By Anderson Ojwang
After President William Ruto’s supposed successful development tour of restive Mt Kenya and his declaration that he is the king of the mountain, former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua hit back, saying they will not be fooled twice.
Speaking during a talk show with KTN on Monday night, Gachagua said it was regrettable that Mt Kenya was fooled by President Ruto to go against former President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2022 Presidential election.
“Nobody can fool the people of the mountain twice, you fooled them once, and they feel very sorry about it. They actually feel very low and down.
Wiiliam Ruto is a master in driving narrative…. he told us former president Uhuru Kenyatta was a drunkard and has failed to run the government.
I am among the people he persuaded. He is very persuasive when he gets onto a narrative. He drove a narrative against Uhuru Kenyatta and recruited all of us, including me.
I was among the leaders who believed in what he told us. That Uhuru Kenyatta is a drunkard, a useless leader, he has messed this country, cannot be trusted to organize a succession and we should despise and hate him.
We listened to William Ruto and he persuaded, five years down the line Uhuru Kenyatta is gone, William Ruto has come on stage.
Nothing is working in the country, yet at that time, he had persuaded us that Uhuru Kenyatta had failed.
He persuaded us that our enemy as a region is Raila Odinga, who is a witch doctor. Since Uhuru Kenyatta has brought him and because he doesn’t mean well for us, we should hate Uhuru Kenyatta and trust William Ruto to carry our destiny.
We believed him. He was confident that if he could successfully drive a narrative against Uhuru when he was the president.
He could equally drive a narrative against Gachagua and cobbled the Sh 10 billion demand.
The mountain people, you can con them once, you can’t con them twice,” he claimed
President Ruto said that his 20-year relationship with Mt Kenya has remained intact and that he was the king of the Mountain.
“ I have developed friendship with people of the mountain. The friendship we have developed over 20 years. Nobody will break my bond with the mountain. Nobody can break it,” Ruto said on his second day of tour in Maua.
But Gachagua hit back saying the Mountain has already made a political decision going forward and Ruto’s claims will not stand the test of time.
“The president is happy he got good photographs, and he got a good crowd. He is welcome again in August, and if possible, let him come in December. We need money for Christmas.
The people of the mountain have made serious decisions and those decisions cannot be changed by anybody or anything.
I am not fighting with the President for the control of the mountain. I heard him say he is the king of the mountain.
Let him be the king of the mountain. If he is the king of the mountain, he does not have to go around. He should have just used his chopper to land at the Lenana peak and proclaimed himself as the king.
If he wants to be king of the mountain, let him proceed. The people of the mountain don’t follow leaders.
It is the leaders who listen to the people and where they want to go and align. That is what I did.
The people of the mountain are not led. They tell the people where to go. If the president believes he has the ground in Mt Kenya, if he believes he is the kingpin of the mountain, so be it. We are not bothered. All we know is that we have agreed on where to go politically.
The people of the mountain we have agreed that we made a mistake in going into an election without our political party. They have said that it will not happen again.
They have asked me to form a political party, a national one, which I have done, which will be announced in May 2025.
They have told me they will not agree to be divided and that our vote will go into one basket.
Again, they have told me that they are aware the president wanted to isolate us and they have told me to look for friends, and I am doing that.
That the visit was a political tour and not a development tour. There is nothing he did apart making all manner of promises
He came to the mountain after six months of disquiet and he needed to do some explanations.
These are people who had trusted and supported him without a memorandum of Understanding, supported his presidency without a political party and believed in him.
He betrayed them and misused them.
The president was welcomed in the Mountain after we had asked people to allow him to talk to them.
I heard him say he has 20 20-year history with the people of the mountain. If that is true, then he has not understood the people he has operated with for 20 years.
If he had taken his time to understand the people of the mountain, he would know, they hate betrayal, deception, lies and being misused. Probably, if he had genuine friends, they would tell him, if those four things occur, there is no remedy.
But the people of the mountain are very intelligent people. They don’t fight and they don’t force circumstances.
They are just nice guys. We agree we have a political problem with the president but we also need to acknowledge that he is president until 2027.
We must relate to him in one way or another. We know how to converse, but we don’t do it in public meetings. We are very silent. There was agreement and understanding among the mountain people that our relationship with the president going forward is commercial and transactional.
People of the mountain are business people. We say that if anybody has some money to bring to us, we will take it. Because even if you own a shop, you don’t have to like all those who buy from you.
What is important is the money and we asked our people to come out, you saw the buses, mobilization and there was too much money,” he said.
