By Oscar Obonyo
Sometime last year, as the rift between Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Higher Education Minister William Ruto began to show, Regional Development Minister Fred Gumo and his Fisheries counterpart, Paul Otuoma, held a secret meeting and hatched a plot.
Otuoma invited the Eldoret North MP to his Funyula constituency as chief guest of a soccer tournament at Sio Port. Ruto did not disappoint. He honoured the appointment and even rewarded the participating players handsomely. Meanwhile, as the game progressed, Gumo who was in the company of Raila at his Bondo home persuaded the PM to fly to Funyula and briefly watch part of the game. What Raila and Ruto did not know is that Gumo and Otuoma had arranged a blind date for the two, "to clear their apparent differences".
According to Otuoma, elaborate plans had been made towards "healing our party", including a luncheon at the lakeside town of Port Victoria in the neighbouring Budalang'i constituency. To date, Otuoma and Gumo remain tight-lipped as to what transpired and why the meeting flopped. But memories of the events remain fresh among residents of Funyula who witnessed choppers carrying Ruto and Raila land minutes apart and then take off.
Since that dramatic March, last year, episode, repeated efforts by ODM ministers and officials to hold their house together have been replicated everywhere with little success. Understandably, Ruto has always slipped through the fingers of party functionaries keen on initiating reconciliation.
While the PM reportedly exhibits an attitude of indifference, some of his foot soldiers are yet to give up on Ruto.
This is indeed the curious thing about the Raila-Ruto relationship. While they seem to have severed links, their henchmen are preoccupied with compelling them to working together. Ruto's exploits go beyond ODM.
Like a gadfly, he has emerged as Kenya's most controversial, yet tolerated politician. He whizzes around his political foes disturbingly, inflicting measured pain. Although anticipated, the referendum results are a painful sting on ODM that swept the boards in North and South rift regions in Rift Valley Province in the 2007 presidential elections.
Ruto has become the proverbial "msumeno unakata pande zote mbili (a seesaw that cuts on both edges)". And if Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta had doubts about this reality, then the referendum poll has offered them the answer. Believably united in a political alliance, Ruto staged a spirited campaign in the backyards of the DPM and VP, eating up a sizeable chunk of votes from the latter's Eastern Province home turf.
To pundits, Ruto is not easy to tame. The more you accommodate and spare him as ODM has done, the more he bites back. And if you get hard on him, he stages an even harder reprisal. Head of University of Nairobi's Political Science Department Philip Nying'uro points out that Ruto's case is one that ODM needs to act on swiftly if it hopes to regain lost ground.
Criticising the party's approach to pluck the minister from Government, Prof Nying'uro nonetheless opines ODM has every right to get Ruto out of the way within the party machinery to enable it to recruit officials afresh and build support at the grassroots.
Probably aware of this, Ruto has declined to budge. To ODM, he has become the rogue member the party would wish to kick out. Yet to the rest of the political class, especially Government, Ruto has assumed the enviable role of the most pampered 'political kid'.
Source: The Standard | Online Edition
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