Uhuru says Raila won in 2022 polls, why did he hand power to Ruto?

Former President Uhuru Kenyatta hands the instruments of power to President William Ruto at Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani, Nairobi.  [File, Standard]

Between the burial of Kenya’s former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, and his first anniversary, former President Uhuru Kenyatta moved from a silent prayer at the grave to a public sentence about the 2022 election, and Raila’s comrades read the two together.

Part 2 ended at Raila’s grave, where Uhuru’s silent prayer earned a standing that outlasted the visit. This part sets the sentence he spoke eleven months later against the record.

On September 22, 2026, at a Jubilee Party officials’ meeting in Nairobi, Uhuru Kenyatta said, in Swahili, that he knows to this day that Raila won the 2022 election, and that “we know how things went.” Here is how things went. In 2007 Uhuru backed President Mwai Kibaki, who was sworn in after dark, within two hours of a disputed result, and 1,133 people died in the post-election violence that followed the controversial swearing-in. In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld Uhuru’s win after refusing to admit Raila’s additional evidence. In 2017 it annulled the August presidential result, and Raila withdrew from the repeat, citing the electoral commission’s failure to comply with court orders. In all three disputed counts, Uhuru’s side kept the presidency.

After the 2018 handshake, Raila stood with Uhuru to the end of Uhuru’s term, and in February 2022 Uhuru endorsed Raila’s bid. In September 2022, Uhuru handed the presidency to his deputy, William Ruto.

A friend who meant the older Raila to have his turn would have given it to him, but Uhuru served both of his own terms, with Ruto beside him under a pact that Jubilee’s vice chairman, David Murathe, called “yangu kumi na ya Ruto kumi,” ten years for Uhuru and ten for Ruto. If that pact existed, honouring it meant backing Ruto in 2022.

Murathe said instead, in March 2022, that it had already run its course, because Ruto had served ten years as co-president. The Constitution provides for a President and a Deputy President and has no office of co-president, so the claim stretched a title to cancel a promise.

Uhuru was free to change his mind, but a man who breaks a gentleman’s agreement owes the other party a public reason, and the co-president line was not one. Either way, the pact left no place for Raila, and a man denied the presidency again and again cannot be blamed for taking the chance the handshake offered.

Uhuru did back Raila for 2022, but only when the term limit left him no candidacy to give up, so the endorsement cost him no ambition of his own. His admirers hold that to say Raila won in 2022 honours him in itself, yet a man who knew as much could have said so while President, and he said it more than four years later, when it could change nothing.

Two days after Uhuru spoke, on September 24, Dr Oburu Oginga, Raila’s brother and the leader of Raila’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement, asked why Uhuru handed power to Ruto if Uhuru believed Raila had won. The question leaves two possibilities. If Uhuru is right, the result declared in 2022 was not the real one, and it was declared while Uhuru headed the State. If he is wrong, he has claimed a knowledge he does not have. In either case, the burden falls first on him.

Simba Arati, the Governor of Kisii and the party’s deputy leader, put the same question to the crowd at Migwena on October 15. In 2022, he said, Uhuru was the one with the State’s instruments, so why did he not swear Raila in? “We are telling him to give us a break,” Arati said.

Raila’s comrades read that question against the silent prayer at the grave and against a longer record. They hold that Raila’s father, Jaramogi, was kept from the presidency by an order that colonial administrators built and Uhuru’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, turned to his own use, outlawing Jaramogi’s party in 1969 and detaining him until 1971.

They point to the oath of that year against the Odinga family, which Kikuyu elders withdrew in July 2022. Kung’u Muigai, Uhuru’s cousin, says he took it and says Jomo Kenyatta warned its takers never to support that family. In the colonial state, the officer kept the file, and the subject never saw it, and “we know how things went” comes from that file, since it claims knowledge and shows none of it.

Uhuru spoke that sentence almost a year after Raila was buried, when Raila could no longer reply to it. Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, posits that every society has people it charges with saying what counts as true, and Walter Mignolo argues that the heirs of colonial rule inherited that charge. Uhuru’s sentence is that charge at work, and its effect is plain. It concedes that the communities behind Raila were right, but it concedes it late, at no cost, and in the voice of a friend.

As reported, it proposes no remedy: no correction of the record, no account of how it went wrong, nothing for those who paid. Their courage becomes credit for the speaker, and their grievance is left where it was. Those who stood with Raila heard in it the old order claiming the last word on his legacy: the power to say when the truth may be told, and to say it only when it can change nothing.

In Part 2, Raila answered the chant for a one-term Ruto with “so what?” and said Kenyans would decide the term; at Machakos he asked his own side “who told you?” Both questions asked who decides. “We know how things went” answers neither. It settles the 2022 result by assertion, in the voice of a “we” that names no one.

The argument here is that the sentence helped keep Uhuru and President William Ruto from the first anniversary of Raila’s death at Migwena in Bondo. Both had been expected, and after September 22 neither could come without answering for it, Uhuru to Dr Oburu’s question and Ruto to the place that question gave him as the man who received the presidency, yet neither could stay away without leaving the sentence standing.

The doubt over who could share the platform was not confined to the family. On September 27, five days after the sentence, Kalonzo Musyoka, the former Vice President and an opponent of Ruto, said in Bondo that he was “uncomfortable sharing a platform” with people he accused, without naming them, of denying Raila victory in earlier elections. By that test, Kalonzo has his own account to give, since he ran against Raila in 2007 and agreed to become Kibaki’s Vice President even before the dispute could be settled.

The most natural reading, given that Ruto’s government was building Raila’s mausoleum and Ruto was expected at Bondo, is that Ruto was the target. If so, the remark made his arrival costly, because a President jeered at the family’s event would have been humiliated there, and the family would have answered for it as hosts. An accusation with no address lets every hearer supply a name, so it works even where this reading is wrong, as “we know how things went” did.

The sentence drew an answer from Ruto’s party, the United Democratic Alliance, the same day. Its secretary general, Hassan Omar, said Uhuru “has never healed” from Raila’s defeat. The Standard found no stated reason for Uhuru’s absence from the anniversary, and linked Ruto’s choice of development work in the Rift Valley to increasingly sharp exchanges with his predecessor.

Whatever Uhuru and Kalonzo intended, the sentence and the remark together helped take from the anniversary the two figures who would have made it a national occasion, so the occasion meant to hold Raila’s name had to answer for the dispute over his result before it began.

Part 4, Odonjo Ndi, tests Orengo’s “it went as planned” against the day itself.