Hustler narrative must be nuanced to avoid disorder

While the spectacle of two rival camps in the ruling Jubilee Party writing to President Uhuru Kenyatta is comical, the growing fear that the hustler narrative is slowly being weaponised against ordinary Kenyans trying to survive is scary and needs to alarm everyone, especially the “chief hustler”.

It is generally agreed that our politics is dictated by self-interests of an elite manipulating the unsophisticated sensibilities of tribes. Often, it is someone controlling a political party that has persuaded the community to rally behind them. 

Most of the MPs from Jubilee represent the Kikuyu community from the Mt Kenya region and they are divided because they do not have a unifying individual, someone that can represent the unanimity of interest that has marked most of the past transitions. 

Tyranny of numbers 

For once, they find themselves where the Luhya tribe has been since iconic leaders Masinde Muliro first, and later Wamalwa Kijana, left them. The Luhya are a group with a huge number of voters, but one that has been unable to find a person that earns acceptability across the sub-tribes.

This has been a key advantage of the Kikuyu, one that made it easy to play the “tyranny of numbers” game and entrenched the belief that all it took was to have a big tribe in one party to swing the vote and win the presidency. 

Control of the presidency has fed the fiction of a larger allocation of the government’s resources to the tribes that produced the president and it is generally true that the Mt Kenya and the Rift Valley (during President Moi’s time) regions appeared “better developed”, counting roads, hospitals, and so on.

It is the lack of a clear leader for the Kikuyu that has brought disquiet in the mountain and provided an opportunity for Deputy President William Ruto to weave the hustler narrative now shaking the country.

The opportunity rose on break-up between Mr Ruto and his boss and was greatly accelerated by the handshake between President Kenyatta and the leader of ODM (then in opposition) Raila Odinga. The handshake immediately brought forth the 2022 succession debate.

Mr Odinga decided to ride on the “peace and development” message that forms the bedrock of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), and sponsor a constitutional amendment that he and his supporters believe should win him the country’s leadership.

Ruto’s response was to fashion the “hustler” narrative to appeal to millions in all of Kenya’s tribes. These are the people struggling to eke out a living on menial jobs at construction sites, traders at markets, and in a myriad of side hustles. On this huge population, Covid-19 added a few more millions in 2020.

The DP and his many moneyed supporters across the country are the unlikely poster boys of a hustler movement. I doubt it was ever Ruto’s intention to brand himself as a hustler if the succession game-plan he believed he had with his boss had been allowed to run its course. After all, he was the engine of the “digital duo”, committed to catapult Kenya into the glitzy, can-do 5G world of the internet of things, fast trains, laptop-per-child, etc.

But once ostracised, he was smart enough to see an opportunity to disrupt the dominance-of-tribe narrative, which, as someone who has used it timeless counts before, he knows to be flimsy.

As an insider, he knows that the currency that defines political and social relationships is economic status, and that most Kenyans – especially the youth – aspire to be economically successful.

Great danger 

To seek to exploit this to gain political power by raising people’s awareness is a legitimate political strategy. But there is a great danger when such awareness triggers a blind rage against fellow strugglers working to improve their lot.

In countries like Poland, where workers successfully transformed into a political movement that took over power, the messaging was very clear and targeted.

DP Ruto and his supporters must very urgently nuance the messaging driving the hustler platform. The vast majority of Kenyans struggling to get out of poverty are not dynasties to be targeted with hateful messages and graffiti on cars. Rather than be a platform to grab power, it can trigger a counter-reaction where the country spirals into a nightmare straight out of Museveni’s rule book on how to stay in power.

The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group and is now consulting. [email protected], @tmshindi)