The possibility of a resolution of the Jubilee-era Executive circus fades with every clash of the forces allied to the bickering principals.
The Kiambaa parliamentary by-election due next month — a showdown between the President and the Deputy President — could be the grand finale.
The turn of the Cinderella-themed UhuRuto wedding of 2012 is a Kilkenny cats clash that will leave the combatants tailless. The people who cheered the duo in three presidential elections — 2013, and twice in 2017 — now know choices can have such debilitating consequences.
The grass is drying up as the elephants stampede. Can reason stop the tragic music of a duo that should have lived happily thereafter?
President Uhuru Kenyatta's faction is keen on the Big Four agenda of food security, affordable housing, manufacturing, and job creation. There is also a quest for a unitary legacy. The legacy includes the passage of the Building Bridges Initiative constitutional amendments, whose hiatus in court, the DP's side is celebrating. The DP will reap the windfall of an expanded Executive should BBI Reggae rev again.
DP William Ruto’s faction has been on the succession campaign grove from 2017. They have danced nearly lame, even as Uhuru advises the suspension of 2022 presidential campaigns.
The faction claims the promise of economic growth stalled when President Mwai Kibaki retired in 2013. The newfound love for a bottoms-up economic model is the DP's red card for the President.
The Executive snide was not the promise while the Jubilee duo was joined at the hip. The irony is that the gullible have bought into the chicanery. They imagine the DP is the cure for the mess he shares, equally, with the President.
Uhuru cannot sack the 'elected' DP. H.L Mencken was right when he wrote, "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance," in Notes on Democracy in 1926. The Executive duel of the Jubilee regime echoes Kilkenny cats of Irish folklore.
There is a poem, and a history to the fight of the felines.
"There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many,
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails,
And the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there weren't any."
Kilkenny cats are fabled felines from the Irish city of the same name. They fought each other so ferociously that only their tails remained to tell that once lived two cats that could not tolerate each other.
The DP is preoccupied with isolating the president from his base. He is hitting the shepherd to scatter the sheep. The plot began during Jubilee nominations in 2017 - a scheme that netted loyalists for the DP.
Kilkenny cats entered folklore as a metaphor for a conflict that is likely to ruin the quarrelsome combatants. Sadism is the motif of the tale of tails.
There is a history to this: In 1798 when Hessian soldiers camped in Kilkenny, they amused themselves by tying tails of two cats and throwing them over a line to fight.
Upon hearing this, the officer ordered an end to cat fights. Still, on a certain day there hung two cats on a line when the officer was heard coming, one of the troopers drew his sword and cut the cats down, leaving only their tails hanging on the line.
The officer asked, "Where are the cats?" One of the troopers explained the cats had eaten one another except their tails.
President Kenyatta and DP Ruto are quarrelsome in their own unique ways, and for their own unique reasons. During a recent interview on Citizen TV, the DP said he would not want to be a president who mistreats the DP. But Ruto forgot to say if he would countenance a DP who treats the President with such snobbery. The blade cuts both ways, like Kilkenny cats.
