President William Ruto speaks to the media at State House, Nairobi.
All eyes are on, not President William Ruto or necessarily the Gen Zs, whose views are already known, but on opposition leader Raila Odinga. He has a significant role in the country’s immediate future. How will he play his card? Will it matter, or is it too late?
Welcome to uncharted territory, where there is no map to provide a guide through the dangers – rocks, wild currents, Bermuda Triangle-type portals to other times or universes – and back to familiar territory.
There are two juxtaposed realities: from the perspective of some in President Ruto’s circle, the protests are weakening, the economy is holding, the “Kikuyu cabal” that was behind the “Goon-Zs” will lose its nerve and life can soon go back to normal with a slightly modified Cabinet. Only a few people have been shot by overzealous officers and the serial killer story will hold, so stay the course, hold the line, ban protests, all is hanky-dory, amen.
Through the other prism: a rubicon has been crossed, the bloodshed and brutality of the crackdown makes the government an unviable ally, protesters are preparing to permanently occupy the city, the military is on call, supporters in the international community are getting restive, MPs tread in their constituencies with fear and the President must make major concessions or lose power.
The more hardline of this view, occupied by the young protesters, are pushing for the President to resign immediately. In between are those playing in their heads transitional arrangements, perhaps even an election in the near future.
Credible people
Enter Mr Odinga. A government of Orange Democratic Movement – not Azimio – and United Democratic Alliance must look very attractive at the moment to the politicians around him. They can have a bigger, even equal, share of a smaller government and bring some credible people in, ‘show them how to govern’, pacify and unite the country and isolate some of Mr Odinga’s erstwhile and intransigent allies, who they are now in the process of gently tucking under the “mbus”. Mr Odinga’s inner political circle is publicly quiet of course, but if you listen carefully to Kileleshwa MCA and blogger Robert Alai, you can catch whiffs of that thinking.
But will it work? To answer that question, you must ask and answer another. What caused all this? How did UDA move from stadia over-flowing with seas of yellow-clad young people, singing praise to the new movement of the youth that was to define the way to the future, to the same young people throwing themselves at bullets and tear gas, demanding its immediate overthrow?
To be sure, the economic hardships of today are the result of ten years of bad economic management, particularly the question of debt and corruption. The Jubilee government sought to improve the competitiveness of the Kenyan economy by building infrastructure.
The infrastructure was not all done with long term, cheap bilateral loans but some reckless commercial borrowing. The projects themselves were long term, they would take time to show results, so the debt had to be serviced from existing revenue.
The projects were not prudently managed, they were grossly over-invoiced and a lot of money was bled from the country and hidden abroad. Neither the President nor Mr Odinga have complete credibility to deal with any of this because Mr Ruto was the second in command and Mr Odinga was a handshake partner at that time.
And that’s why the young people think political outsiders like Senator Okiya Omtatah of Busia are the right folks to deal with it, never mind that a ‘President’ Omtatah would probably have been promoted way beyond his ability.
Draconian policies
Some of President Ruto’s draconian policies were a reaction to this pre-existing economic reality. However, Kenyans have stoically gone through worse hardship. They have survived the homelessness of the ethnic clashes, they have survived the repression and State-sponsored violence of the Shifta wars, they have survived the economic and political marginalisation of Nyanza over the years, they survived the original madness of structural adjustment and they can survive this too. If Mr Ruto really wants to know what has compounded these problems and made them a crisis, he should step in front of a full length mirror and confront the Kaunda-suit clad cause of his stress.
His approach to leadership is not best suited to these incendiary times. He never stopped campaigning, aggravating those he thought did not support him, he unfairly sacked people and practiced favouritism in employment, he never practised the austerity he expected the population to accept, he allowed displays of opulence and theft of public funds when good hard-working Kenyans were pulling their children out of university, he never sold his policies competently and therefore the population believes he doesn’t know what he is doing, even when he does. He surrounded himself with a Cabinet of coyotes that couldn’t help him. He has a reputation for intolerance to dissent and is deaf to advice, so now acolytes most probably feed him what he wants to hear.
Will Mr Odinga joining the government convince the protesters that they have been heard, their concerns will be addressed, the country will be put on the right course and they can now go back to college? That the government will now be honest, democratic, obey the Constitution and respect the sanctity of life, including the lives of those who protest against it? That there will no more theft, wrong doers will be punished, there will be fairness for all and the economy will be prudently managed?
Maybe what stands the best chance of saving the Ruto government, if it is still salvageable, is a new Ruto.
