Jubilee Breaks Silence on Uhuru’s Role in Raila’s 2022 Campaign Fund Controversy
The Jubilee party has spoken out after politicians recently dragged its leader, former president Uhuru Kenyatta, into a political scuffle over the handling of campaign funds during Raila Odinga’s failed 2022 presidential bid.
The party’s intervention follows a public and acrimonious exchange between ODM Secretary General and Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna and ODM Director of Elections and Suna East MP Junet Mohamed, with each side trading accusations over who mismanaged the campaign funds.
Sifuna has accused Junet of misusing funds that Uhuru donated to support Raila’s 2022 campaign. Junet, however, fired back by alleging that Uhuru used members of his inner circle and family to embezzle the money.
Addressing the media on Tuesday in Nairobi, Jubilee dismissed the claims as dishonest and politically motivated, arguing that the attacks on Uhuru were being orchestrated at the behest of the current government to divert public attention from its governance failures.
The party insisted that Uhuru has never engaged in shadowy schemes to settle political scores or destabilise other political outfits.
“At no time has our Party Leader, or the Jubilee Party, engaged in any plot to destabilise, ‘buy’, or hijack any political party,” the statement said in part.
“The Jubilee Party is clear: the manufactured attacks on H.E. Uhuru Kenyatta are nothing more than a desperate attempt to create a convenient scapegoat for a government that has lost the confidence of the Kenyan people.”
Jubilee further argued that Uhuru openly and publicly supported Raila Odinga’s candidacy in the 2022 General Election and that those who undermined the campaign are to be found within ODM itself.
“They should stop projecting their betrayal onto Uhuru Kenyatta. Jubilee will not allow our party leader to be dragged into schemes designed to sell out a party that Raila Odinga built over two decades,” the statement added.
According to Jubilee, the renewed attacks are designed to inflame ethnic tensions and resurrect old political divisions for narrow political gain.
The former ruling party also signalled a renewed push to reclaim its place in Kenya’s political landscape. Jubilee plans to roll out a nationwide membership recruitment drive, strengthen transparent engagement with aspirants at all levels, and announce new alliances with like-minded political parties and allies.
Junet had claimed that Uhuru allegedly released the funds meant for agents to his brother, Muhoho Kenyatta, who then appointed a man identified as Peter Mburu to oversee recruitment and payments.
According to Junet, Mburu presented himself as an IT expert capable of detecting and preventing electoral manipulation by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). However, Junet claimed that no agents were eventually procured, neither in the vote-rich Mt. Kenya region nor in Raila’s stronghold of Luo Nyanza.
He further alleged that Muhoho operated from a highly restricted office in Westlands, so secretive that even Raila himself could not freely access it. From this office, Junet claimed, operatives coordinated campaign logistics and the handling of agents’ payments.
Junet has strongly rejected accusations of betrayal, insisting that Raila would never have appointed him Leader of Minority in the National Assembly had he lost the ODM leader’s trust.
Sifuna, on his part, accused Junet of hypocrisy, saying he is now portraying Uhuru’s campaign contribution as “dirty” money despite having benefited from it at the time.
As the war of words escalates, the fallout has exposed deepening cracks within the late Raila Odinga’s political camp, even as Jubilee accuses its rivals of dragging Uhuru Kenyatta into a manufactured controversy to serve shifting political interests
