Azimio counters government's letter to foreign missions

The Azimo coalition has written a detailed counter letter to international and diplomatic missions outlining six reasons why they have called for demonstrations.

Raila's coalition said they are resisting President William Ruto's administration because he did not win the elections, singlehandedly reconstituting the IEBC, overseeing wastage in government spending and killing democracy.

The opposition has also accused Ruto of packing senior government appointments with people form the Kikuyu ad Kalenjin Communities and also capturing the criminal justice system.

The opposition, which has called for countrywide weekly protests every Monday and Thursday, affirmed that they will not relent, or surrender, to what they termed as President William Ruto's illegitimate regime.

Describing the letter by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a screed of naked propaganda Azimio claimed that it is part of the government's attempts to justify Monday's police brutality against peaceful demonstrators.

The opposition rubbished the letter dated March 20 as a move to paint Azimio as a violent party bent on subversion and chaos while turning the international community against the coalition.

The opposition alleged that President Ruto panicked upon realizing that the world “is very concerned that he recklessly, callously, and brutally misused the police to suppress people and prevent them from exercising their constitutional rights”.

“These are crimes for which he bears full responsibility,” Azimio said as it moved to set the record straight on why it is opposed to Ruto's administration.

The government had through its letter accused Azimio of economic sabotage through mass action and attempts to oust Ruto from power despite having been duly elected as president.

Demonstrating what they termed as the illegitimacy of Ruto's regime, Azimio started by affirming the legality of its call for mass action across the country saying such a provision is at the heart of the 2010 constitution.

“We refute as false the claim in the letter that our peaceful demonstration on March 20, 2023 was in any way illegal or outside the constitution and the law,” Azimio said citing Article 1, which provides that all sovereign power is vested in the people.

Saying that they had given notice of their demonstrations in advance, Azimio alleged that it was the police force that initiated and carried out brutal violence against demonstrators, “killing several and injuring many”.

“ In both cases, the vehicles were badly damaged and the lives of Odinga and Musyoka were put at great risk. This is not the conduct of a legitimate democratic government, but that of a brutal dictatorship,” they said.

In the letter, Azimio disputed that Ruto was duly elected saying the result declared by then IEBC chair Wafula Chekubati was wholly unconstitutional and without merit.

Azimio said the fact that the Supreme Court “ignored overwhelming evidence and essentially gave a stamp of approval to Mr Chebukati's illegalities does not in any way make Mr Ruto the winner of the elections”.

“ We know that an IEBC whistle-blower subsequently published the legitimate results which showed that Mr Odinga had convincingly won the election,” Azimio said.

The coalition also accused Ruto of doing everything to throttle and kill Kenya's fledgling democracy by engineering a corrupt scheme to buy off Azimio legislators that installed “his puppets as speakers of both houses”.

“Since then, he has engaged in a campaign to cannibalize and destroy Azimio so as to bring the Parliament under his complete control. He is bringing back the corrupt one-party state that Kenyans rejected in the early 1990s,” Azimio said.

The opposition claimed that Ruto is slowly bringing the judiciary and the institutions of justice under his complete control including the DCI, EACC and office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

“The ODPP has dropped all serious cases, some on murder and grand corruption, against members of his regime. On the other hand, Mr Ruto is now selectively seeking to prosecute and persecute individuals perceived either to have been close to the previous regime or those in Azimio,” said Azimio.

The opposition claimed that the recruitment of electoral commissioners is a scheme by Ruto's regime to singlehandedly try to create out of whole cloth his own IEBC so that he can rig himself into power again in 2027.

They highlighted the amendments to the composition of the IEBC panel and the constitution of the selection team as part of an elaborate plan to install his puppets as commissioners.

The opposition also claimed that Ruto has created the most exclusionary regime since independence by packing senior offices with primary appointees from the Kalenjin and Kikuyu communities.

“The 42 "other" Kenyan communities have been left to scramble for the scraps. The story is the same at all levels of the once proud civil service,” Azimio said.

They said election losers, criminal suspects, and unqualified corrupt cronies now occupy senior offices, including in the parastatal sector killing the morale of career civil servants and those who merit appointments.

“Today Kenya is more divided along ethnic and sectarian lines than it has ever been in its history. We are sitting on a volcano,” Azimio said.

Azimio also argued that Kenya's economy is in a free fall with the cost of living completely out of reach for most Kenyans while the President is busy expanding the executive.

“Ruto and his regime have gone on a spending binge to burden the taxpayer and a broke exchequer by creating offices for their spouses, splashing money on fleets of luxury vehicles, and taking expensive and opaque junkets abroad,” they said.

Accusing Ruto of killing devolution, Azimio said, for over six months, counties have not received funding to counties for operations and development.

“The country's economy is slowly grinding down. That is why so many Kenyans have heeded our calls for peaceful demonstrations,” they said insisting that the ministry of foreign affairs failed to address the issue in its letter.

“We know the international community-based in Nairobi is aware of these sinister and undemocratic actions by Ruto. Their silence concerns us,” Azimio said.