Mystery letter on ‘DP murder plot’ and the last kicks of  Jubilee

You don’t need a diviner to tell you a marriage has broken down irretrievably. If it can’t work – and this particular one can never – just dissolve it. File for divorce and look for another partner. The evidence of incompatibility was there all along. Long before 2013.

CONSPIRACY

Some couples quite simply were never meant to be. The historical record bears me out. I, for one, aren’t shedding any tears as the Jubilee union disintegrates.

One day late last year, Mt Kenya MPs gathered in Naivasha for a meeting where they demanded President Uhuru Kenyatta’s government cease taking them for granted. Their grievance was that the government was not taking the development of their region seriously. Shortly afterward, the President summoned all of them for a closed-door get-together at the Regional Commissioner’s residence in Nyeri. The MPs made their pitch, some bitterly.

In response, the President detailed Trade Minister Peter Munya to do the follow-up, given the fact that the President would be too busy with other matters to effectively micromanage the development initiatives being proposed. Munya’s brief was to co-ordinate with fellow CSs, PSs and parastatal chiefs from the region and come up with coherent plans, which would be presented to implementing agencies and departments. Munya duly embarked on organising meetings with the relevant top officials and bureaucrats at the La Mada hotel in Nairobi.

I don’t know at what stage these meetings mutated into a conspiracy to assassinate the Deputy President. Anybody who had any lingering doubts that Jubilee was on its deathbed was rudely woken back to reality when three CSs from Mt Kenya materialised at the DCI headquarters last week to answer to an allegation that they were plotting to kill the DP.

There is some dispute as to who prompted the DCI’s intervention. One theory is that it was the President himself who ordered an investigation, which is the line the DP’s side are eager to push. However, Munya, who was among the CSs who were summoned by the DCI, categorically told the media that they had been informed at the Directorate that it was the DP who made the complaint through a telephone call.

VERACITY

The genesis of this “plot” is a letter that had been circulating widely on social media purporting to have been written to the President by a CS who “exposed” the assassination conspiracy. All manner of garbage is peddled on social media, day in day out. In this era of fake news, you can’t keep kicking up a ruckus over everything you see or read there. First verify its accuracy. The crux of the matter is this: Was there a letter from a CS to the President regarding an assassination conspiracy? Had the President received it? Had that particular CS confirmed s/he wrote the letter as per its contents? If that was the case, then the DCI’s investigation would be left to only a matter of ascertaining the veracity of the claims the CS had made in the letter to the President.

However, the subsequent twist where the DCI is now investigating the authenticity of the letter and the identity of its author suggests the letter itself is most probably fake. That’s the only logical inference to make.

For starters, the DCI seemed to have jumped the gun by summoning the CSs before first authenticating the letter. The biggest puzzle remains: Who is the author of this letter? Who posted it online? More importantly, who was he working for? Why the hoax?

It turns out the same team of CSs and top government people who were fingered in that letter has been working on preparations for an upcoming grand “homecoming” tour of the Mt Kenya region by President Kenyatta.

OLD HABITS

Is it by coincidence they have now come under the DP’s crosshairs? Munya, who can be as combative as they come, has announced to whoever cares to know that the La Mada meetings will continue as before.

I quite perfectly understand why the DCI is roping in America’s FBI into the investigation, which I have no doubt our own detectives can crack. The sensitivity of the matter requires a scrupulously neutral investigator to handle, especially when it comes to perceptions. The DP has in previous rants questioned the DCI’s objectivity in the crackdown on corruption and also queried its capacity to do a proper investigation. Now the DCI is subtly throwing shade at the DP by handing over a crucial part of the investigation to an outside agency whose findings the DP cannot brush aside.

This whole assassination intrigue reminds some of us of the Nyayo past, when paranoia, petty vindictiveness and non-existent conspiracies were the order of the day. Whenever the regime felt itself under pressure, or imagined it was, it would cook up all manner of dark stories about “plots” and “night meetings”, then work itself into a frenzy over essentially nothing. Old habits, it seems, die hard.

[email protected]