Duale’s vundamentals

These are the people. These are my people. These are our people. These are the vundamentals!

National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale has found himself in an unfamiliar ground. A hawkish defender of Jubilee and its leaders, he now invites the wrath of a Coalition he swore to defend. And when besieged by House colleagues, he invokes the URP/TNA pact whose content is hardly in public domain.

So for whom does he speak – Jubilee or URP? There’s something called “collective responsibility” in the government. What can we make of this? For a moment, the Garissa lawmaker appeared to have crossed the floor and joined the Opposition ranks! Indeed, he threatened to ditch Jubilee over the crackdown.

“We stand by the interests of our people. There should be no doubt about that … It shall no longer be business as usual. We shall not and will never allow our people to be discriminated against, never,” he thundered.

Jubilee (or is t TNA?) hit back, almost immediately. “It would be better for Jubilee to lose power than continue to entertain his behaviour — his competing interests meant to entrench him in power,” said Coalition strategist Andrew Kuria said.

The grapevine has it that Duale’s outburst was more in self-defense rather than genuine concern over possible human rights abuse in the on-going police swoop down on terror suspects in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighbourhood. The opus of his delegation to State House a couple of days before the killing of Sheikh Abubakar Sharif alias Makaburi had infuriated his vundamentals.

His critics claim the delegation comprised old tired fellows, hardly representative of the diverse Muslim community. Youth, the sector hardest-hit by the unrelenting swoops, was hardly represented in the “courtesy call” at State House.

Explicably, Duale had to make amends by unleashing populist rhetoric in Eastleigh – the epicenter of arrests.

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