Nairobi senator Edwin Sifuna has scoffed at President William Ruto over his rhetoric that former president Uhuru Kenyatta is sponsoring Linda Mwananchi.
In a Facebook statement Sunday, August 23, Sifuna taunted Ruto for failing to substantiate his claims.
Sifuna's remarks come after Ruto was pressed, in a newspaper interview, to provide evidence backing his repeated claims that Uhuru is funding opposition figures positioning themselves against him ahead of the 2027 general election.
According to Sifuna, the president could not produce any proof beyond media reports.
"That guy who supposedly holds all of Kenya's intellectual capital was asked a very simple question, to provide evidence that Uhuru is the sponsor of the opposition; and he said he only read about it in the newspaper... yet he claims we are the fools," Sifuna stated.
Read More
The senator's comments add to weeks of escalating rhetoric between the two camps, after Ruto, speaking in Eldoret on Thursday, August 13, accused Uhuru of funding candidates positioning themselves to challenge his re-election.
Ruto claimed his predecessor was driven by envy over achievements in sectors he said Uhuru had failed to deliver on during his own decade in office, including the Affordable Housing programme, Universal Health Coverage, and education funding.
"When you look at their sponsor, didn't he fail to deliver on Affordable Housing, Universal Healthcare Coverage, and Education? Now he has gone to sponsor his protégés to come and compete with me. I will defeat them early in the morning because they have no plan, agenda, policies or vision," Ruto had stated.
Ruto also dismissed calls from sections of the political class for him to serve only one term, terming such demands as rooted in tribalism, and maintained that his administration had distributed development equitably across all regions of the country, unlike previous governments.
Sifuna, who serves as the face of Linda Mwananchi, has previously dismissed Ruto's sponsorship claims as an attempt to delegitimise the movement's grassroots opposition to the government, without directly addressing the substance of any specific allegation, framing the president's remarks instead as evidence of a broader failure to engage with evidence-based scrutiny.
Linda Mwananchi is the breakaway faction from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) that Sifuna leads and which has vowed to challenge Ruto's re-election bid in 2027.
 (1)-1787475795.jpg)
