In my open letter to William Ruto more than nine years ago, I narrated the following to him:
I am certain you do not recall this but at the tail end of the 2007 campaign, a friend of mine and I were at the Fairview Hotel having lunch when you and other Pentagon members minus Raila Odinga and Joe Nyagah were also seated at the nearby gazebo for a meeting.
My colleague and I engaged the other Pentagon members except you as you were mum and basically treated us as a nuisance—not sure exactly why. I joked with my Kalenjin friend that he must have had a run-in with him before, but he assured me that not to be the case.
Be that as it may, as my friend and I returned to our seats, I told him looking at that table, it was my conclusion you could not possibly be on the team for much long after the ensuing elections.
My assessment was simply based on this: Knowing you were the youngest of the four Pentagon members sitting there, with the two absent ones clearly in your mind, you must have surely been thinking if each ruled as President at a minimum one term, it would translate to more than 25 years before your turn arrived. Going by the politics of the oldest first, if each ruled for a maximum two terms, you were then looking at more than 50 years before your turn.
If you factor in the opposition taking one or two of those terms, add at least five more years, which led to my summation that you could not possibly want to wait that long thus your exit.
For this reason, I told my friend you would soon have to find a way to cut the line, and this could not possibly happen in ODM.
For those who followed my blog at the time, you know I penned a series of articles imploring Raila to bring Ruto back to ODM and asking the then Eldoret North MP to oblige him.
Unlike many in Raila’s camp, I have never seen Ruto as a political enemy or otherwise someone who the ODM leader cannot work with post-2007.
To the contrary, I have always maintained Raila and Ruto complement each other, with latter the bigger beneficiary were he to work with the former because of his sure path to the presidency than he has with Uhuru—and this is a view I expressed in the open letter back in 2012.
In the letter, I told Ruto his bolting ODM and becoming a thorn in the flesh against Raila soon after the coalition government with Mwai Kibaki was formed was understandable. This is because Ruto was trying to dethrone Raila from the pinnacle of power he enjoyed as the leader of ODM and therefore position himself as the king slayer who rides on the victory all the way to State House.
Looking back, however—I told Ruto he would have to agree, falling the Mugumo tree in ODM that is Raila turned out to be an insurmountable and daunting task. I also reminded Ruto I had long before concluded after conducting thorough legal research that he would not be convicted at the ICC.
Ruto did not buy my plea to return to ODM and work with Raila but joined President Uhuru Kenyatta and the rest is history.
Here is the irony: Much as Ruto discovered Raila was too big a Mugumo tree to cut down in ODM with a razor blade, it is increasingly becoming obvious the DP may be too big a Mugumo tree to cut down by whoever is salivating to do so, even with the use of better tools.
That is not necessarily a bad thing for it shall mean voters will decide in a fair and free election whether Ruto or someone else should take over from Uhuru.
Samuel Omwenga is a legal analyst and political commentator.
