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It was on March 4, 2013 when then 51-year-old Uhuru Kenyatta was elected Kenya’s first president under the Constitution of 2010.

This was also Kenya’s first election since the disputed 2007 election, when Orange Democratic Movement leader Raila Odinga also declared that he was cheated out of victory, triggering ethnic violence that killed more than 1,000 Kenyans and drove several hundred thousand others from their homes.

The mayhem crippled the country’s economy and shattered its image as a bulwark of stability in Africa.

During their first days in office, Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto walked together, sometimes hand in hand like a happily married couple; and worked in sync, at times dressing alike.

They prayed together in public and they laughed a lot as they called each other brothers. An excited public laughed with them, too. Life was good, the marriage was strong and the future looked bright.

Wearing marching white shirts and red ties, Uhuru and Ruto promised the country a new beginning that would be free from tribalism, corruption, poverty and coercion from the West.

Soaring on the popularity gained by the stiff opposition to recommendations by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to try them at the International Criminal Court (ICC) over crimes against humanity, Uhuru captured the presidency attaining the 50 per cent needed to avoid a runoff by winning 6,173,433 votes out of more than 12.3 million cast.

Main challenger

His main challenger, Raila, had gotten 5,340,546 votes, 43.3 percent, in an election contested by eight candidates. About 8,000 votes had pushed Uhuru above the 50 per cent mark. The turnout, at 86 per cent, was the highest ever in Kenya’s history.

In his speech during his inauguration on April 9, 2013, Uhuru and Ruto, then sworn comrades-in-arms, set themselves a six point agenda that they sought to accomplish in their ten year presidency: Creation, recreation and re-engineering of government at both the national and county levels; dealing robustly with insecurity in all of its manifestations, internal and external; creation of meaningful large scale jobs across the country; and pursuing food and nutrition security.

The other two priority agenda included rebuilding the country’s image regionally and globally and reinvigoration of the private sector. Alongside the six priority areas, the new president and his deputy promised to unite Kenyans by ensuring a sense of belonging by all in his government.

Today, as Uhuru addresses the nation on his last Madaraka day speech, and perhaps his last public speech before he hangs his boots, historians would be looking in amazement how the man from Gatundu has survived several turbulent incidents to serve his full 10 years.

Jubilee’s nine year tenure at the helm has revealed extraordinary fissures in Kenya’s politics that saw their presidency sail through turbulence all through.

“It is still a big puzzle on how the president managed to steady the ship throughout the nine years because there is no time he has ever had peace. He has had to manage a crisis after another,” observes Prof Macharia Munene, a political analyst and a former lecturer at USIU-Africa.

Uhuru’s journey of upheavals began sometimes in 2010 when he and Ruto were accused by ICC at The Hague of financing and instigating ethnic mobs who carried out mass killings after the 2007 election.

That meant that both of them were to endure months on trial while running the country. At one time, Uhuru was forced to temporarily “step aside” and hand over the reins to Ruto in order to travel to The Hague for the hearing of the case.

It was also the time that relationships with the country’s key allies and donors took a downward spiral. The United States and European nations issued a warning that there could be consequences if Kenyans chose a leader facing charges by the international court. Some Western diplomats went as far as threatening that they would only have essential discussions with Uhuru if he were to be elected.

But amid the storm, the President did not go down without a fight, as he told the world to respect the fact that Kenyans had chosen him and Ruto as their leaders and not apply pressure.

“We recognise and accept our international obligations, and we will continue to cooperate with all nations and international institutions in line with those obligations,” Uhuru said.

“However, we also expect that the international community will respect our sovereignty and the democratic will of the people of Kenya.” In his early years of his presidency, Uhuru mobilised several African leaders to put pressure on the ICC to the point of threatening to withdraw from the international court if it did not drop his and Ruto’s cases.

Both cases were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence, although the ICC said its prosecution witnesses were intimidated and promised that the cases could be resumed in future.

To this, Prof Macharia notes: “Uhuru’s presidency began on a rocky note with so many challenges. It is just by a miracle that he has managed to steer through it. I doubt if any other person would have withstood all the challenges that have faced him.”

Prof Macharia says early signs of problems in the first days of the Jubilee administration were clearly manifested in the delay by the two to name their Cabinet days after their inauguration. Soon after, there was a growing concern about the level of insecurity in the country, fuelled partly by the fact that Kenya was hosting over one million refugees from troubled neighbouring countries, including Somalia.

On 21 September, 2013 al-Shabab terrorists attacked the Westgate shopping mall in the capital Nairobi, killing more than 60 people. The government’s reputation suffered due to its poor crisis management.

His pet project, the free laptop programme for primary schools faced difficulties in taking off despite his government having pumped in billions of shillings. The project later collapsed.

Corruption ghosts

Ghosts of corruption have not spared the Jubilee government either, starting from the Managed Equipment Services (MES), the Covid-19 billionaires scandal, the National Land Commission (NLC) compensation on land for the construction of Standard Gauge Railways (SGR) and the National Youth Service scam.

Having survived all the turmoil in his first term, Uhuru was welcomed with a similar gloom in his second term with the Supreme Court led by Justice David Maraga nullifying his victory over alleged procedures used by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) in the 2017 General Election.

After victory in the fresh poll, Uhuru was in the news over his infamous “we shall revisit” remark that saw him on a collision course with the judiciary since then.

Throughout his second term, the two arms of government have always remained at arm’s length, with the executive accusing the judiciary of issuing injunctions against her projects and laws enacted while the latter accused the Uhuru administration of starving it off funds. As soon as the dust on the 2017 elections settled, Raila, who was then enjoying the support of the National Super Alliance (Nasa), launched a wave of protests complaining that the poll was not free and fair.

Concerned that protests would undermine the delivery of his election pledges in his final term in office, Uhuru reached out to Raila, through the famous handshake as a declaration of peace, that ended up opening a new warfront with his deputy.

And with the handshake, Ruto started drifting away from his political blossom friend of five years, complaining that he had been marginalised and isolated in government.

And with the relationship broken down beyond repair, Ruto moved in inherit Uhuru’s Mt Kenya backyard as the President heightened his support for his former nemesis Raila to succeed him.

Their differences have reverberated almost across all sectors in Kenya, with the government most affected as even the Cabinet Secretaries found themselves dealing with each other in suspicion.

Despite the economy growing on average of 5 per cent a year since he took power and foreign investment increasing, many Kenyans still say they are not feeling the effect of the much touted growth.

Matters have not been helped either by the apparent increases in the prices of basic foodstuff and essential commodities such as oil that have put Uhuru’s government into a fire-fighting mode.