Deputy President William Ruto insists that the fallout between him and president Uhuru Kenyatta is as a result of the handshake.
According to Ruto, before the handshake, together with president Kenyatta, they were focused and achieved lots of developments.
In an interview with Voice of America, the Deputy President said that the development record in their first term of governance, that is 2013-2017, is the legacy that president Kenyatta will carry home when he retires.
“History is going to be written and I am sure that details will be out there. But let me say the following; In our first term we were focused as a government on delivery of our plan and that’s why it stands out.
“Every legacy programme President Uhuru Kenyatta will go home with is the programmes of the first term whether you talk about the SGR, Road network, electricity connection, equipment we have supplied in our referral hospitals, TVET programmes,” DFP Ruto said.
During their second term in office, the handshake came and divided the two leaders. Ruto says that he was aware of the plans and that Raila had reached out to him before he went to Kenyatta.
“In our second term, we got ourselves engaged in this handshake that was built to be an exercise to bring people together. As president Kenyatta has said, I was briefed. President Kenyatta informed me in fact before Raila engaged president Kenyatta, he tried to engage me and it is in the public domain,” Ruto said.
The things that they had agreed for the handshake however turned to something else which did not sit well with Ruto. He however said that he had no problem with the Building Bridges Initiative whose intention was to unite Kenyans.
“There was no problem but the things we had agreed on forming part of the handshake mutated into something else. For example, we did not discuss that it will be an exercise to kill the opposition and to kill oversight.
“We didn’t discuss that members of the ruling party would be [expunged ] so that members of the opposition can occupy committees in parliament. We didn’t agree that this was an exercise in changing the constitution and we didn’t agree that this was an exercise in succession. Everything we didn’t agree with became the handshake except for the things we agreed on,” Ruto said.
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