Deputy President William Ruto continued with his onslaught against President Uhuru Kenyatta on his USA tour, claiming that the first in command has been enslaved by the opposition party.
Ruto, who spoke at a US-based think tank on Thursday, March 3, criticised the 2018 handshake between the president and ODM leader Raila Odinga saying the opposition had swallowed up the Jubilee government.
“We lost the ruling party; we lost the government agenda and we all ended up losers. We lost almost four years chasing a mirage that did not really work,
“The supposed opposition leader has become a puppet of the government and the leader of the ruling party (President Uhuru Kenyatta) is now a refugee in the opposition,’’ William Ruto said.
Speaking in an interview on Thursday, March 3 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the deputy president who was last week chased out of the ruling party, said the handshake scuttled the Jubilee big four agenda replacing it with the opposition’s agenda.
“The handshake took away the oversight role of the opposition. In Kenya today, we do not have an opposition. There is a mongrel of an organization that nobody knows what the hell it is,” Ruto said.
According to Ruto, some of the opposition’s agenda after the handshake was the looting of public resources.
He said close to KSh 100 billion is budgeted every year yet it cannot be accounted for.
“The other issue is budgeted corruption. Today you have close to KSh100 billion budgeted every year that has no oversight in opaque institutions, that amount has grown between four and fivefold in the last ten years,” Ruto said.
But speaking during the Sagana III meeting, the president defended his handshake with Raila saying it lowered the political temperatures and allowed the country to rise up and thrive after the chaos linked to the disputed 2017 elections.