Ruto not getting red card an affirmation of uprightness

A score of red cards issued to prominent politicians intending to contest elections is a backhanded green light for Deputy President William Ruto to seek any political seat of his choice.

Although the Kenya Integrity Alliance, which named 11 candidates for governor, nine for Member of Parliament and one aspiring Member of the County Assembly, says the list of 20 is not exhaustive, its omission of the Deputy President’s name is clear affirmation of his probity and uprightness.

Some of the very people who only a few months wore loud T-shirts, blew whistles on the streets and risked the lives of schoolchildren by publicly inhaling teargas have nothing on the Deputy President.

At the time, it was claimed that the Weston Hotel, in which Mr Ruto has a passing interest, stood on grabbed airport land and intended to convert the playground of Langata Road Primary School into a parking lot.

After searching high and low for leaders with integrity deficits, the moral police have a list of suspected forgers, practitioners of public hubris, and experts at public procurement shortcuts they want barred from seeking election. And Mr Ruto’s name is not on their list.

SINNED AGAINST

The Deputy President is a man more sinned against than sinning. Only last year, an opinion poll by Infotrak Harris reported that 51 per cent of Kenyans believed the Deputy President’s office was mired in corruption. He has been the victim of unwarranted smear campaigns and libelous allegations seeking to link him to every land grab and loss of public funds for two decades. All the allegations have either been proven false, or are in the process of being exposed as untrue.

A spirited attempt to besmirch the Deputy President’s reputation began as soon as he took his oath of office. Piqued by Mr Ruto’s choice to travel by jet instead of a train to Congo Brazzaville, Ghana, Nigeria and Gabon between May 16 and 19, 2013, his detractors began a parliamentary investigation into the hiring of a private jet for Sh100 million. After months of investigations and discussion, Parliament rejected the report in its entirety.

Attempts to spin a scandal out of Mr Ruto’s efforts to save taxpayers’ money by cancelling the tender for upgrading the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and instead ordering the construction of a Sh28 billion facility came a cropper. The investigation ordered by the parliamentary committee into the affair has produced nothing to write home about.

An attempt to politically lynch Mr Ruto in Parliament through a no-confidence vote over the importation of maize in 2009 was defeated. Mr Ruto was also acquitted of fraud charges relating to the sale of Sh272 million land to the Kenya Pipeline Corporation.

WITHDREW APPEAL

Early this month, Mr Ruto, as a good practising Christian, withdrew the appeal against the High Court decision that he returns 100 acres of land to Mr Adrian Muteshi, who had sued him for trespass and pays him Sh5 million for occupying the land. In the case, Mr Muteshi claimed that Mr Ruto illegally took his land in Kaptabei Scheme, Uasin Gishu, after the 2007-2008 post-election violence.

Were it not for the slow wheels of justice detaining his reputation, the five opposition politicians who claimed last year that Mr Ruto was involved in the forcible and aggressive acquisition of the Sh8 billion land in Karen, Nairobi, would have fattened from eating humble pie.

Jealous people panicked by the irresistible rise of the DP have been working day and night to trip him with allegations of corruption, forcing him to weep openly in church. With the #RedCard20 list out, people with a penchant for blaming Mr Ruto for everything in an accelerated effort to enthrone him as the High Priest of Corruption should hide their faces in shame.

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