A high-ranking member of the 12th Parliament has come out to reveal the genesis of frosty relations between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto.
While speaking on Citizen TV’s JKL show, Minority Leader John Mbadi speculated that the two fell out when DP Ruto boisterously claimed that he was the one running government.
According to the Suba North MP and Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party chairperson, the statement broke trust between the President and his deputy.
”There can’t be co-presidents, the president is only one and I think that was the origin of the problem between the president and his deputy.
“It is not the handshake that ruined the relationship between the president and his deputy, the handshake found an already weak relationship. And if you ask me, I think the president just decided to survive with his deputy in the first term. Thereafter, we understand that there was an issue when the deputy president decided to go around bragging that he was the one running the government and maybe the president was not happy with that,” Mr Mbadi opined.
Former Majority Leader Aden Duale who appeared on the show alongside Mbadi defended the DP raising a concern over why the MP was speaking on behalf of Jubilee party leaders.
"It is very interesting that a member and the leader of minority has the audacity to lecture Jubilee and its leadership on how we should run, how the president should behave with his deputy, how we were in the first term... Let me reiterate that I was one of the people within Jubilee who embraced the handshake. The DP and many others in Jubilee were skeptical and now they have been vindicated because the end result has been the process of the handshake ending up in Mombasa with a group of tribal leaders on how to organize them in order to seize power in the next General Election," the Garissa Township MP stated.
Duale added that the handshake led to the humiliation of the DP, his office and those who chose to be associated with him, citing his own ouster from National Assembly Majority Leader as one of the consequences of the handshake.
Murathe on Uhuru-Ruto fallout
Jubilee party vice chairperson David Murathe, in April 2021, disclosed that DP Ruto slandered President Kenyatta during the 2017 elections campaign.
Murathe noted that the DP was at the time speaking to his tribesmen in their native Kalenjin language when he called President Kenyatta a drunk.
"There is a day Ruto spoke in his native language and told his supporters to vote for Uhuru because as he drinks, I will be running the government
"It was during the funeral of the late Mark Too. The government always has a way of knowing some of these things. I suspect that was one of the reasons Uhuru decided to sideline Ruto was this statement," Murathe claimed.