In a tersely penned letter to the Cord coalition brigade, President Kenyatta through his Presidential Strategic Communications Unit (PSCU) has hit back at the opposition where it hurts them most by saying they have always thrived on corruption and kept their supporters poor in order to remain relevant.
The opposition, which has been vigorously fighting high levels of corruption in the government has itself been termed as filled with filth and has a penchant for high graft going by their previous records in government.
The PSCU said that Odinga has been engaging in economic sabotage strategies by perpetually engaging in negative, parochial and violent politics.
“ODM continues to be a closed, parochial, tribal, violent, repressive cult of personality overhung with the menacing spectre of wanton chaos. Its grassroots nominations are deadly fiascos and its leaders predatory and feckless as ever. Wiper is contending with apathy in its strongholds and fatigue over its severe deficiency of vision and credible development agenda. Ford Kenya is hampered by a dissonance arising from excess aspiration and miniscule stature, scarce support and imperceptible impact,” the PSCU says in a statement seen by Tuko.co.ke.
This latest strong attack on the opposition comes a day after the opposition demanded that President Kenyatta institute a lifestyle audit on his deputy William Ruto who has been dishing out millions of shillings at harambees (fundraisers) every week.
The Cord coalition further said that the Jubilee administration led by DP Ruto was conducting ‘political tourism’ to buy voters and leaders from across Kenya’s political divide with missing Eurobond money.
However, the Jubilee has not taken such accusations lying down. Instead, it opted to respond in the toughest way yet.
Below are excerpts from the letter:
The entire CORD leadership is hobbled by corruption of the past and kleptomaniac fantasies. Led by Odinga, Musyoka and Wetang’ula, they are projecting their venal proclivities and penchant for abuse of office on the Jubilee leadership. All we can learn from their recent tirades is that the opposition brigade expects public office to be an opportunity to loot and imagines that government is doing so with official sanction.
Kalonzo Musyoka easily distinguishes himself as the founding father of NYS scandals. Among his well known exploits is the grabbing of 2,000 acres of NYS land for use as his private ranch in Yatta.
Moses Wetang’ula, whose feckless ways earned him the nickname “Black Moses” long ago at the University of Nairobi, has mastered the international dimension of corruption through his involvement in the sale of Kenya’s embassy in Tokyo and more recently, his fetid dalliances with big tobacco multinationals. Wetang’ula is the poster boy of corruption’s cancerous nature.
But it is Raila Odinga who remains as the oligarch of official graft and the doyen of economic sabotage. It must never be forgotten that the Kisumu Molasses Plant was a government parastatal intended to inject economic development in Nyanza when it was thoroughly impoverished under the Odinga dynasty’s leadership.
In a move that has come to characterise Odinga’s economic sabotage strategies, Raila went out of his way to court, join and lead KANU so that, as minister, he could appropriate the government asset to be his family’s flagship entity.
Odinga used his slyly acquired official position to “buy” the molasses plant for a peppercorn consideration as Spectre International Limited. This company only thrived when Odinga could coerce state owned millers to supply Spectre with molasses at concessionary rates, even though the company rarely paid up and is now buffeted by financial difficulties. Indeed, at last telling, Spectre owed impoverished millers hundreds of millions of shillings.
It will be remembered that the post-election violence was instigated under a “No Raila, No Peace” principle which enabled Odinga to walk over the dead and injured into the high office of Prime Minister. Peace only came to the country when Odinga was designated Prime Minister. As Prime Minister, Odinga orchestrated the maize scandal whereby his office coerced the National Cereals and Produce Board to sell grain reserves meant for famine relief to Odinga’s family, friends, political and business associates at low prices to make a killing in the free market when Kenyans stared starvation in the face.
It will also be remembered that Odinga, as Prime Minister, started the Kazi Kwa Vijana programme, ostensibly dedicated to employing Kenyan youth, but which in fact was another of his famous embezzlement schemes.
Any entity averse to taxes or competition ordinarily finds safe refuge with Odinga. His famous interventions include ensuring that bulk grain handling at the port of Mombasa remains a monopoly, and pressuring the Kenya Revenue Authority to forgo billions of shillings in tax arrears from a large multinational tobacco firm. To deny Kenyans their rightful revenue is economic sabotage. To profit from sabotage is simply evil.
In the last days of the Grand Coalition Government, Odinga shed the sheep skin, bared his fangs and displayed his true colours. He hurriedly executed scores of large, inflated infrastructure contracts even though there was no budget or policy-based programme for them. The procurement for these projects was similarly orchestrated by Odinga in a rushed, opaque and corrupt manner in order to facilitate kickbacks for Odinga.
Despite protests from Treasury, Odinga personally ensured that his rackets became official contractors. Odinga’s intention was for a successor administration to finance these inflated contracts and provide him with a colossal retirement package.
