After the nullification of the BBI bill on Friday by the Court of Appeal, a very crucial and inevitable question arose, who is it that lost the most?
In relation to the initiators and especially the President Uhuru Kenyatta, critics have argued that by shooting down the bill twice, the embarrassment fell directly on the president’s face because despite having a team of apt lawyers, senior counsels the likes of Otiende Amollo and also the Attorney General to share pieces of advice in relation to the bill, he still could not convince the judges otherwise.
Moreover, following a string of continuous defeats hovering on the president’s head be it political like in the case of Kiambaa and under the courts roof, again and again, political analysts have argued that the President’s soft underbelly has now been exposed to scrutiny and challenge especially after Justice Kiage ruled that the President isn’t immune to prosecution for any wrongdoings happening during his tenure.
Arguably, the second loser would be Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga as he was the best placed candidate to benefit the most on the handshake cake should the BBI have passed through for he was assured of a prime minister position or a president’s should he have lost or won respectively.
Other than that, analysts had foreseen the rising of his convincing power on both his voting block and even his OKA brothers for had it passed, he would have been negotiating with a full pocket in terms of rewarding them with positions in the new government unlike now that many of his allies seem to have ditched him.
The Deputy President William Ruto might in my opinion be tagged as the third loser in the sense that by merely opposing the Bill he shelved the possibility of ever being in a lucrative and powerful position should he not win the presidency come 2022 and could suffer the fate of Raila of almost getting buried politically like the way it was before the handshake resurrected him back.
Be that as it may, the last and most injured player at the table, who ironically is the boss to them all and yet has suffered irredeemably is the common Mwananchi who has shouldered the over 2 billion shillings funds that the unconstitutional BBI process has guzzled so far, the cold wars brought by its waves and the harsh times especially during a Pandemic that would have been fought of had the wasted funds been directed towards fighting it and thus begging the question,
Are we really in control?