This man Muturi: Strategic planner or seasoned wily opportunist?

 

Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi may not be a fire-spitting hothead, but he has over time proven that he is an independent-minded political survivor, an attribute that has helped him remain in the limelight since he joined politics in 1999.

His decision this week to criticise the Kenya Kwanza government he serves as Cabinet Secretary over the ongoing abduction of social media activists did not, therefore, come as a surprise given the current political winds blowing in the Mt Kenya region.

Political analysts who have followed his career from the time he served as MP for Siakago, then senior Kanu official for many years, to the National Assembly Speaker in Uhuru Kenyatta’s government, Attorney General and now Cabinet Secretary, say he is simply not predictable.

“He is not radical but he is also not a mellowed politician. He has managed to be politically correct most of the time and that is how he has quietly risen over time with little controversy,” says political analyst Martin Andati.

In President William Ruto’s first Cabinet, where he served as Attorney General, it was alleged by the Law Society of Kenya that the President ignored his advice against allowing three advisors and a UDA party secretary-general to sit in Cabinet meetings.

READ: Muturi made his bed, he must now lie on it

It was no surprise that he was removed as the AG after the Gen Z protests forced the President to sack the whole Cabinet in July last year before re-appointing him to the current position as Cabinet Secretary for Public Service.

Andati thinks Muturi’s frustration now could also be because there is nothing much he is doing in the Ministry of Public Service, where decisions are mainly made by the Public Service Commission (PSC) which is a constitutional commission and also through directives from State House.

Apart from PSC, other key departments in Muturi’s ministry include the countrywide Huduma centres and the National Youth Service, both almost semi-autonomous agencies.

Muturi may be getting irritated because, unlike the powers he enjoyed when he served as Speaker and AG while also controlling influence and money, there is nothing much he is doing in the current ministry.

“All he does now is to take issues arising from the three agencies in his ministry to the Cabinet for discussion. All the appointments and anything else is being managed by either the presidency or PSC or directors at Huduma and NYS,” says Andati

In 2022, Muturi surprised many political observers when he decided to quit President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee party to take over the late President Mwai Kibaki’s Democratic Party.

READ: Is NIS the abductor in chief?: CS Muturi links top spy agency to abductions

Seen as Uhuru’s staunchest political ally, they had worked together in Kanu at its lowest moments and later fought many factional fights together for about two decades, which they later lost to Gideon Moi and Nick Salat before forming The National alliance (TNA) that morphed into the Jubilee party.

Muturi stuck with Uhuru in the most difficult times, especially after the 2002 presidential elections when the then ruling party Kanu was banished into the opposition after going through very tough times.

He remained with Uhuru and Gideon Moi in Kanu when Ruto led all Rift Valley politicians to decamp from Kanu to ODM in 2007. He lost his Siakago seat in that parliamentary election.

In the elections that followed to reorganise the party, Uhuru was elected party chairman while Muturi took the influential position of organising secretary and also the party’s whip in parliament.

When Jubilee took power in 2003, with Uhuru now as President he fronted and supported Muturi to take the powerful position of Speaker in the National Assembly.

What could have forced Muturi into abandoning his longtime friend to support President Ruto in 2022, a candidate Uhuru bitterly opposed and didn’t want to succeed him?

Gitile Naituli of Multi-Media University, who describes the former Speaker as a friend having served in the think tank for his presidential bid in 2021 before Muturi joined Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza alliance, understands him well.

Prof Naituli attended Muturi’s meetings in Embu, Meru and Tharaka Nithi that were heavily pro-Ruto and says that could have influenced his decision to join the current president’s team.

“If you are looking for political relevance, you have no choice but to go where the public is. That is why you hear Kenyan politicians saying I am listening to the ground, and that is what happened with Muturi,” Naituli told The Sunday Standard.

Muturi campaigned for the presidency for one full year but realised there were only two horses in the race. He decided to join one where his people were.

In 2020, it was rumoured that Uhuru mooted the idea of Muturi succeeding him and gave him the blessings of being crowned as an elder at Mukurwe wa Nyagathanga shrine in Murang’a as part of the bigger plan.

Muturi, however, dismissed those claims and instead said he was charting his own course just as was the case when he served with Uhuru in Kanu and later TNA.

He later told The Sunday Standard that he is driven by his own principles and not cheap politics, and narrated how he was given the task of reforming Kanu when he was a member of the National Executive Committee but chose to decamp to the National Party of Kenya, whose name Uhuru changed to The National Alliance (TNA).

He also revealed how he worked on a new constitution for KANU but his proposals were opposed by one faction. He says he later used the same in TNA.

Muturi was also instrumental in creating the merger between President Uhuru Kenyatta’s TNA and Ruto’s United Republican Party (URP), but later regretted, in an interview with The Sunday Standard, that his efforts to make Jubilee a national party failed.

During his close working relationship with the former president, Uhuru lost in his presidential bid against Kibaki in 2002 but Muturi chose to remain by his side.

He then consolidated his position as a member of Uhuru’s think tank together with David Wakairo Murathe who was the MP for Gatanga. Muturi later became chairman of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy.

In 2012, Uhuru attempted to rebrand Kanu as Kenya Alliance National Union, or the New Kanu, at the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Naivasha but the move was opposed by, among others, Secretary General Nick Salat.

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The former President was at the time serving as Kanu chairman and Deputy Prime Minister in Kibaki’s government. Gideon Moi was the party’s vice chairman, Salat secretary general and Muturi organising secretary.

Fights only intensified in the party with pressure mounting from the Registrar of Political Parties Lucy Ndung’u that they hold a Kanu National Delegates Conference (NDC) to comply with the requirements set in the 2010 Constitution or be deregistered.

With the threat of de-registration looming, an emergency NEC meeting was convened by Moi and Salat, which was given a wide berth by Uhuru and Muturi who dismissed the emergency meeting as irregular and inconsequential to Uhuru’s status as chairman.

Asked about the status of the party and the risk of deregistration as time was then running out, Muturi replied:

“We are still trying to comply and make a decision on the way forward.”

It emerged by the end of that same week that Uhuru was in fact no longer interested in the party and Muturi had for whatever reasons been playing delaying tactics with the rival camp through the media.

Consequently, the Moi faction went ahead with their plans for the NDC and invited 1450 party delegates to Kasarani, as the Gema communities, coincidentally, released a statement endorsing Uhuru to run for president.

At the Kanu NDC held on April 14, 2012, Uhuru, with Muturi strategically in his corner, sat pretty as they were replaced at a gathering in Kasarani that Muturi dismissed as illegal.

He was still fighting from Uhuru’s corner on the eve of the delegate's conference, saying:

“It will be interesting to hear what the Registrar of Political Parties will say because she was served with a copy of the injunction.”