HAS THE KIKUYU ELECTORATE EVER VOTED FOR ANYONE?
We Voted Against Uhuru – Not for Ruto: Mt Kenya Voter
The Catholic Church has a prayer called conftieor: It’s a confession of sin committed by acts of commission and omission. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – It is my fault. Three times the faithful beat their chests confessing “it’s my (grievous) fault” and asking God for forgiveness. Two years after Mt Kenya region vote propelled William Ruto to the presidency, albeit a third of Kikuyus staying away from the voting booth, is the region going through a confessional moment? Will they go through this paroxysm for the next three years? Or will they, along the way, find redemption?
“We really didn’t think, things would turn the way they have for us mountain people,” said 74-year-old Njogu who, not only voted for Ruto, but vigorously campaigned for him. “I mobilised 300-plus people to vote for the president. I’m a community leader and people do listen to me.” Of the total votes that Ruto got nationwide, 47 percent was Kikuyu vote. Kiambu County, for example, has 1,275,008 total registered voters. On August 9, 2022, 606,105 turned out to give Ruto their vote. It was nearly two-and-half times bigger than the vote he got from his home county of Uasin Gishu, a fact that the president acknowledged to Kiambu leaders shortly after the election was over. “Kiambu county holds a special place in my heart,” he’s reported to have told the leaders. Uasin Gishu county polled 272,862 presidential votes.
Kikuyus didn’t vote for Ruto, they voted against Uhuru
Njogu comes from Kiambu county. The ruling coalition was up against Azimio coalition, fronted by Raila Odinga, Ruto’s chief political nemesis and who had the support of the former President Uhuru Kenyatta and his state machinery. “I will make my own confession,” said Njogu. “The Kikuyu people didn’t vote for Ruto, they voted against Uhuru Kenyatta.” The 64-million-dollar question is, has the Kikuyu electorate ever voted for anyone? Put differently, when did the Kikuyus not vote against? The electoral behaviour of the Kikuyu voter since the re-introduction of multiparty politics in 1991, has remained one of secrecy and impromptu unpredictability.
“We drove home the point that Uhuru and his family didn’t own us. We’d made him president in 2013 and 2017 alongside Ruto, yet in his last term, he became a feudal lord and forgot that we Kikuyus were never an appendage of the Kenyattas. He didn’t owe us a living and we were no longer interested in his political semantics. He had destroyed our businesses (the Nyamakima traders especially, reeled with anger when the government destroyed their goods that they had been importing from China). Business is our livelihoods, and we were not ready to be pawns of his political gymnastics.” The Kikuyu voter was itching for revenge against their muthamaki and they got it. Or didn’t they?
Go tell it to the birds
Njogu reminded me of how some Kikuyu elders were dispatched to President Uhuru to tell him the people were unhappy with his methods and implored him to mend them in good stead. “It’s not as if we didn’t try to talk to him and remind him that he owed his position, not to himself, but to the people.” At State House Nairobi, the elders allegedly found him in a drunken stupor (it wasn’t strange to find the president inebriated in state house) and after listening to them, President Uhuru purportedly dismissed them and told them to go tell it to the birds. “The wazees that had been sent to him would qualify to be his father, but, not only had he spurned them, he disrespected them. When word spread surreptitiously of how he had mishandled the ‘wise old men’, Uhuru apparently sealed his fate with the Kikuyu vote, it was the last straw that broke the camel’s back amid other transgressions that he had committed against them. How then could he now even have the gall to lecture us on who to vote for?”
Eat or you’ll be eaten
The history of the Odinga family vis-a-vis the Kikuyus has been a most tenuous one since the 1960s, said Njogu. “The dislike of the family among the Kikuyu people, has been etched in the psyche of successive generations, for nearly 60 years. You can’t wake up one day and pretend to erase that with a wave of pronunciations and ultimatums. We told Uhuru to take a long walk when he preached Raila to us. We no longer thirsted for his counsel, neither did we crave his patronage. It was over for him.” Not too long ago, in Kiambu County, to make children eat their food, parents would frighten and threaten them with the “ogre” Raila.
The Gema animosity against Raila Odinga in particular and the Luo community in general, was orchestrated and cemented by President Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the republic and the father of former President Uhuru. The ritualistic blood oathing of the Kikuyu people by force in 1969, at Ichaweri village, Jomo’s ancestral home in Gatundu, could be said to be the modern post-colonial genesis of the antagonism between the Kikuyu and the Dholuo. The two dominant communities propelled Kanu to defeat Kenya African Democratic Union (Kadu) in the 1963 general election. Kanini Kega, former Kieni MP and now an MP in the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA), once said, “Kikuyus have been so conditioned to believe that Raila Odinga encapsulates all their (political) problems and that all a Central Kenya politician needed to do was to evoke Raila’s name and all bile and hate against him would win him favour among the electorate.”
