Mandago: Rungu governor with a loose tongue

Uasin Gishu’s ‘rungu’ wielding Governor Jackson Kiplagat Mandago is a blend of many spirits.

Like John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the US, he is astute, erratic and intelligent. Yet he is as condescending and disdainful as he is loyal and ambitious.

Not afraid to speak his mind, Mandago is admired and loathed in equal measure. Like Okonkwo, the main protagonist in Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, the Uasin Gishu governor’s unpredictable character has put him in the headlines for all the wrong reasons time and again.

This assertiveness, defiance and against the against the grain streak have earned him comparison to the late Mark Too, whose ‘Mr Fix It’ signature was also admired and scorned at for more than a decade.

But beyond his wide smile and the bewitching gap that embellishes his milky teeth, lies a devil-may-care politician who easily whips up emotions.

Just last week, Mandago was in the cross-hairs of his Nakuru counterpart Lee Kinyanjui, who accused him of ethnic profiling. A video showing Uasin Gishu County askaris beating up a hawker in Eldoret town had been the talk of social media.

This was only the latest in a string of controversies that have defined his short career in politics. In his usual element, Mandago let his deputy do the fighting for him.

Mandago seems to thrive in controversy. A hithertho unknown personality when he delved into politics in 2012, he has come a long way since he beat Deputy President William Ruto’s preferred candidate, Prof Julius Bitok, in the Jubilee primaries.

Before then, he could not attract a passing glance in town. The wealthy farmers and business community that own Eldoret had never heard of him.

But it is his outgoing nature that endeared him to the rural masses, as he went from village to village campaigning in a tractor. He won the seat by a landslide, sending Margaret Kamar, then a Cabinet minister, to political obscurity.

Mandago wasted no time making himself Ruto’s number one defender, even when it was obvious that the DP had little regard for him.

And then he started wielding a ‘rungu’ in public. For the Kalenjin community, a rungu is a symbol of leadership, power and wisdom. Though there is nothing wrong with carrying the rungu, many questioned why he would do so at his young age. After all, no other leader had been seen with one apart from former President Moi.

Mandago took office with a bang: driving hawkers out of Eldoret town’s CBD in what created stiff resistance especially from the non-Kalenjin traders. He was labelled a tribalist.

Then he was accused of appointing only members of his community to senior county positions and locking out other tribes. He paid no attention.

3,000 street children

When several street families staged a demonstration in Eldoret to protest killings allegedly perpetrated by the police, his response was tacit.

He ordered security officers to round up and remove more than 3,000 street children and beggars from Eldoret, claiming many of them were from neighbouring counties. On his orders, street children were bundled into a truck and dumped in Busia, prompting an outcry from human rights groups.

He was also condemned by Bishop Cornelius Korir, the late head of the Eldoret Catholic Diocese.

The governor has a knack for addressing crowds in his dialect, even at national functions attended by the President. During the burial of Mark Too, a national TV station was forced to cut short a live broadcast after the governor switched to his mother tongue to ask the community to back the DP as its de facto leader.

Yet all this was nothing compared to his run-ins with the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC). Last year, he led a demonstration to the doors of Moi University’s administration block to protest the appointment of Laban Ayiro as acting vice chancellor.

Reason? Mandago, his Elgeyo Marakwet counterpart Alex Tolgos and MPs Oscar Sudi (Kapseret) and Silas Tiren (Moiben) wanted “one of our own” to head Kenya’s second oldest institution of higher learning.

This marked the first of Mandago’s altercation with the Deputy President, who is said to have supported Prof Ayiro’s appointment.

Then came the 2017 campaigns and he found himself facing businessman Zedekiah Kiprop Bundotich (Buzeki), said to have been the DP’s candidate.

NCIC warning

Mandago pulled out a multi-pronged attack on Jubilee’s game plan. He teamed up with then Jubile rebels, MPs Oscar Sudi (Kapseret) and Alfred Keter (Nandi Hills) and threatened to mobilise the community against President Uhuru Kenyatta and the DP if they continued supporting his fierce rival, Buzeki.

It was then that he, together with Sudi and Keter, were again summoned by the NCIC for warning the Kikuyu community in Uasin Gishu against supporting Buzeki. That he could openly draw a line in the sand and warn the President and his deputy against supporting his rival shows how far he has come in his political journey.

In the campaigns, Mandago became the only Jubilee candidate to receive unlikely political support from NASA when Opposition leaders endorsed him, even though he had wasted no chance to tell them off as a bunch of losers.

And just like he did in 2003, he won by a landslide and wasted no time mending fences with Ruto, landing himself a spot as one of the key campaigners in the repeat presidential elections.

It is not clear what his ambitions are when his term as governor ends. But to expect him to drown in the bathroom might perhaps be foolhardy.