Sabina Chege Rejects Ruto’s Prestigious Offer

Jubilee Party leadership hopeful Sabina Chege on Friday revealed that the Kenya Kwanza Alliance tried to lure her out of the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition party by promising her 40 per cent of the Nairobi County Cabinet as deputy governor.

The now nominated Jubilee Party MP revealed that then-Deputy President William Ruto wanted her to be Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja’s running mate, but she turned down the offer.

“If I had taken that opportunity, today I would be very big in politics with a lot of money. So it pains me to hear people say that I was bought to undermine retired President Uhuru Kenyatta’s control of the Jubilee Party,” she told Inooro TV’s morning show. 

Ms Chege said that contrary to the popular narrative that Mr Kenyatta built Mt Kenya politicians who are prominent today, the opposite was true.

“It is he who should thank us. We stood by him and campaigned, voted and supported him for 10 years as President and Mt Kenya kingpin. In the process, we voted for him three times after his 2017 victory was nullified by the Supreme Court,” she said.

Ms Chege urged the former president to realise that no one is abandoning him in his hour of need, “only that you have failed to take us to prominence; you have only managed to bring many of us down”. 

She, however, urged President Ruto’s allies to keep families out of politics as debate rages in Mt Kenya over how some politicians allied to the government have insulted Mr Kenyatta and his mother, former First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta.

The Kikuyu Council of Elders has since called on President Ruto to tame his allies who have publicly attacked the former First Lady.

The government’s recent decision to withdraw Mama Ngina’s security detail has also not gone down well with most Mt Kenya residents.

“We have to learn to respect families and there is absolutely no justifiable reason to drag them into political disputes … It is not right and we must also learn to respect each other because we are only living today with the hope of a tomorrow we do not know what it will bring us,” she said. 

On the August 9, 2022 General Election, Ms Chege insisted that there was nothing wrong with the choice of Mr Odinga as the Jubilee Party’s preferred presidential candidate.

“Mr Odinga is a nice man, a man with a big heart and no grudges. He is a good man and was a good choice. We tried to take him to the presidency but things went south instead of north,” she said.

She added: “Even after we were defeated and some of us walked away from him politically, he remains as accommodating as if nothing happened.

“Just recently, I met him at Wilson Airport and he hugged me, was happy to meet me and we chatted like good friends.”

She said the problem with Mr Odinga’s political fortunes was a cadre of politicians who had manipulated his huge popularity for their selfish benefit and neglected his ambitions.

“If these people had prioritised Mr Odinga’s presidential bids in 2007, 2013, 2017 and 2022, he would have prevailed by now.”

Had Mr Odinga been more conscious of those in his inner circle who meant well for him, she said, his political fortunes would have taken a different turn since 2002 when he helped oust Kanu from power after another star performance in bringing multiparty democracy home.

She said the people of Mt Kenya won’t understand for now how important it is for the Jubilee Party to be rescued, rebuilt and parked as an area bus for the near future.

“But one year is enough for you people to understand the importance. We are coming and we will be bigger,” she said without elaborating.

President Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) has been pushing for the dissolution of all affiliates of the ruling Kenya Kwanza Alliance and the formation of a single party for the future. 

Regional parties have resisted the move, fearing nomination debacles that massacre political careers at the altar of electoral malpractices, with Mount Kenya for now in the UDA, fearing that it would be foolhardy to go into the future without its home party.

Ms Chege alleged that Mr Kenyatta had embarked on a systematic plan to take the Jubilee Party out of the control of the Mt Kenya region and put it in the hands of others, and the move must be checked.

“Our giant party, which had 178 MPs in 2017, now has 28, of which only eight are from Mt Kenya. We have only one governor in Isiolo. We are the majority in Samburu County. This cannot be said to be our party that Mr Kenyatta controlled on our behalf,” she said.