Deputy President William Ruto has claimed that President Uhuru Kenyatta pushed him out of government after the 2017 elections to “build his personal legacy”.

Speaking at the Moi International Sports Complex, Kasarani, during the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) delegates conference, Ruto explained that he was forced to retreat to the periphery of the government after the President asked to be given space to work on his legacy alone.

“My friend the President did inform me that he needed space to work on his personal legacy as the fourth President. I obliged, and this led to my eventual retreat to the margins of a government that I had participated in forming,” Ruto said.

A seemingly bitter Ruto castigated his boss and the Jubilee party claiming that it derailed from its original purpose to politics of division of ethnicity and personal interests.

“In our second term we witnessed accelerated regression into tyranny, personality politics and the weaponization of public institutions to intimidate, harass and persecute Kenyans perceived not to worship those in power. Many large enterprises were destroyed, many business owners harassed, many leaders subjected to humiliation, intimidation, blackmail because their only crime was holding contrary opinion to those holding the levers of state power,” said Ruto.

Ruto, who was endorsed as UDA’s Presidential candidate, accused the President of killing the opposition through the March 9, 2018 handshake, which gave birth to the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) in the name of creating national unity.

“A new frame of national unity was engineered in undemocratic and in terms which rationalized grounding and swallowing the whole opposition and the vandalization of the constitution to accommodate corrupt and dangerous ethnic arrangements. At the same time, the Big Four agenda was abandoned,” he added.

“This is how we lost four years that would have gifted us with a brilliant blossoming  of a beautiful dream which inspired millions of Kenyans in 2013.”

In what he termed as state capture, Ruto said that the government had weaponized several institutions such as the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission (EACC) to run political errands.

He said that on his first day in office, he would appoint an accounting officer for the inspector general of police and the DCI so that they would not be financially dependent on the Office of the President.

“As they weaponize the KRA, we will do the complete opposite. We will professionalize the KRA, digitize the KRA, and make sure that it collects all the taxes professionally and the 60 percent of the taxes that are not collected as VAT we will make sure that we create the mechanism… and we do not have to fight Kenyan enterprises and destroy people’s businesses,” Ruto said.

Ruto also accused the President and his allies of planning to change the Constitution to take away the Judiciary’s independence and make it answerable to the Executive.

He promised to operationalize the Judicial Fund on his first day in office so as to guarantee its freedom.