After 2017 polls, Jubilee Party is dying a slow but sure death

It gives me no pleasure – zilch – to say so, but lately Senator Majority Leader Kipchumba Murkomen has been bleating like an orphaned goat. That’s what happens when a “gilded age” ends, and reality dawns. By every measure, Mr Murkomen should still be in his political diapers. But thanks to the largesse of Deputy President William Ruto, the poor kid from Elgeyo Marakwet is today a wealthy man with tons of political panache. Once a staunch defender of Jubilee, the middling politician has turned against one of his masters, Jubilee’snumero uno Uhuru Kenyatta. In 2013, I wrote that Jubilee was “nonsense on stilts” that couldn’t take two steps without collapsing in a heap. For Murkomen, that time has come to pass.

It’s not lost on Kenyans that since 2013, Murkomen and his ilk on Mr Ruto’s faction of Jubilee have lived – and talked – as though they were the state, and the state was them. The URP brigade in Jubilee had already banked Mr Kenyatta’s check for 2022. In their minds, Kenyatta had been sold and delivered to Ruto’s corner. Ruto’s plan to State House in 2022 was on what they used to call glide path – an unstoppable and inevitable fact. But I, like other keen observers of Kenya’s shark-infested political waters, was dubious. This certainty was at best naïve and at worst delusional. Even former American President Obama couldn’t guarantee Secretary Hilary Clinton keys to the White House.