Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Freedom, at last!

William Ruto’s presidency is absolutely inevitable.

He has overcome immense obstacles and endured devastating sabotage to emerge as the president-elect, on course to assume office as the fifth president of the republic.

As Deputy President, the distance he had to traverse to State House, under ideal political conditions, was the shortest imaginable in our dispensation.

However, by dint of an unprecedented concatenation of obdurate machinations, his alternative vector to the summit of his political career could not have been longer, nor more convoluted.

There was formidable opposition from Raila Odinga, which was expected.

But added to this was a blistering onslaught from an irascible Uhuru Kenyatta, who incited tectonic ethno-regional and administrative forces into an unprecedented political cataclysm directed at extinguishing Kenya’s political supernova.

That this elemental incursion was waged upon a loyal and extremely effective champion of long standing caused no mean measure of disquiet.

That Kenyatta did not deign to rationalise his vicious bombardments of his political ‘best friend forever’ endures as a perturbing conundrum.

That all the aggression was waged either in concert with or for the benefit of Raila Odinga presented an absurdity that was never adequately allayed.

An insoluble paradox 

As a result, Raila Odinga’s campaign was trapped in an insoluble paradox, which ultimately totally paralysed it.

Ostensibly a reformist, Odinga sought to prosecute a forward-looking campaign firmly undergirded by unwholesome, illiberal energies, desperately hewing to dubious glories dissolved in the mists of time.

A lot of support for the Odinga campaign was procured through fear.

The draconian regimentation of participants dissipated all spontaneity and authenticity, and with those, all possibility of ever striking a euphoric momentum typical of Odinga’s best forays. 

Finally, the sense that no one clearly understood Kenyatta’s end-game in the Azimio enterprise utterly sapped all promise from a campaign lavished with prodigious endowments of everything it took to shake earth and heaven in unforgettable ways.

The means and ends of Azimio and, therefore, Odinga’s campaign remaining thus encumbered by malevolent ambiguity, it was a catastrophic strategic blunder for Kenyatta, Odinga and Azimio to persist in gloating about the inevitability of their triumph while revelling in impunity and boasting about the extra-constitutional rampages of rogue bureaucrats and administrators, ominously christened the Deep State.

Kenyans are a freedom-loving people. The lengths to which ordinary people go to vindicate their sovereignty; the measures they take, individually and collectively to resist tyranny in all its guises, are perfectly radical.

It is not as though our freedom fighters did not know that spears are no match for guns – they were driven by a higher principle: we cannot just sit by and allow tyranny to have its way with us. 

Thus was born the spirit at the heart of every beating Kenyan heart, and flowing in the red-hot blood in every Kenyan artery: it is always better to die on your feet that to live on your knees.

The sum total of the Azimio campaign was the stampede of snarling impunity and rampant tyranny. 

It transformed the campaign into a freedom-winning moment.

Kenya underwent a psychic transformation which evoked the traumatic epoch of the Emergency, when colonialists and their collaborators bombed, shot, tortured and hanged scrappy mau mau, who nevertheless bravely had a go at them and died stubbornly clutching the soil of the land they swore to liberate, dead yet triumphant.

Azimio’s disinterest in engaging on economic issues animated the platform of economic liberation, and elicited an explosion of the liberation theme into hatupangwingwi: ferocious defiance of dynasticism, entitlement, impunity and attempts to fashion illegitimate trade-offs between freedom and ‘development’.

Our mama mboga moment underscored the underlying message of the Hustler Nation insurgency: development and freedom are not mutually exclusive propositions. Development is freedom.

Liberation struggles 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Many liberation struggles have perished for want of champions of the momentous agency. 

The Hustler Nation has been fortunate. In William Ruto, they found a candidate who was a perfect antithesis of the Azimio proposition. 

Born and raised in a relatable milieu, his biography holds an inspiring and unifying power.

His struggle and rise to the pinnacle are amply punctuated with epic exploits and vanquished dynasts.

Totally fearless, prodigiously astute, phenomenally indefatigable and abounding with curiosity, this unstoppable machine was perfectly calibrated and assembled for the moment. 

Moreover, born, raised and educated from Nursery to Doctor of Philosophy right here in Kenya, he is 100 per cent made in Kenya, with all Kenyan parts. 

Such was the pedigree demanded by the freedom struggle: an agent of necessity and a formidable insurgent.

Until the last moment at the Bomas of Kenya, Azimio struggled with a misunderstood assignment and devastatingly asymmetrical contest. 

They persisted in performing ‘Deep State’ in a ‘Freedom’ moment. 

On that note, they might petition the Supreme Court, further underscoring the magnitude of their tragic misapprehension of an epoch-defining moment of our political growth. 

Freedom is here!

Mr Ng’eno is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a former State House speech writer. @EricNgeno