Senate Speaker Ken Lusaka has opened up about how his friends and colleagues deserted him after he lost the Bungoma Gubernatorial seat in 2017.
In a sit-down with The Standard on Thursday, December 19, the former county boss disclosed that his phone went silent immediately the results were revealed.
While admitting that he learned that humans were fickle beings, he further pointed out that they made their way back into his life after he got sworn in as the speaker of the Senate.
"It stopped ringing immediately. In fact, for two days I thought it was spoilt. For the first time, I didn’t have to charge it, because the charge was always full.
"But then when I became the speaker, people bounced back saying, ‘Oh you know we were praying for you! We knew you would get something else,’" he noted.
He further notes that it was President Uhuru Kenyatta's call informing him that he was wanted to take over the reins at the Senate that really bounced him back.
He narrated that his world became hazy that on the day of his inauguration, he did not really know what was happening and relied on photos of the day to try and reconstruct it.
“I don’t even remember where I was sitting. I try to look at photographs today to try and recall that day. I was very happy because I had just been elevated to a high point.
"I had never imagined I would be a Speaker. That was out of my line. My line had been civil service, then I thought I would be a governor for two terms and then do my own business afterward,” he continued.
In the interview, the politician also noted that despite all his success while at the helm of the County Government of Bungoma, he was always haunted by the ghosts of the overpriced wheelbarrows that made the county a laughing stock of all devolved units at the time. Information had emerged that the county had acquired 9 wheelbarrows spending Ksh109,000 on each in 2015.
He clarified that he initiated the inquest that exposed the rot but the message was distorted when it hit the media.
“This thing about the wheelbarrow that everyone talks about. It keeps coming up. It was me who had initiated an audit as governor to find out how the ministries were performing. When I saw it I was also shocked. Why would a wheelbarrow cost Sh109,000?
“But you see politics being what it is, it was really taken out of proportion. Media, of course, set me up because whoever interviewed me edited some parts out and just left the parts that they wanted to use," he pointed out.
Lusaka lost the 2017 poll to Wycliffe Wangamati.
