Blowing hot and cold, Duale rides out the Jubilee storm

In Kenya’s political history, only a few individuals like former long-serving Cabinet minister Paul Ngei have had the reputation of having the nine lives of a cat.

Throughout his drama-filled political career, Ngei, one of the heroes of the independence struggle, had an uncanny knack for comebacks that remain exciting folklore tales not-so-much because they are memorable, but they defied the natural order of life.

Ngei is perhaps the only politician who survived well past his sell-by date through a mix of political brinkmanship, skulduggery, acumen and sheer luck.

Last week, it appeared that National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale was well on course to take over from Ngei as the modern day cat with nine lives.

By the end of the week, it was clear that Duale was still battling fresh attempts by disgruntled colleagues in Jubilee party determined to see him off the lofty perch of majority leader.

By the time President Uhuru Kenyatta summoned the National Assembly parliamentary group of the Jubilee Party on Tuesday, Duale’s die was cast, after analysts had written him off, delivering his political obituary, reviews of his performance and supposed disloyalty with menacing finality that his survival was unfathomable.

Coming in the wake of a bloody purge of politicians allied to deputy president William Ruto loyalists in the Senate, the worst was expected of Duale.

Even though not in the mould of Ngei, he pulled off a unique comeback that has everybody talking, and one that can form a perfect subject for a political science student’s thesis.

Known to shoot from the hip, there has never been any doubt that Duale is Deputy President Ruto’s protégé.

Unlike all others, though, he does not just espouse the Ruto line in its raw, crude fashion. Although he has for months avoided appearing in public with Ruto and his Tangatanga brigade, his reputation for cockiness, arrogance, opportunism and using all means to succeed remains.

In the blissful days of the Jubilee administration, those days when the country’s top two were simply known as the “dynamic duo”, the majority leader was the most cacophonous sycophant-in chief.

“Being a sycophant of the sitting President makes me have many sycophants under me,” the excitable Duale bragged in 2016, arguing that he was highly indebted to the dynamic duo.

The cunning political animal that is Duale can smell the scent of power miles away and programme himself on how to adapt to the situation.

He has the kind of arrogance that at one point saw him refer to MP Alfred Keter as ‘bubu’ and even admonished former governor Isaac Ruto, publicly telling him that the equitable shareable revenue allocated to Bomet County, was not his (Ruto) mother’s money.

“Since I started this journey, with Ruto in 2008, there is nothing he has told me which has not come to pass. If he told me to jump from the top of the KICC and assures me that I will not break my leg, I will jump. I am so much indebted to this man. I can do anything for Ruto and Uhuru under the sun,” he once said.

As an ardent Man United fan, Duale has likened Ruto to Romelo Lukaku, the forceful former Red Devils striker who did his bit at the club until two seasons ago. “Ruto is our best player going into 2022,” he said on the floor of the House in 2017.

“When you have a good player, you protect him from injury. That is what Lukaku is to Man U and that is what Ruto is to us,” he said.

If he has survived, at least for now, the jury remains out there on whether it is because he has performed or delivered for the President and his men.

As the case for Kithure Kindiki’s removal as deputy speaker now shows, party loyalty offers one a greater leverage in politics that the monologues of merit, competence or even the game of mathematics.

But again, you can’t take it away from the man, if as they say as politics is a game of the possible. Once he discovered that the President and his deputy were pulling apart, he went mute, and adopted some shape columnist Makau Mutua calls “formlessness”.

Whether this shape will save him will be known in the coming week as his critics in the party collect signatures to impeach him. If he holds onto his seat, he will be one great survivor.