Four years after leaving office, Uhuru Kenyatta has finally said out loud what many of his allies have whispered for years: that he believes Raila Odinga, not William Ruto, actually won the 2022 presidential election.
The remarks came not in a press conference or a scripted address, but inside a closed-door Jubilee Party National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting in Nairobi, the kind of internal party gathering where politicians often speak more freely than they do in public.
“Tulifanya kila kitu kumsaidia Baba awe Rais wa Jamhuri yetu ya Kenya. Na kura akapata, na mimi mpaka wa leo najua ya kwamba yeye ndiye alishinda hiyo kura. Tunajua vile mambo ilienda, na hatutaki iende hivyo tena,” Kenyatta told the gathering. (We did everything to help him become President of the Republic of Kenya, and he did win the vote, to this day I know he was the one who won that election. We know how things went, and we don’t want it to happen that way again.)
It’s a claim Kenyatta has hinted at before in more guarded terms, but never stated this plainly, that the numbers, in his view, don’t add up.
His argument centres on Parliament, not the presidency.
He pointed out that Odinga’s Azimio la Umoja–One Kenya Coalition Party emerged with the majority of seats across both the National Assembly and the Senate in 2022, a result he says makes the simultaneous presidential loss difficult to reconcile.
“How can you say you won yet we have most Members of Parliament, Senators, and Governors? How could you say we lost? We know how things went down,” he said.
Notably, Kenyatta used the same platform to defend his own record, a sign that some within his camp may have questioned how hard he actually fought for Odinga’s candidacy at the time.
“I am shocked to hear people saying that we did not help Baba, saying that Uhuru Kenyatta did not win. I was not the one at the ballot; I was just Raila’s handyman,” he said.
Even as he made the explosive claim, Kenyatta tried to draw a line under it, warning his own supporters against weaponising the past as the country heads toward the 2027 election.
“Using dirty politics will not take us anywhere; let nobody try to divide us. What does it help you? Share your manifesto,” he said.
The former president then pivoted to the future, using the moment to formally throw his weight behind Jubilee Deputy Party Leader Fred Matiang’i as his preferred successor-in-waiting for 2027.
“He is respectful, he is not corrupt, he loves Kenyans, he is a hard worker,” he said of Matiang’i.
For context: the official 2022 results, as declared by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), gave Ruto 7,176,141 votes (50.49%) against Odinga’s 6,942,930 votes (48.85%) , a gap of roughly 233,000 votes that Kenyatta’s comments now directly dispute, three years on.
