sources said he would be in Mombasa until Sunday, leading to an overhaul of his diary.
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Jubilee secretary general Raphael Tuju who met Raila on Wednesday alongside party vice chairman David Murathe declined to give any details.
“There has to be constant consultation between leaders for the stability, prosperity and development of the country irrespective of the party. There would be more consultations as days go by,” he told the Star.
The relationship between Uhuru and Ruto is increasingly getting confrontational.
On Monday, Ruto was dramatically blocked from flying to Uganda. The DP claimed the incident is part of a continuous scheme to humiliate him.
But speaking at his Karen home after a meeting with his troops, Ruto said Uhuru’s administration abandoned its key agenda, sliding the country into “a grim state of affairs”.
Ruto said the economy has been ruined, millions of people condemned to poverty and public debt accumulated to unprecedented levels after Jubilee abandoned its solemn pledges to Kenyans.
“For the past four years, we have consistently and repeatedly raised concerns and objections to Jubilee’s abandoning of its agenda and solemn commitments upon which it was re-elected in 2017,” Ruto’s team said in joint press statement.
Ruto addressed a press conference after a closed-door meeting with MPs, senators and governors allied to his UDA that they said numbered 135.
The statement was read out in turns by the legislators who officially declared shifting to UDA – the outfit the DP intends to use for his State House journey.
Surrounded by the battalion of MPs in a show of might, Ruto said the President and the Opposition brigade got preoccupied with the BBI, thus sabotaging key Jubilee plans that would have turned around the lives of ordinary Kenyans.
“The Nasa coalition, its principals and their Jubilee collaborators took the government hostage, hijacked its agenda and sabotaged job creation, universal health coverage, food security and manufacturing thus scuttling the entire Big Four plan,” Ruto and his team said.
The UDA team also claimed that Uhuru’s administration has criminalised ‘hustler’ enterprises in places like Nyamakima, Gikomba, Kamukunji, Kirinyaga Road and River Road in Nairobi, condemning many to the poverty bracket.
Jubilee has also presided over the brutal and inhuman evictions and demolitions of the vulnerable and destruction of private property in, among other areas, Kariobangi and Ruai in Nairobi.
“They have mismanaged the economy leading to stockpiling of public debt to unprecedented levels occasioning the current crisis,” the DP said.
In their first term, Ruto constantly defended Jubilee’s appetite for debt and often criticised the Opposition for taking on of the government for its excessive borrowing.
Ruto’s assertion is the direct opposite of his boss who has publicly said that he has achieved more under the handshake arrangement than he did in his first term.
The President said that his first term was riddled with massive graft.
At the presser, Ruto suggested that Uhuru’s trickle down economic approach has failed to free more than 15 million Kenyans from the yoke of poverty.
“The bottom-up economic model will uplift the millions of people in our nation that today either are jobless or are hustling and pastoralists and herders who are on food relief,” he said.
“It is our very considered view that our focus on these 15 million Kenyans will only help us broaden and expand and recruit new taxpayers, they will help raise the necessary resources to run government and also retire debt that is becoming a crisis in our country,” Ruto added.
Raila flew to Mombasa on Wednesday evening after a meeting with a group of youths from Murang’a county.
The agenda of the Mombasa meeting remains unclear though it is believed to have everything to do with the 2022 succession politics.
Sources indicate handlers of the two leaders, including their political confidants, have been locked out of the meeting, raising curiosity about its agenda.
The Star has established that the meeting led to the cancellation of ODM political event that was planned for this Friday in Kisii.
The Nyanza meeting has been rescheduled to August 18 and the venue moved to Homa Bay.
Speaking to the Star, Tuju said for long they have tried not to be pre-occupied with politics but hinted at a big political surprise in the offing.
“The President and his team don’t have the luxury of tangatangaring (sic)…but we have our game plan. Watch this space,” he stated.
ODM also issued a quick rejoinder to Ruto trashing the bottom-up model, saying the DP failed to leverage on it to transform lives during his heyday with the President.
“Despite what they say, the truth remains that the problems in Jubilee begins and ends with DP Ruto. None other than Jubilee Party leader Uhuru Kenyatta has said as much,” secretary general Edwin Sifuna said in a statement.
Sifuna’s said the government programmes including the Big Four have continued unabated.
“The difference is Ruto is no longer invited to launch or commission these, so he believes they stopped,” he added.
According to sources that attended the Karen meeting, Ruto and his MPs resolved that UDA grassroots elections be held in the October as part of their preparations to create structures and position the party as a formidable outfit ahead of the polls.
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