How will Ruto excite Jubilee without foreskin, ICC on the ballot?

The next presidential election in 2022 is supposedly William Ruto’s to lose.

Aside from the cliché about a deputy president being a half beat away from the top seat, Mr Ruto controls a solid ethnic voting bloc – the kind every Kenyan politician needs to be considered a serious contender for State House.

A deft scheming that saw the disparate entities in the former Jubilee coalition merged into one political party before the August 2017 elections also cleared the path for him to be the only presumptive flagbearer in 2022. But all that seems to be the easy part for the Deputy President.

There are early signals that keeping the party united won’t be smooth sailing for Mr Ruto. Indeed, the Jubilee boat might not dock with everyone on board in 2022.

For all its posturing as a national party, Jubilee remains a two-tribe cast with a mishmash of extras from here and there.

Mt Kenya and the predominantly Kalenjin counties accounted for about 80 per cent of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s vote tally  in the one-horse October 26  repeat race.

ENTITLEMENT

That explains the sense of entitlement in the National Assembly where MPs from the President’s and the Deputy President’s communities took the lion’s share of the House committee leadership.

A face-saving effort to have four MPs give up their chairmanship seats to accommodate their colleagues from other communities has fomented open rebellion, prompting Mr Kenyatta to crack the whip.

Even if the President has his way, it won’t remove the perceptions that all this is being done as a show of tokenism.

Yet entitlement by the ‘party’s owners’ in Parliament isn’t even the biggest threat to Jubilee unity.

With Mr Kenyatta set to leave the scene, the party is about to lose the little glue that remained to hold it together after the ICC cases at The Hague fell off.

Remember Jubilee sprang up from the ethnic nationalism that boiled over following the indictment of Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto for the bloodletting in parts of the country during the 2007/2008 post-election violence.

CASES COLLAPSED

The last of the cases, initially involving six Kenyans, collapsed in 2016 for lack of witnesses. In effect, the ICC handed Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto their freedom but robbed them of the persecution complex platform for political mobilisation.

The widely expected exit of Raila Odinga, the Jubilee duo’s fiercest rival, presents yet another odd twist of fate for Mr Ruto.

It is an open secret that Mr Odinga’s opponents have over the years seized on the fact that he comes from a community that doesn’t circumcise its males to appeal to their supporters’ base instincts.

A politician from the President’s Gatundu backyard has cultivated a cult-hero status in his community by simply posting some drivel about the foreskin on social media.

It is hard to see how Mr Ruto will keep a huge section of the Jubilee support base excited without the ICC and the foreskin on the ballot.

 [email protected] @otienootieno