'We underestimated Ruto's influence in Mt Kenya,' Jeremiah Kioni admits
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
first….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.
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