President William Ruto has asserted that he will not take part in any “handshake” with Azimio la Umoja coalition party leader Raila Odinga as many quarters are speculating.

Ruto said his dialogue with Raila is meant to address issues raised by the former Prime Minister leading to the anti-government demos spearheaded by his Azimio coalition.

The president was speaking on Tuesday during the first day of his two-day visit to Kigali, Rwanda to attend the 9th session of the Joint Permanent Commission for Cooperatives.

The Head of State reaffirmed that the array of issues being raised by Raila’s team even as they ceased demonstrations will only be address through available constitutional means.

“There will be no handshake but there will be an engagement in parliament on the issues that have been raised. Those that parliament can resolve, they will resolve,” said Ruto.

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He added, “I did offer them that whatever issues they had there were democratic, constitutional and legal channels of raising those issues using the platform of Parliament in a bipartisan manner and that is the offer I made to the opposition.”

Ruto said his decision to climb down from his previous tough stance against dialogue with the opposition was occasioned by the need to provide leadership on the ensuing crisis.

“In times like this, you have to put your house in order. As president, I owe it to the people of Kenya to provide leadership and on Sunday I did ask the opposition to reconsider calling off the demonstrations they had undertaken because protests and demonstrations are provided for in the Constitution but they were acquiring an ugly violent turn that was destroying property, putting a lot of lives into risk and a lot of unnecessary chaos,” Ruto intimated.

He said his truce with Raila should not be misconstrued to mean he was contemplating a handshake like the one between the Azimio leader and former president Uhuru Kenyatta.

“If I say there will be no handshake, I know there is a context. Unfortunately for us in Kenya, handshake has a different connotation and that is the one I am talking about; the handshake that brings the opposition and government into some conundrum, a mongrel, and an outfit that is undemocratic, unconstitutional and illegal,” expounded the president.

He faulted the Uhuru-Raila handshake of 2018 for bringing down the Jubilee Government saying it resulted in the eradication of the necessary checks and balances.

“I am a great believer in a system where there are robust checks and balances because that is the only way you can hold the executive or government to account,” Ruto noted.

Raila on Tuesday demanded national dialogue through a process similar to the National Accord of 2008, which differs with Ruto’s proposed bipartisan process through Parliament.