Angry and hungry
“The mountain people are angry and hungry,” said mzee Njogu. “Many of the parents from Central Kenya are struggling to send their children to school, because they simply don’t have the financial wherewithal.” By end of January 2024, 140,000 pupils who had sat for their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) had not taken their Form I positions, 40 per cent being from Central Kenya. “Majority in the villages cannot afford a square meal in a day – not because there isn’t food per se – but they just cannot afford it. This wasn’t their understanding of the bottom-up economic model. The coffee cartel’s unrelenting absolute control on the sale of the cherished berry, the fertilizer fiasco and the avocado avowal by the Murang’a farmers not to pay the prescribed withholding five per cent tax on their fruit produce has further angered the Mountain people.
In February 2018, I did a story on Central Kenya’s grinding poverty, after travelling to Nyeri County and interviewing a 75-year-old woman. The land was dry, the rains had not been forthcoming and the maize in the fields was stunted. The people were looking to be given relief food by the government. Many people in her Kirimukuyu location didn’t have enough to feed their children. Now, for the better part of last year and so far in 2024, the rains have been aplenty, nobody’s starving, but the burdensome new taxes introduced by the Ruto regime and a struggling economy, have conspired to make the people even more miserable.
An intoxicating cocktail. . .a broth well prepared
The populist bottom-up economic model was oversold and ingeniously marketed as the panacea to the economic woes that had beset the country’s urban hustlers and the rural strugglers, which they had swallowed whole kit and caboodle. It was an intoxicating cocktail of a drug that drove the Kikuyus to compose electoral, euphoric ballads such as, “We’ll wake up very early in the morning to vote for Ruto.” The concoction of electoral euphoria, fear and hatred for Raila is a broth when well-prepared is best served to the Kikuyu voter. And no politician served it better than the deceptively discerning William Ruto, who understands the political psychology of the Kikuyus masses so well.
Gatundu North MP, Elijah Njoroge Kururia, who ran as an independent candidate, apologetically tells of how some of his constituents believed that with the onset of the Ruto regime they’d be exempted from paying extraneous taxes. “In fact, some were convinced that the government would set aside money for their recompense. The youth believed that money would be put into their pockets.” The exact opposite is happening: Money is leaving their pockets faster than it is finding its way in there. Now burdened with inconsiderate and punitive taxes, they’re gnashing their teeth.
Calming edgy nerves
In as many months, 2024, Ruto has returned to Mt Kenya region to ostensibly inaugurate developments projects. Between August 9–10, he was on a charm offensive, his deputy in tow, to present a united front and remind the Gema community that it’s still the key to his re-election in 2027. The visit came hot on the heels of a “revamped” cabinet. The Mountain lost a key CS position – National Treasury – that’s why Ruto was in the region to explain the rationale behind the broad-based government (BBG). The Mountain is not amused that it lost a key CS plank; the money ministry. Ruto’s chief message in central Kenya was; I invited John Mbadi (the ODM politician, who’s the new CS Treasury) so that he can help us collect tax; he has been criticising us from the opposition flanks, now let us see how he handles this job. The Italian Mafia has a saying: Keep you friends close; keep your enemies even closer.
On the day the former Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury Prof Njuguna Ndung’u was reading the Budget estimates, June 13, 2024, President Ruto dashed to Mt Kenya east in Meru County. The official reason given was to inaugurate maendeleo (development). Not surprising, the visit came in the wake of a brewing storm that had engulfed the Mountain: The debate over one man-one-shilling-one vote revenue sharing formula; the rising tension between Ruto and his deputy Rigathi Gachagua and the fight between Mt Kenya east leaders and their counterparts from Coast region, over a green intoxicating green leaf, muguka, that is grown in Mt Kenya area, but mainly consumed down at the coast region. The coast leaders banned the leaf from being transported to their region claiming the drug is wreaking havoc among the coastal youth.
The senior most leader from this region is Kindiki Kithure, the reappointed Interior CS. Kindiki openly chastised Gachagua and told him to stop his apparent ethnic machinations by spearheading the divisive “revenue” formula and quisling manoeuvres towards his boss, President Ruto. Then as now, Ruto could have been affirming Kindiki and subtly egging him on to continue poking Gachagua.
Similarly on the week of Valentine’s Day, February 14, Ruto, the 2022 Kikuyu presidential candidate made an impulsive, quick dash to Central Kenya, where he camped for three days; Feb 14–16, ostensibly to inaugurate developmental projects, but in reality, to calm the voters’ edgy nerves. He passed through Kiambu County, before heading to Murang’a. In Kiambu, he was confronted by a simmering rebellion against the county’s governor Kimani wa Matangi, by some MPs, which spilled to the open, to the chagrin of the Deputy President Gachagua and to President Ruto’s embarrassment. It is alleged that it is Kikuyu MP Anthony Kimani Ichung’wah who was behind the rehearsed rebellion. As President Ruto’s bosom buddy, “Ichung’wah, as the Majority Leader, has been overstepping his mark, strutting around in the county by stepping on everyone’s toes,” whispered a Kiambu County MP.
Plains of misery
Many of Ruto supporters from the mountain are no longer animated: Nobody is owning up to having voted for him and those that I know did, are mum and sullen and prone to easy provocation. “It is probable Ruto may no longer be in the mountain’s heart,” said a senior government official. “Kikuyu anger is building . . .and that doesn’t augur well for his regime.”
