The explanation lies squarely at the feet of the deputy president – his hubris, raw ambition, lack of humility, and generally taking his succession to the presidency for granted. This narrative has garnered quite some movement in the country, but it does not actually explain the fallout between the president and his deputy, nor the fact that the deputy president is unlikely to succeed the president. The argument is that those who belong to the dynasty – Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga, and Gideon Moi – have regrouped to ensure a Hustler – William Ruto – does not ascend to the highest seat in the land. If you ask Deputy President Ruto and those close to him, the issue lies in the Hustler vs. The six-million-dollar question is: why? Why did the UhuRuto duo fall out so badly given their brotherly closeness following their 2013 electoral victory? This time round, he is the incumbent casting his lot with the opposition and working hard to ensure his deputy does not succeed him. But instead of rallying the opposition forces against the incumbent, President Mwai Kibaki, Uhuru chose to cast his lot with Kibaki in a case wherein, perhaps, ethnic loyalty trumped democratic sensibilities. In the 2007 election, Uhuru was the official leader of the opposition. This is a most rare development in the practice of democracy anywhere in the world. The fallout between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto is so complete that the incumbent president has thrown all his weight behind the de facto opposition leader instead of supporting his second-in-command to succeed him. In my public lecture at Kenyatta University on 23 June 2022, entitled “The Uhuru-Ruto Administration and Electoral Politics in Kenya: A Dialectical Perspective”, I developed my argument further and buttressed my conclusions of three years ago using the three laws of dialectics. Developments in the country in the countdown to the 9 August 2022 elections seem to buttress my argument of three years ago that kingmakers never become kings themselves, or, more precisely, they never succeed the kings they make.
In that article I concluded that, just like Oginga Odinga helped facilitate Jomo Kenyatta’s ascendancy to the presidency but he himself never became president, William Ruto may have helped Uhuru Kenyatta win the presidency but he himself was unlikely to become president. More than three years ago, on 1 November 2018, I wrote an article on this forum titled Man in the Mirror: Echoes of Jomo in Uhuru.
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