Raila Odinga has been the man under siege from the Mt. Kenya choir since the time of President Mwai Kibaki. Despite the fact that many of Mt. Kenya were given Land for industralisation for free, Raila’s mollases plant, to Mt. Kenya, became a fraud.
Then, the Mt. Kenya bile was directed toward Raila Odinga’s mollases plant. Though they would behave as if they were driven by other factors, the truth was that they were attacking Raila’s growing enterprise.
From then, they devised a scheme that would kill Raila both economically and politically. They came up with the unelectability matra as they embarked on bringing down the sugar industry in West Kenya so as to deny him the much needed raw materials which his company relied on from the sugar millers.
They sought to shift sugar production to Tana Delta which is far flung entity in relation to the mollases plant.
They also, through KRA, introduced a raft of changes including tax regimes that were indended at eroding cash flow. Among these changes was a rule that required advance taxation on power alcohol and related stuff. In the meantime Mt. Kenya’s back street enterprises went into production of cheap liquor. This in essence made the Raila products sound more expensive than their backstreet competitors.
That did not stop there. While they continued with unelectability mantra, and a sustained insinuation that Molasses plant stood on stolen land, they embarked on flooding the market with cheap sugar imports, some of them uncustomised by KRA.
While they were killing the industry through cheap stuff from Brazil, India, Pakistan and Sudan, the government pretended to engage in modernisation programmes in which they wanted the sugar millers to engage in production of power alcohol from their own molasses as they use the surplus molasses and bagasse to power electricity generating plants. That way nothing would remain for Raila’s flagship.
So why would a person undertake all these just to bring down one individual while at the same time destroying several jobs? The simplest explanation lie in the fact that outside Mt. Kenya, Raila had positioned himself as the wealthiest politician laying claim to the top seat. Most analysts were placing him at 8 billion and was still growing. Again he was, and is still, the most influential politician internationally.
If I rewind back to the 90’s during the struggle for multipartysm, the Mumbi brigade would quip, “hii kiti ikitoka kwa mundu uria irudi kwa nyumba ya mumbi, haitatoka tena”.
Mundu uria was Mt.Kenya’s code name for Moi for they feared arrest and detention. Therefore all the effort undertaken by Mt. Kenya on the economic and political person of Raila Odinga was, and is, intended to keep the seat in the Nyumba ya Mumbi.
In this quest, they have killed the economic lifeline of Western and Nyanza. Rift Valley had not spared either.
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