John Busii's Evidence

John Busii is the founder director of HIRTO, the Highway Rescue Team Organisation which works in the Rift Valley to promote food security and peace.. It is a small and underfunded NGO compared with others in this story but Busii is well respected and serves as the chairman of the Regulatory Committee of Kenya's National Council of NGOs. He is not a friend or supporter of Ruto and is a life member of a rival political party. He was able to give me fresh information on the plot to frame Ruto and has decided to speak out publicly for the first time.

I asked John Busii about the claims made by some of the original witnesses against Ruto that Omar Hassan of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and Ken Wafula, formerly chairman of the National Council for NGOs had been bribing them. Busii stated that in a conversation in late 2010 at the Midland Hotel Nakuru Ken Wafula had admitted to recruiting poor witnesses willing to give testimony against Ruto in return for reward and helping to relocate them abroad. Wafula had said John Busii would be shocked when he found out how Ruto had been fixed and that he hoped Ruto would spend 20 or 30 years in jail which would be a triumph for human rights campaigners.

I asked if it was possible that Wafula sincerely believed in Ruto's guilt. Busii replied that the motivation of both Wafula and Omar Hassan was their support for the Prime Minister Raila Odinga who viewed Ruto as a threat to his presidential ambitions. Odinga was the candidate who was officially defeated by President Kibaki in 2007, setting off the post election violence. He was supported at the time by William Ruto whose advocacy was influential in securing for Odinga the office of Prime Minister as a consolation prize. However both men were candidates for the 2013 elections creating intense rivalry between them. They were also rivals for the 2007 ODM nomination. As the testimony of other witnesses will show it was only after the original KNCHR investigation and the Waki commission that Hassan and Wafula started bribing witnesses. Ruto and Odinga were friends at the time of the KNCHR and Waki reports. Busii's belief that Odinga's allies were motivated by Ruto's ambitions constitutes just one possible explanation of their behaviour. The testimony of my second witness, William Rono, suggests another. John Busii cited prejudice against the Kalenjin as an additional factor lying behind Ken Wafula's campaign against Ruto. He also told me that the original report of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights into the post election violence did not implicate William Ruto. He says he saw the original report on their website.

Busii stated further that Ken Wafula had been bribing journalists to write articles attacking Ruto and supporting Wafula. On four occassions he saw Wafula paying the journalists. He said Wafula had been deposed as the chair of the NGO council in July 2012 at a meeting Busii chaired, for violation of the council's rules and code of ethics. Busii helped to remove him in disgust at his antics. He added that he had no personal animus against Ken Wafula. His motivation was simply revulsion at the perversion of the course of justice and the original purposes of Kenya's NGOs. Wafula claims that the special general assembly that ousted him was illegal. Others have counter claimed that the meeting that originally elected him was illegal and that he was never chairman in the first place.

In a complaint echoed by my other sources John Busii asked why the ICC did not conduct a full independent inquiry. The ICC have stated in response to similar complaints that they did not depend solely on the inquiries of the two main Kenyan investigations into the post election violence, that of the Kenya National Commission on human rights and the Waki Commission. This I believe. I shall be adducing testimony to show that many of the accusations against Ruto were manufactured after Waki's inquiry due to the paucity of the original evidence.

Busii named as co conspirators Muthoni Wanyeki of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, Professor Makau Mutua, an ICC consultant, Wambugu Ngumijiri a jounalist, Maina Kiai formerly chair of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights Njonjo Mue, formerly legal counsel to the same body and Martha Karua, former justice minister and current presidential candidate.

Martha Karua's motivation must be assumed to be different from that of Odinga supporters such as  Wafula and Hassan. She is a Kikuyu politician who was justice minister at the time of the 2007 elections. In January 2008 in an interview with BBCs Hardtalk she accused the Orange Democratic Movement, which then contained both Ruto and Odinga of planning the post election violence and organising ethnic cleansing. After the peace agreement she agreed to serve under Odinga. She could not therefore go after him and presumably went after Ruto because she wanted someone to pay for the crimes against her community.

John Busii's evidence was invaluable but he didn't claim a complete knowledge of the inner workings of the conspiracy. Fortunately many of the details were filled in for me by one of the original consprators, William Rono.

Read part 3 of "The Framing of William Samoei Ruto" - "William Rono's Evidence"