An MP has rubbished assassination claims by Gatitu-Muruguru MCA Simon Muturi.
Nyeri Town MP Ngunjiri Wambugu said it was a tactic perfected by Tangatanga whenever they face rejection by Kenyans.
Muturi on Wednesday alleged some youths loyal to the MP are after his life. He said they are members of the outlawed Mungiki sect.
The MCA said the same group disrupted a meeting by Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mwangi Kiunjuri and Woman Representative Rahab Mukami at Gatitu shopping Centre on Saturday.
The meeting was meant to launch the Sh262million Riamukurwe Water Project.
But Wambugu wondered why the MCA should bring in assassination hot on the heels of similar claims by Deputy President William Ruto. Three Cabinet Secretaries have been questioned over the DP assassination claims.
An anonymous letter of the alleged plot is being probed by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations. The letter claimed that a meeting was convened at Hotel La Mada in Nairobi to deliberate on how to eliminate the DP.
Cabinet secretaries Joe Mucheru (ICT), Sicily Kariuki (Health) and Peter Munya (Trade and Industrialisation) presented themselves to DCI after being summoned over the meeting. Infrastructure CS James Macharia is also in he list.
“This MCA claims that some people want to kill him. The same claims were made by the Deputy President the other day. They claim they are being targeted for assassination whenever they face resistance,” Wambugu said.
He said Tangatanga members seem to be borrowing the same narrative from each other. Wambugu said he is very concerned about how the members are throwing around the claims of assassination.
He said they are using the claims of elimination to counter political hostility and sustain their ambitions.
He said since Tuesday, there seems to be a concerted effort to introduce a narrative that young men from Nyeri town, especially the more than 1,000 who are in the boda boda business, are Mungiki.
“A couple of national leaders are facilitating some local MCAs to push that narrative online and in national media,” he said.
“The idea behind this narrative is to ‘revenge’ because when these same leaders tried to turn a development event in Nyeri on Saturday into a political rally, they failed.”
Wambugu said the fact is that the people who stopped the leaders from using a project to politick were not just young men alone but there were also old men and women. They were all from Nyeri Town, and mainly Gatitu/Muruguru Ward, the MP said.
He accused leaders, whom he did not name, of now wanting to brand young men from Gatitu and the wider Nyeri town as Mungiki.
“They hope that the police will start killing them as used to happen in the past. But times have changed and the police have refused to fall into this trap. Today, criminals are arrested to prove their innocence,” he said.
(Edited by P. Wanambisi)
