ETHNICIZED FURY
Both candidates depended on the region to win their presidential bids. The fact that both their running mates were from Mt Kenya showed just how much importance they attached to the region. The region has the largest voter basket in the country. In 2022, that basket held 6.3 million votes. In 2027, that basket might as well swell to more than 7 million votes. Mt Kenya is not only the largest voter catchment area; it has consistently posted the biggest voter turn-out in the country since the re-introduction of multiparty politics in 1991. The majority of the rest of Kenyans grind their teeth, when they are reminded that without the Mountain vote no presidential candidate can ascend to State House. The flipside of this ethnicized fury is that mugikuyus tend to think they own the title deed to the geographical entity called Kenya.
Between a rock and a hard place
For the first time, Mt Kenya region posted the lowest turnout in the post-1991 general election; only 66 percent turned out to vote. The reasons for this were obvious; not having a candidate of their own meant many of the voters kept off the polling booths. Socialized to always vote for a candidate from their region, there was little inspiration to troop to their polling stations. The region has been accused of being notoriously ethnic and selfish. The choice between Ruto and Raila put Mt Kenya in an unenviable situation; between a rock and a hard place. The voters had issues with both candidates: The older generation of age 50 and above could not countenance voting for Ruto. Why? The post-election violence (PEV) of 2027 was still fresh in their minds. They had witnessed it in real time. Many Kikuyus of that generation still blame Ruto for their cousins’ death in the North Rift, a grudge they are not yet ready to let go. The wound is still raw and therefore they are still bitter. In contrast, their children and grandchildren who PEV is history to them, couldn’t connect directly to the mayhem and death, hence, couldn’t care less.
Corrosive narrative
Candidate Raila presented a special problem. The region had consistently shunned him; it didn’t trust him. It didn’t matter whether his candidature presented the best manifesto, or he worked with some of the area’s better known political elites. The Mt Kenya voter didn’t trust him because overtime the region’s political elites had worked extra hard to sow seeds of discord between Raila and the electorate. Since 1991, the Mt Kenya political mandarins had painted Raila as an enemy, whose ambitions were ostensibly anathema to the region’s political and socio-economic interests. But Kenya’s political history preceded the elites’ apparent fear of a Raila presidency: The 1969 oath of allegiance administered in Gatundu, the ancestral home of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first post-independent president. After Jomo publicly disagreed with his first Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, which lead to the Little General election of 1966, barely three years after the country got independence in 1963 and subsequently the assassination of the mercurial TJ Mboya on July 5, 1969, Jomo Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia, felt sufficiently threatened that the presidency could be slipping away from them. They decided to oath ethnic Kikuyus; a cultural practice that called for their loyalty and obedience complete with threats of death if you didn’t abide by the oath. The oathing was forcefully used to bind Mt Kenya region, tying the region’s political fate to that of Jomo and his cabal of Kiambu District loyalists. The ramifications of this secret blood oathing are still felt to date in the Mt Kenya region in regard to voting a presidential candidate from the Luo community in general and a member of the Odinga family in particular. Despite this corrosive narrative, the Mountain in an unprecedented move gave Raila, 1.1 million votes in the August 9, 2022 elections. It could as well be the largest cache of votes that Raila will ever harvest from the slippery Mountain.
Aesop’s fable
Within the Mt Kenya region, the choice between choosing Raila or Ruto has been likened to an Aesop’s fable: The choice was between choosing a defanged hyena or a canine-fanged hyena. Between an aging hyena and a resurgent hyena. Whatever the case, the region was prey to competing hyenas, a fact the region considered inescapable. Between the two, so went the question, which predator, was going to maul the region sparingly? Because it was going to be mauled anyway.
Defanged hyena
Raila was the defanged hyena and Ruto was the young fully toothed hyena. The Mt Kenya region proponents of the Raila presidency observed that even though they had been socialized to shun Raila and the community he hailed from because of cultural taboos and apparently being a political mismatch incongruent to the region’s interests, he was, nonetheless, the less dangerous of the hyenas. This standpoint hacked back to the principle of the lesser evil, or if you may, to the Kiswahili proverb that says; zimwi likujualo halikuli likakwisha. The devil that knows you doesn’t eat to finish you. The proponents who agreed with Uhuru Kenyatta, the outgoing president said the community would be safer in the hands of Raila, an aging political carpetbagger, who would be seemingly pliable to the dictates of the Mt Kenya region’s political elites. They said Raila’s presidency would be a qui pro quo: We made you president; you must cater to our biddings. He was likened to a hyena that growled in old age but wouldn’t bite. Yet, it was a gamble; even an aging hyena could turn lethal and kill you. Certainly, this group was outnumbered by the group that backed a powerfully jawed hyena.
A young agile hyena
The proponents of a hyena with all its canines intact, said a young, agile hyena though dangerous, ostensibly carried the aspirations and expectations of a country that was seeking to look into the future by shunning ethnic politics and therefore, this hyena whose destiny was interwoven with the fate of the country couldn’t risk eating the country’s future progeny. Because of the hyena’s apparent youthfulness, the proponents believed this hyena had a better and clearer vision than the old toothless hyena that seemed shackled to the old ways of doing politics. The proponents also reminded the Mountain’s electorate that Ruto had had a pact with Uhuru Kenyatta; “ten for me, 10 for you.” They claimed the Mountain people are an honourable lot – they respect and keep promises. Above all, believe it or not, they also observed that Ruto was a Christian. Whatever that meant and for all its worth, it meant that Ruto would abide by his promises, especially the promises he had made to the Mt Kenya region. They hoped that the fear of the Lord would prevent him from eating some of the Mt Kenya offsprings. People from the Mt Kenya area are notoriously religious; this is not the same thing as being Godly.
A hyena will always remain a hyena
Thirty-six months later, gnashing its teeth, the Mountain has completely turned its back on Ruto. And now, the storyline is hiti no hiti – a hyena will always remain a hyena. When it wants to maul one of its offsprings, it claims the offspring smells like a youngling of a goat. A late realization by the Mt Kenya people, but one that invokes another of the Kikuyu idioms – hiti ndineyaguo keri. You don’t make the same mistake twice. Literally it means, you cannot let a hyena maul one of your calves twice.
Both the proponents of the defanged hyena and hyena full of teeth had hoped that the Mt Kenya political elites would not be outstripped by their respective hyena choices. That the young agile hyena bared its full teeth, barely 18 months into its first term, a surprise move contrary to the peoples’ expectations has made the region look inwards, even though it’s unlikely it will have its own candidature (the deposed deputy president Rigathi Gachagua has upped the ante recently and said he will be on the ballot box, his impeachment by the upper senate house notwithstanding).
Obnoxious thought
Even though the powerful jawed hyena has attempted to bastardize and ostracize Mt Kenya region in the eyes of the rest of Kenyans, it recently professed its love for the region, claiming it will not stop loving the people of this region because without their vote, it wouldn’t be president today. To the Mt Kenya people, they interpreted this statement to mean, the hyena feeling exposed, hopes to devise a new strategy to further pulverize its prey. This is even after the attempts by the Ruto regime to marginalize the region, which has only served to unify the Mountain even further. The first attempt was to create an artificial fissure called Mt Kenya East and Mt Kenya West. It didn’t work. The second, even more bizarre, was to try and “physically” dislocate Kiambu County from the Mt Kenya region: An obnoxious thought that belies political logic. Being a Kikuyu, or for that matter, being from Mt Kenya region is not a geographical construct. The Mt Kenya voter has been known to vote collectively whether they are in Cheregani Hills or Shimba Hills and more than ever before will do so, come 2027.