In times of economic and political hardships and confronted by unforeseen uncertainty, Kikuyus turn to religion: Psalms 121: I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. Our God is still on the throne, we place our hopes and desires in the Lord.
But they also become suicidal and resort to criminal tendencies. In early February, I visited werū mwega (happy plains) location in the larger Kimende area of Kiambu County. The area chief and the elders are having to deal with a new crisis: Livestock theft. Being a cool place, many villagers largely rear sheep. The sheep have been disappearing faster than their owners can count them. The chief has had to issue an edict; whoever is doing this should stop or be eliminated. When I spoke to one of the chief’s confidant, he ruefully lamented, werū mwega had been turned into werū mūru (plains of misery). “A band of some rogue youth have been on the rampage scuttling away people’s livestock in the darkly night. This is the local youth doing this; they are known, life’s tough for everyone, so what the chief has been telling the villagers quietly is to be more vigilant in protecting their animals and if possible, build firmer enclosures.”
Mindboggling unbridled avarice
Central Kenya has for the longest time been beset by dangerous illicit brews, that has maimed some drinkers for life and even killed them. In January, I was with my friend from Kiharu, Murang’a County, who narrated a disturbing story: Lately, there had been a spike in the intake of illicit brews in his location. There has always been a drinking problem among the youth in Murang’a, “yet, the youth had singularly resorted to heavier dangerous illicit drinking over the recent months. It’s not a good omen. Why is it that it is Central Kenya that has been caught up in this web of illicit brews? Why is it that it’s only our people who don’t know how to drink responsibly?”
To seek answers, I paid a visit to a senior police chief, who I’ve known for many years. He is an Officer Commanding Police Station (OCPD) in Kiambu County. Like Murang’a County, Kiambu has suffered immeasurably from dangerous illicit brews and my cop friend has been in the forefront of fighting it. “The Kikuyu people were the first Kenyans to embrace capitalism from the British colonial rulers, but their unbridled avarice for primitive accumulation is mind boggling,” he lamented. “How on earth can a woman, who herself is a mother, sell poison to her sons, the band of youth that visit her den, all in the name of unfettered capitalism?
“These brews are sold by Kikuyus, consumed by Kikuyus, policed by Kikuyus themselves – the area local administration of chiefs and sub-chiefs. Are they not Kikuyus? How is it that we knowingly kill our most productive people, the youth? Granted, the regular police and the administration police (AP) who also receive bribes from these sellers could be non-Kikuyus and hence would care less whether the Kikuyu people chose to poison themselves or not, but what about our people?”
A cup of poison for KSh50
The OCPD squarely put the problem of illicit brews in Central Kenya on two sets of people: The peddlers and the local security apparatuses. But he also whispered a third one: he imputed that the ethanol-laced brews were being imported in central Kenya by a former powerful state aficionado in President Uhuru’s government. Guess what? The powerful bureaucrat is both Uhuru’s friend and from the Mountain region.
The OCPD had busted a powerful woman who sold ethanol to drinkers. “I discovered she was untouchable and very powerful, why? She had pocketed the area chief, who was on her weekly retainer. As the chief collected his bribes weekly, my police officers also visited the den, for their handsome hand-cheques. ‘If the Kikuyus are on a mission to commit suicide, who are we to stop them,’ some of my officers are reported to have gleefully said.” The OCPD told me he called a baraza for all his regular police officers from his division and laid down his rule – You can collect bribes from wherever else, but not from illicit liquor owners. If I catch you doing it, trust me, you’ll be interdicted.”
So, when it was reported on February 6, 2024 that illicit brew had once again wrecked havoc in Central Kenya, in Mwea, Kirinyaga County, it signalled a harbinger of things to come and the resurgence of a drinking problem that has refused to go away in the vote-rich Mountain region. In total, 23 drinkers had been killed and 20 lost their eyesight. At Kangia village, an uncle spoke about his deceased nephew: “The people had turned to the cheap killer brews because life was becoming unbearable. It helps them drown their sorrows. With KSh50, you can buy yourself a cup of poison. With a KSh100, you get a knock-off and black out.”
The Flying Horse
In Kiambu county, there’s an illicit liquor that swells the drinker’s face. I asked a recanted drinker where the liquor came from and said, it’s usually distributed by some funky young men who drive a posh salon vehicle. He added that it is usually laced with formaldehyde, to make the drink extra lethal. Formaldehyde is a disinfectant substance that is used in embalming and preservation of bodies in the morgue. The young man listed Diamond, also known as Kadaya, Flying Horse, Santa and Taifa Ice, as the most popular brews consumed in Kiambu County and generally in central Kenya.
God of a second chance
In 2019, 70-year-old staunch catholic granny from Kiamaina village, Engashura location, Nakuru County told me the Kikuyu people are an enigmatic lot. When it has the Kenya shilling in its pocket, the almighty God becomes a distant relation. “During President Mwai Kibaki’s era (2002–2013, an epoch many Kikuyus now recall with nostalgia), they hardly were religious. They were busy minting the Kenya shilling. When the shilling becomes scarce, they remember God and seek his refuge. But at the same time, they too self-destruct and engage in suicidal missions like, consuming poison in the name of wishing away their misery.”
