During the Jubilee nominations for senate, a curious occurrence escaped undetected by many. The Jubilee Nairobi senate ticket went to Johnson Sakaja who won 153,422 votes against Kavemba Mutinda’s 126,982 and Ali Badi’s 10,132.
What is not known by many, is that a “tharaka nithi” had to be executed to achieve the desired final tally. In reality, the far more capable Kavemba was denied the ticket in what is a recurring ‘me first’ pattern in Sakaja’s political life.
It is a fact that Nairobi senate aspirant Narcissus Johnson Arthur Sakaja is out of his element when faced with competent competition. He is in the habit of letting others do the heavy lifting then ambling to media houses claiming all the glory.
For a man who claims to be as talented as he does, it is perplexing that Sakaja forfeited his governor ambitions with little more than a whimper. Then again, the peek-a-boo sham nomination he pulled on Kavemba could not have been done at the gubernatorial level. Not with Mike Sonko as the opponent. The shrewd and cunning Sakaja realized that he was well out of his league and settled for lower hanging fruit.
The very tragic story of former TNA secretary general, one Onyango Oloo, is testament to Sakaja’s ability to play Judas for thirty shekels of silver. Oloo was thrown under the bus by a man he considered a close friend simply because he was seen to represent a threat to Sakaja’s unbridled ambition.
While Oloo was the technical brain behind the entire TNA enterprise, it is the media-savvy Sakaja who took all the credit for a job he neither merited nor deserved. It is Oloo who identified the opportunity Uhuru Kenyatta’s lack of a political vehicle presented. Ever the opportunist, Sakaja rushed to the registrar of political parties and put in the TNA papers, got cleared and then waxed lyrical about how a new brand would get Uhuru to statehouse. Things went just as Oloo had predicted, with the exception of just how cavalier Sakaja could be. Oloo never saw that one coming. With the election in the bag, Sakaja got himself and others nominated and left Oloo to fend for himself.
As John Githongo would say, he was left ‘dangling in the wind” Sakaja’s true colors were finally on full display. To be sure, Sakaja dangled all manner of carrots to keep Oloo from getting too disenchanted and this worked for a while.
The final straw came when Sakaja’s machinations saw Raphael Tuju was brought in to manage the nomination process. Oloo had hoped that as secretary general, he would be called upon to drive the process.
Oloo, tired of this arrangement, realizing that he would never be anything more than paper tiger secretary general, and made known his intention to step out from the shadows to run for office, Sakaja double crossed and jettisoned his friend, warning him against leaving Jubilee or else they would smear him with concocted scandals to bring him down
When Onyango Oloo eventually decamped from the party he helped rise to power, Johnson Sakaja became wary of his threat from the outside and immediately went to the press linking his former friend with several made-up stories of Onyango Oloo’s involvement in malpractices during the latter’s term at the Lake Basin Authority.
Time would soon vindicate Onyango Oloo who encouraged Sakaja to go to court for which the wannabe musician backed down from knowing he had no iota of evidence. Nairobians have now started to peel off the mask from the pretender who has been desperately masquerading as a Luhya candidate to win support from Nairobi residents from Western Kenya.
As the famous Budhist saying goes; Three things cannot be long hidden; the sun , the moon and the truth.”
It is time.
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