The Jubilee administration has not done so. Odinga further expected that the Eurobond would be used to provide his kickbacks. His hysterical obsession with the Eurobond and persistent demand for Eurobond financed projects to be made public, is a desperate bid to see if even one of his inflated kickback rackets made it to execution as a government project. Odinga knows that this is not the case.
The desperation and vendetta over this disappointment has made Odinga a delirious, disgraceful political spectacle. Odinga concocts improbable and incredible allegations of corruption on a daily basis which he cannot substantiate.
One of Odinga’s long serving aides confirmed to the media that he coordinated kickbacks for the Prime Minister and that contractors from the East came calling on Odinga in droves and customarily parted with gifts of millions of shillings. Odinga has never denied this, only claiming that KSh 5 million is too little for him and is beneath him. Clearly, therefore, Odinga made more and perhaps his aide only witnessed the delivery of minor instalments here in Kenya and on Odinga’s innumerable itineraries to China.
Odinga has never objected to harambee when he is the beneficiary and has never interrogated the sources of his donors’ largesse, which include Hummers from well-known fraudsters and KSh 100,000-a-plate dinners. Odinga notoriously exploits the generosity of others, but can never be moved by plight or might to part with a shilling for a worthy cause.
Harambee is solidarity. Harambee is compassion. Harambee is sharing. Harambee is giving. Harambee is philanthropy. All these are terms wholly foreign to Odinga’s moral vocabulary. Tragically, Odinga is avaricious and stingy. Giving by others makes Odinga look bad. His preferred method of engaging Kenyans is at funerals where he sheds copious crocodile tears. Indeed, ODM just took over the management of funerals in western Kenya and Nyanza and converted them into official fora for recruitment and mobilisation.
Jubilee is steadily transforming Kenya. Kenyans want strong, principled, national political movements. Jubilee is aggressively reaching out to bring all Kenyans in every region into a solid, united, party. CORD is still speaking the language of tribal enclaves that has sundered our national fabric and brought much grief to our people. CORD’s prospects in the next elections are proving thin indeed. As a result, CORD is resorting to an old Odinga repertory of ethnic profiling, gratuitous libelling of important institutions with the aim of pre-emptively delegitimising the clearly predictable outcome of the next election.
Odinga’s onslaught on IEBC, the Judiciary and the Executive are strategic, aimed at fomenting a deadly crisis like the 2007 PEV, or the unnecessary suspense of his quixotic forays in the Supreme Court in 2013. Clearly, Odinga is activating a sequence aimed at creating a crisis for him to force his way to the power-sharing table in 2017.
In Odinga’s strongholds, his party continues to behave as though party leadership nominations are synonymous with civil war. George Aladwa publicly declared that there is nothing wrong with people losing their lives if that is what it takes for Odinga to be president. At his State of the Nation Press Conference, Odinga called on Kenyans to take up arms. From dog-whistles, Odinga has escalated his approach to outright incitement.
Jubilee is not taking Kenya back to 1991 as Odinga claims; CORD is taking Kenya back to 2007. Odinga is desperately beating his drums of war. He is harkening back to “No Raila, No Peace!”, “41 vs 1″ and the atrocious ideology of despair and destruction.
The economy is defying the naysayers, who claimed that infrastructure investments would cause what they called a “Dutch disease” by sucking up resources from productive sectors. The latest authoritative forecasts declare that the latest acceleration is attributed to positive externalities arising from the flagship infrastructure investments. This momentum will be intensified on completion when the projects begin to deliver economic returns. The war on graft, Kenya’s improvement in doing business ranking and other strategic initiatives by the government have also contributed to a positive economic outlook.
Western Kenya and the Coast have accorded the Jubilee Party a warm and effusive reception and shown much goodwill and interest in it. The seismic waves in lower eastern Kenya indicate that people are tired of doing the same thing over again and expecting change.
Garissa University just reopened, symbolising Kenya’s resurgence and northern Kenya’s resolve to lead and accelerate the national development, integration and unity agenda.
Kenya is defying terrorists, prophets of doom, economic saboteurs and pessimists. Kenya, the land of winners, is on a winning streak. This is why CORD leaders are desperate. Times can only get tougher for them because the people of Kenya aren’t fools and know that through thick and thin, UhuRuto is on their side and that Jubilee works for them and that the government is their government.
In 2015, the Cord coalition took the government to task to explain why some of its top officers had not misappropriated KSh 140 billion which was part of the KSh 200 billion Kenya borrowed from the international market in 2014. The dust is yet to settle on the matter.
Equally, Cord pushed for the resignation and prosecution of a number of suspects in the KSh 791 million National Youth Service scandal. Under pressure for overseeing a ministry gripped by corruption scandals, former Devolution and Planning Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru resigned although she cited medical reasons for the move. Odinga said he would intensify his war against corruption in the Jubilee administration in 2016.
Image: Nation.
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