Nick Ruto, the eldest son of Deputy President William Ruto, has responded to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jamhuri Day speech where he asserted that the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) was a deferred dream.
After the conclusion of the Jamhuri Day celebrations on Sunday, December 12, Nick called out Uhuru for using the line ‘a dream deferred’ from Harlem – a poem by Langston Hughes that talked about the injustice of denying justice to the black people in America.
He explained it was distortion for the president to state that the BBI was a deferred dream stating that the product of the handshake between Uhuru and ODM leader Raila Odinga flopped because it was resisted by a majority of Kenyans.
“It’s a distortion of history for President Muigai to call BBI ‘a dream deferred’. The poem is set in the early 20th century in the US, where the promise of the American Dream was clearly not accessible to blacks who had been enslaved less than 50 years earlier.
“It was not about the dreams of autocrats which are not accomplished due to the resistance of the people, which is the case of BBI,” he stated.
Additionally, the advocate of the High Court went ahead to claim that the media had allowed the president to get away with his distortion because of his status in society.
“But this is the trick that Anglo-American imperialism plays on our minds. It parasites the words of the oppressed and calls on us to take their words literally and ignore the power difference and the context,”
“And our elite get away with it because the media do not read or care for history, and because GoK bureaucrats and pirate sector demonize the study of the arts,” the young Ruto alleged.
After making the statements, the DP’s son went ahead to comment ‘hatupangwingwi’ a famous phrase from Kenyan music meaning ‘we cannot be organized’ which has also been used by his father in criticising the government operatives for allegedly orchestrating Uhuru’s succession.
During his address, Uhuru stated that despite the High Court declaring the BBI, null and void, it was important for the country to revisit what the document had envisaged.
“Although it encountered some legal obstacles, I can only say that BBI is just a dream deferred,
“One day, someday, it will happen, because the country cannot survive ethnic majoritarianism and exclusion just as it cannot survive unfair and skewed representation. This is a design defect that we must fix,” Uhuru stated.
At the end of his speech, Uhuru defended that it was important for Kenyans to recognize the history of the country further praising Raila for advising him when undertaking the Uhuru Garden project.
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