Former Ndaragwa MP and Jubilee Party Secretary General Jeremiah Kioni now says that allowing Deputy President William Ruto enough time to infiltrate the Mount Kenya region turned the residents against its own leaders.
Kioni opines that DP Ruto’s strong influence in the area as witnessed in provisional results of the August 9th elections came about after the leaders overlooked the DP’s attempts to woo the Mountain perceived to be their own backyard.
The Jubilee Party Secretary General who conceded defeat on Wednesday to UDA Party’s candidate George Gachagua admitted that his party had lost grip of its people after the DP ‘cunningly’ turned their hearts against them (Jubilee).
“We must give credit to one William Ruto, he has all this on the table with his team, on how do we benefit from all these scenarios?… He takes this and uses it that way…it is really a chase game,” Kioni said in an interview with KTN News on Friday night.
“We must accept that we also underestimated the extent to which our people had been taken hold of by UDA… Credit to William.”
Kioni argues that the UDA frontman managed to convince the Mt Kenya residents since he had taken a lot of time traversing the region, which he says they (government) could not do since they were “busy serving the people.”
“Every time I talk to a crowd of about 200 people, their question would be why didn’t you tell us this earlier, and we would say that we decided to undertake development fast….we did not have adequate time to convince them,” Kioni explained.
Referring to the voter apathy witnessed in the elections, Kioni said Mt. Kenya residents were at crossroads on whether to elect the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya candidate Raila Odinga, who over time had been demonised in the area, or to vote in the DP and they chose the latter.
He spelt out that it would not be a walk in the park for Azimio to undo the ‘no voting Raila’ narrative even if it managed to clinch the presidency since the narrative has already existed for a decade.
“It will be good to have a debate with those who have admitted publicly that they demonized Raila among our people. It is not useful to demonize, the price for demonizing is what we are seeing now,” he claimed.
Kioni added: “It will take a while for us to unravel what he did. When you come to a constituency which you have represented for x-number of years and you realise you have not won even in a single polling station, including where you vote. It is a very stale rigging scheme.”
The lawmaker consequently attributed the Ruto factor to the lack of a kingpin from Central Kenya to unite the people since he/she would have countered the DP’s attempt to court the Mountain.
“It would not have been necessary because if there was a candidate from Mt Kenya, he/she would have been there countering the narrative by William in good time, so the alternate message would have been competing for space,” he said.
“In a likely event where Azimio forms the government, it would be a useful thing for our community because a majority of our people who voted, voted in UDA, meaning they are in the opposition. They would then ask themselves, what did we not listen to?”
