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Aden Duale’s Concorde flies into turbulent storm
Following an investigation by the Nation, Aden Duale has been vocal in his social media platforms over the past week as he sought to distance himself from Concordia. ILLUSTRATION | J NYAGAH | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- And if responses to his tweets are anything to go by, one might argue that the “Aden Bare Duale” character he presented did not win over many observers.
- One of his defences has been that the person, who formed Concordia alongside Abdi Yakub Duale in 2007, is his namesake.
- His rants on social media platforms have made others revisit his famous promise after the 2015 terror attack on Garissa University.
There was the Concorde aircraft; and now there is the Concordia Building and Civil Engineering Company Limited linked with Aden Duale, the Leader of Majority in the National Assembly.
Both are associated with noise. Because it travelled faster than sound, the Concorde plane that carried passengers between 1976 and 2003 was characteristically noisy, and it was only supposed to fly over oceans and never above residential areas due to the disturbance it created.
For its size, the Concordia firm can also be said to be travelling at supersonic speeds in bagging government tenders — clinching Sh2.6 billion worth of them in the past decade — and its noise has majorly been from Mr Duale, the Garissa Town MP.
VOCAL
Following an investigation by the Daily Nation, Mr Duale has been vocal in his social media platforms over the past week as he sought to distance himself from Concordia, saying he is not the “Aden Bare Duale” that was once listed in official documentation regarding the firm.
One of his defences has been that the person, who formed Concordia alongside Abdi Yakub Duale in 2007, is his namesake.
He even shared images of an identity card that supposedly belonged to the namesake, but the signatures among other details provided more questions than answers.
“Daily Nation has decided to go the gutter route by publishing pure falsehoods in the name of investigative journalism. I’m not a director of the alleged company,” he tweeted on Wednesday night.
If this were a novel, Mr Duale would be said to have created that namesake character. And in literary circles, the effectiveness of a character is judged partly by his or her ability to draw sympathy from the audience.
And if responses to his tweets are anything to go by, one might argue that the “Aden Bare Duale” character he presented did not win over many observers.
A look at his posts on Twitter and Facebook reveals that only a tiny portion of commentators bought the defence of Mr Duale, a man who once said in a TV interview that he is a “soul mate” of Deputy President William Ruto.
SOCIAL MEDIA
“It’s so surprising that you’re not part of the said company but you have details of the directors even their ID numbers. What’s the purpose of having them?” one Twitter user questioned.
“Go to court. Twitter will not help you,” stated another.
“Bring it on. The public is with the Nation Media Group. Fear God and say if you are not linked to the company,” came another comment.
His rants on social media platforms have made others revisit his famous promise after the 2015 terror attack on Garissa University. After the attack that left 148 dead, he pledged to release a list of al-Shabaab financiers within 30 days, which never happened. It was another manifestation of Mr Duale’s vociferous personality that sometimes lacks the backing of facts.
His denials in the past week have shone the spotlight on a man born in Garissa to a pastoralist family two years after independence.
He said in a 2015 interview that the motivation for joining national politics in 2007 was to change the lives of the people of Garissa Town Constituency.
“What brought me to politics was not anything else but to make an impact or change in the life of the people of Garissa Township,” he told KTN News in October 2015. “Today if I retire, I can say I have left a legacy in that constituency.”
NOMAD PALACE HOTEL
Among the projects that Concordia has implemented include maintenance of roads in Garissa for Sh6 million; maintenance of the Garissa-Mbalambala road for Sh18 million, construction of water supply systems for Garissa Town among others. Well, that is the legacy of Concordia, a firm that shares a postal address with Nomad Palace Hotel and Medina Hospital.
And for a man who, in another 2015 TV interview said he will not quit politics until he sees William Ruto in State House, one sure thing is that Kenyans have not heard the last from Aden Bare Duale, a former prefect at Moi Forces Academy who studied economics at Moi University.
He is likely to continue with his Concorde-esque tirades, and like the Concorde that transported many passengers across the oceans in Europe and America, maybe — just maybe — he will lift his constituents from poverty to prosperity as he had planned when he switched from full-time businessman to part-time trader and full-time politician.
