Jubilee must stop politics of division and work for Kenyans

When word on a rift within Jubilee broke, Deputy President William Ruto dismissed it as a fallacy. He went to great lengths to discount that claim by affirming that Jubilee was intact, and that together with President Uhuru Kenyatta, they had the country reins firmly in their grip.

Today, that façade is no longer tenable and even the deputy president doesn’t talk about Jubilee woes in the numerous political rallies he addresses on an almost daily basis.

Jubilee is a house divided and rather than celebrate, Kenyans should be worried. A distracted ruling party is not only bad for development, it is bad for the economy; it is bad for national integration and cohesion as it is bad for the political health of the country.

Discounting a few who portray themselves as neutral, there are two camps within Jubilee, namely Tanga Tanga that identifies and vigorously champions Deputy President Ruto’s 2022 presidential bid, and the Kieleweke team that stands by President Uhuru Kenyatta. While Tanga Tanga believes President Kenyatta owes Ruto his presidency and must reciprocate in 2022, the Kieleweke team believes that there never was such an arrangement; that nobody owes Ruto any political debt.

Indeed, from the outset when tension started to manifest inside Jubilee, Ruto came out to publicly declare that no individual or community owed him anything. What then drives the Tanga Tanga team to be so obsessed with 2022 politics at the expense of development, even rubbishing president Kenyatta’s order to suspend early campaigns and deliver campaign pledges to the citizens? Equally important, why does the Kieleweke team feel constrained to defend the president? Against what, one might ask?

A few of the Jubilee legislators are not comfortable with the divisions and have chosen to remain neutral. Apparently, this does not sit well with the belligerent Tanga Tanga and Kieleweke gangs that are now  pushing their colleagues to stop straddling the fence and take sides. This infighting is going on to the detriment of everything else. Service delivery suffers as those who should supervise its seamless implementation are out campaigning. The ogre of tribalism that we should, as Kenyans, have long slayed and laid to rest is healthier today than before as the tribe factor in the Jubilee rift is allowed to play out. These wars are impeding the fight against corruption as some leaders choose to inflame tribal sentiments by lying that a certain community is the target of state harassment.

If recent public appointments are anything to judge by, the rift in jubilee has succeeded in clawing back the little gains made towards equitable distribution of the national cake. If the president believes he has been pushed into a tight corner and can only be effective with loyalists around him, that would be a boost for tribalism. And who would blame him when patriotism is the least of our concerns?

These Jubilee wars must end for the good of the country. If truth be told, the aggressive party is the Tanga Tanga team, and it behooves Deputy President William Ruto to call off his combative loyalists. They are destroying his chances for 2022 by showing him as desperate for the presidency.

To achieve this, the deputy president should scale down on his public rallies that form the perfect forum from which to launch attacks on rivals. Notably too, those attacks are not entirely directed at the Kieleweke team, for the handshake between President Uhuru Kenyatta and erstwhile challenger Raila Odinga appears to have irreparably soured the Tanga tanga teams mood. This should not be the case.

To his credit, President Kenyatta has not made a public display of supporting the Kieleweke team, but that does not excuse him. The divisions within Jubilee are messing his legacy and menacingly stand in the way of the Big Four Agenda on which his second and final term hinges on.

While the chasm within Jubilee widens, time flies past unnoticed and unless the president makes a conscious effort to stop this madness, he will have no legacy to bequeath Kenyans. Unless, of course, he wants history to remember him as the president under whose watch the country completely went to the dogs.