By Dikembe Disembe
It is difficult to tell when the rain started beating Johnstone Muthama, the Senator for Machakos County. However, yesterday’s pronouncements and the futile court attempt to stop an event where the head of state has been invited opened an ugly twist to a sour relationship between the senator and the president.
The ideological differences, if any, between Senator Muthama and President Kenyatta, in mature democracies, is accepted. Regional leaders can snub the president and even sabotage him. If anything, Muthama belongs to a different coalition of the political divide.
For a man who is believed to have donated a fortune during the last elections for the presidential race pitting his coalition leader, Raila Odinga against the president, Muthama’s open irritation whenever everything Uhuru or the Jubilee government is mentioned is well understandable. But, in every war, there are decent rules. Only among savages do you find the kind of irrational anger that Muthama often shows whenever he talks about Uhuru the president or his government.
Tommorrow, the senator sensationally claimed that Uhuru, despite being the president of the republic, is unwelcome person in Machakos county. A persona non grata!
According to Muthama, Machakos is a CORD Zone and does not need an ‘ICC indictee’; this is despite the fact that the governor of the same county, Dr Alfred Mutua, is the man billed to have invited the President. To any sensible person, this is not politics. It is a pathetic attempt to settle personal scores using the platform offered by politics, and people as pawns.
Muthama goes ahead to claim that the people of Machakos know only CORD leader Raila Odinga as their ‘president’, and that it is wrong of the president to visit a county which ‘overwhelmingly rejected his candidature on March 4th’. It is true that the people of Machakos rejected the president on March 4. But, is it wrong for the president to visit Machakos County?
Muthama again claims that the people of Machakos are opposed to Kenyatta’s rule because of the incomprehensible charges he faces at the ICC. But history tells us that Machakos and the larger Eastern region were beneficiaries of the violence which Uhuru is accused of orchestrating as their sons, Kalonzo Musyoka (now in CORD) got appointed as the Vice – President while the current governor, Alfred Mutua, a former lousy spokesperson of the Kibaki government, made his name and fame by unashamedly bashing Raila Odinga (Muthama’s current god) at every turn?
Eastern should have no problem with Uhuru. In fact, the country is better off allowing Uhuru to visit every region without threats of demonstrations.
You see, we have been there before. We know what happens when a president is unwelcome in an area of this country, or when he is violently welcomed, as happened to the first Kenyatta sometime in 1969 in Kisumu.
Uhuru is the current custodian of the legal artillery allowed to visit violence on the people to maintain ‘public order’. If Muthama succeeds in organizing demonstrators who succeed in ‘attempting’ to block a serving head of state from visiting a place only a stone throw away from the country’s capital, how will the international press report that?
The very reasons which Muthama is citing in blocking Uhuru to visit Machakos should be the same reasons which Uhuru should use to go attend Gov Mutua’s event.
President Uhuru cannot afford to turn his back on the people of Machakos. There is something called state power. Communities which lost the ‘right to state power’, like where yours truly was born, know what it means for a government to turn its back on a section of her people.
That’s why any right-thinking citizen; CORD or Jubilee, must reject Muthama’s blind hatred towards President Kenyatta with the contempt that usually accompany such poor political mannerisms. It is just bad manners reloaded.