The Turkish Embassy in Kenya decided to pull the plug from under Uhuru’s feet and vanquish the artificial mystery smeared on their law-abiding national, Harun Aydin. “This is not a terrorist, but a law-abiding Turkish citizen and international businessman,” they said. They went ahead to ask the same tough questions that ordinary Kenyans were already asking but were conveniently swept under the rug by the largely clueless, rudderless, vacuous, moronic, and outright dumb government bloggers. “Kenya has fairly good intelligence services. Are you telling your citizens that you allowed a terrorist to travel in and out of the country five times?” the Turkmen wondered.
Mr. Aydin is not new to Kenya. He has been in and out of the country at least five times, and in all these cases, his travel documents including his Turkish passport have been duly checked and deemed legal and legit, without a dot or any red alert. He has business interests, and whether or not he is using his own money or he is being financed by Deputy President William Ruto as a front, is none of our business really. The first family is known to use Asians including the Rai family for some of their business ventures, and this is perfectly legal.
Aydin is 56 years old.
Why is his age important?
The other Harun Aydin who has a terror background was 29 years old in 2001 when he was nabbed by anti-terror forces consisting of American and German intelligence officers. Therefore, the Islamist Aydin is now 50 years. At the time the Islamist Aydin was 29, the Aydin Jubilee bloggers believe is a terrorist, having bought their lying government’s lie, was 36.
But to be fair to everybody, anything is possible in this modern world of magical technology, blinding greed, and porous borders. Al Shabaab militants have bragged time and time again over how easy it is for them to enter Kenya, acquire authentic Kenyan identification cards, and carry out whichever evil they desire. This, they say with boundless evidence, both in shed blood and lost lives. In other words, assuming a new identity especially after being tainted with a past of terror is not such a Herculean task.
But here are the questions that ordinary Kenyans who are extremely brilliant by the way, were asking, and the government plus the legions of bloggers it has unleashed, would not answer.
First, in the past, terror issues were coordinated by the Interior CS. Dr. Fred Matiang’i. Therefore, one would expect that any attempt to investigate a Mr. Harun Aydin would start with alerting the CS. But it so happens that after the Deputy President was barred from leaving the country, the CS who had been used as a scapegoat was contacted and he distanced himself saying that he “had not instructed anybody to block the Deputy president and his team from leaving the country.” The interior CS is a rather straightforward person with a terse “bring it on” persona, meaning that if he had given orders that Ruto gets barred from traveling, he would have admitted as much.
If the Interior CS did not know about Mr. Aydin, the Jubilee terrorist, who knew? Why was the CS’s name being used without his knowledge? Assuming the Jubilee terrorist was indeed a terrorist, (he wasn’t), with the CS not being involved, who would have coordinated the arrest and subsequent investigations?
Secondly, the junior officers who were being instructed to harass, humiliate, and torment Ruto at one point shifted the responsibility to Joseph Kinyua, the Head of Public Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, who also empathically distanced himself from the screw-up, stating that he had not been asked to or was not involved in the decision to block Ruto from traveling to Tanzania.
Again, why was his name being thrown around even before he would be alerted? ‘
Here is the most hilarious part: people claiming to have blocked the DP from traveling because of a terror scare for some weird reason allowed the “terror suspect” to fly out while leaving the DP behind. Assuming Aydin was indeed a terrorist; would it not have been risky to let him fly out of the country? Would that not have denied the country a chance to detain and interrogate a terror suspect? How many other people out there would have been hurt by this alleged “terrorist?”
Well, as usual, the usual lazy and mentally dense government bloggers were all over the media offering about three sets of false and uncoordinated responses to the same question. Some claimed lack of clearance for the Ruto to leave the country, leading many Kenyans to ask whether he has been seeking and receiving clearance the many times he has traveled out of the country, including recent trips to Uganda and Zanzibar. By the way, Mr. Harun Aydin was part of Ruto’s trip to Zanzibar on the 27th of July 2021 (see passenger manifest), of which George Muhoho was a co-pilot. The second meandering response was that of terror and the last one was that Ruto is laundering money through Uganda, and stopping him from traveling there was an attempt to scuttle the activity.
But the final answer that Kenyans were waiting for came from Ruto himself when he shared his views on Citizen TV. He clarified that he was not alerted of any terror links to Aydin, and was not briefed as to why he was being detained at the airport.
One would expect that whoever had this nonsensical terror story would at least alert the DP and request him to be patient as background checks were being done. Nothing of the sort happened.
Whatever the motivation, the shortsighted act damaged the government even more and added more sympathy votes to Ruto. The conclusion of most Kenyans is this: Ruto has become so strong that these guys have to use unorthodox, primitive, and dictatorial means to try and contain 
him. In the minds of such Kenyans, Ruto will not lose next year’s presidential election in a free and fair contest.
And who is to blame for this malarkey? The government! I listened to the Member of Parliament for Bahati, Honourable Kimani Ngunjiri wonder aloud, “why are these guys campaigning for us? They are making Ruto totally unbeatable. They are making him more popular.”
And that, fellow Kenyans, is the truth.
James Oloo Okoth,
Senior Political Contributor, Centre for African Progress (CAP).