How Azimio plans to bring Ruto government down – Weekly Citizen

Details are emerging on how Raila Odinga and his allies are plotting to rally Kenyans to force president William Ruto and his deputy Rigathi Gachagua to flee the country. In what the schemers say will be bloodless coup that borrows from Sri Lanka’s revolution that toppled president Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022, Azimio plans a series of weekly rallies that will culminate in a major rally in Nairobi before directing their supporters to start weekly demonstrations to oppose what they term high taxation, high food prices, tribalism in state appointments and political witch-hunting.

Azimio’s planned weekly picketing, according to a source aware of details, will start in phases just like the rallies have been programmed. First phase will be to hold demonstrations twice per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Phase two will lead to thrice per week and phase three four times to build momentum.

The demonstrations will be held in Nairobi central business district. No demonstrations will be held on Monday to allow citizens do business after the weekend. Also, they will not be held on Fridays to allow Muslim prayers to proceed while Saturdays will accommodate Seventh Day Adventists adherents and Sundays for other Christian faithful.

Informed sources briefed us that those involved want to take control of Nairobi city being the capital of Kenya as happenings trickle down to other major towns of Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and Kakamega others lined up.

The idea is to instil fear among investors and make Ruto unable to implement his manifesto thus set the stage for the masses who are already disgruntled against the president for inability to cushion them from the pangs of hunger, unemployment and insecurity among other social evils bedeviling them.

To the plotters of the scheme to topple Ruto, the so-called dynasties, which were targeted in 2022 presidential campaigns, will come in handy to rescue them.

Ruto’s administration has claimed tycoons who evaded paying taxes are funding the rallies but other sources say that due to Ruto leaning towards the West, they are using former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s regime lieutenants and connections with China to help them. Kenya is currently caught in America-China war with Ruto having no time for Chinese. Since he won the presidency, Ruto has never visited the East preferring the West.

In fact the current Azimio rallies, apart from testing political ground across the country, are also aimed at raising political temperatures to ignite the people’s temper against the state. The rallying call “Ruto Must Go” is aimed at removing him and his deputy from power in a populist show. Azimio leader declarations that he does not recognise Ruto presidency after an alleged whistleblower’s supposed presidential results that claimed he won is part of the scheme.

Azimio plans to take control of Nairobi during Madaraka Day celebrations when Ruto will be leading Kenyans in marking the day in Embu county under the theme of “universal healthcare”. The protestors, who will adopt a ‘Ruto Must Go’ clarion call, will march along Nairobi streets after the Madaraka Day rally that those in the know claim will be used to launch the so-called third liberation movement. The first liberation was the fight for independence and self-governance, the second was for pluralism and now third liberation in what they term as the fight to safeguard democratic gains that they argue are under siege.

The Azimio coup script borrows heavily from Sri Lanka where mass protests that began in March 2022 against the government for mismanaging the economy led to the ouster of president Rajapaksa. Millions of protestors who took to the streets lamented the harsh economic crisis that caused severe inflation, daily blackouts, fuel shortage, domestic gas, and other essential goods and mirror the pain which Kenyans are currently experiencing.

Azimio hopes that just like the virtual economic shut down that culminated in a revolution in Sri Lanka led to an uprising, overburdened Kenyans will take the cue and force Ruto and Gachagua to flee the country. They are buoyed by the fact that Kenyans are in the same stage Sri Lianka was when it suffered a severe balance of payments crisis resulting in default on international debts. The country, just like Kenya, had also taken big loans from China often for uneconomic vanity projects. Azimio is pegging its hope on Kenyans copying the protestors in Sri Lanka who stormed and took control of the presidential compound, prime minister’s residence and several other government buildings.

They are hoping the deeply divided Kenyans will ape Sri Lankans who refused to obey Rajapaksa’s orders to eject the protestors from government buildings and homes of his close family members and their cronies.

Raila strategists are capitalising on more than six million supporters on their side. To them, if Ruto flees, which political analysts say is next to impossible, it will be as a last resort to institute a government of national unity. But as they are planning to fight Ruto, the president has numberless weapons to put Raila in his powerless place one being declaring a state of emergency which the constitution allows when the state is threatened by war, invasions and general insurgency like tribal clashes, anarchy and breakdown of law and order that civic authority is unable to contain. A state of emergency can be declared according article 58 of the constitution.

In the end, Azimio hopes Ruto and Gachagua will be forced to flee the country just like Rajapaksa fled Sri Lanka to the Maldives Islands on a military jet after India refused to grant him asylum. Rajapaska’s woes started when he directed that all agriculture in Sri Lanka be organic something that saw millions of rice farmers who now planted without fertiliser harvest less than a tenth of their normal harvests throwing the country into economic turmoil. The country’s port was then taken over by the Chinese who had loaned Sri Lanka heavily using the port as security. It is to be remembered that president Uhuru used the port of Mombasa as security for Chinese loans something that could see the Chinese take over the port in the near future if Kenya defaults on the loans.

What is giving Azimio more impetus to press Ruto and Gachagua, top state officials who served under Uhuru regime but are still in office are living in fear of losing their jobs or at worst, criminal prosecution for trying to rig the August 9 2022 presidential race.

Ruto has directly accused them of plotting to abduct and kill then IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati in an effort to block his victory during the 2022 presidential elections, meaning that he can easily prosecute them if he so desires.

The Azimio game plan is to first psyche their masses that Ruto lost the presidential election to Raila in 2022 which has been dismissed. The strategy was at play when Azimio released a report by an alleged IEBC whistleblower alleging bizarrely Raila won the polls after garnering 8,170,355 votes ahead of Ruto who reportedly managed 5,919,973 votes. This was followed by a series of rallies starting at Kamukunji and Jacaranda grounds in Nairobi and that continued over the weekend at Kibra last Sunday before moving to Machakos this week. Machakos people are however said to be uninterested in the political shenanigans and are keen to form rapport with Ruto so that they can gain from government projects. Wiper MP Jessica Mbalu posted on WhatsApp “ambieni kitendawili aache jokes. Aende Bondo mapema mapema ndio best” summing the feeling of leaders and locals of the area who are now in the midst of the worst drought since the nikw’a ngwete (I’m starving to death while I have money) famine of 1980.