By 2017, Bomet East MP Richard Yegon had earned a title ‘Veteran loser’.
He had gone to the ballot three times in a row and came home three times empty-handed, usually by margins wide enough to count as verdicts. Among his conquerors was the youthful Benard Bett.
Then, in 2022, he found a new campaign strategy: his own funeral. The former Ethiopian Airlines senior manager cast himself as a prophet unrecognized in his own hometown and warned that losing meant a death sentence to him.
“ I have decided, if you will not elect me, I will go and never come back,” Yegon would declare in his campaign trails.
In a community where even a threat to one’s own life is considered scandalous, voters did what decent neighbours do. They kept him ‘alive’, and sent him to Parliament.
Political analysts credited his 2022 win to the sympathy card, and the sympathy card, it seems, is still in his wallet.
“After the spate of political loses, he hit a jackpot with his campaign propaganda and that is why he is in office” said Enock Langat, a political Observer.
Four years on, the self- styled prophet reports miracles. Bomet East, he says, has seen unprecedented infrastructural and educational transformation “since its creation,” anchored on 72 kilometres of paved road. Having tarmacked the road to the 2027 ballot, he now says his leadership is heaven-sent and a second term should be automatic, since divine appointments do not usually go to elections.
“Its not a secret, my has brought some projects which has never happened in the history of this constituency.” Yegon often chants during his meet the people tour.
With the election around the corner, the MP seems not ready to change tact and has resorted to sticking to his threats
Last time the threat was to himself. This time it is to the voters: reject him, and never come looking for him when the wrong leader lands on them.
Critics call this arrogance. It is a strange way to ask for a job, telling the employer in advance that the complaints department is closed.
Sympathy, of course, is old currency in Bomet East, and the Kones family practically minted it.
When Kipkalya Kones, the Roads Minister, died in a plane crash in June 2008, his widow Beatrice inherited his seat in the by-election that September. Grief, it turned out, was a perfectly good qualification.
Yegon is hardly the first to ride sympathy to Parliament. He is merely the first to write his own tragedy in advance.
In 2013, Benard Bett, then a nondescript graduate, toppled the sitting MP and Assistant Minister Beatrice Kones. Her fall was read as the end of the Kones and Salat dynasties, which had dominated the constituency, then part of the larger Bomet Constituency, since 1976.
Bett’s rise was hailed as a master stroke that would consign both families to irrelevance.The celebration lasted one term.
Mrs. Kones returned in 2017, a reminder that in Bomet East dynasties don’t die, they inherit, lose, and wait. Which leaves 2027’s question for Yegon: when a constituency has already shown it can fire an MP and rehire the family, does it owe a man a second term for threatening to die, or for paving a road?
