With most MPs on his side, will Ruto rule like Solomon or cruel Lucifer?
President-elect William Ruto. What is clear however is that by winning the battle to control Parliament and Senate, he now has the platform to rule in his own image.
What you need to know:
- Ruto needs to grab from somewhere the Sh150 billion or more that he promised to ring-fence as a pot for the hustlers to get grants or easy payback loans.
- Something must be done to control the prices of food, whose movement up or down is closely linked to the price of energy, or more specifically, petrol.
- What is clear however is that by winning the battle to control Parliament and Senate, he now has the platform to rule in his own image.
From his first moves to dominate the National Assembly and the Senate, cynics will be quick to judge President-elect William Ruto as the controlling ruthless bully he has always been, someone loathe to tolerate anything that stands in the way of whatever he wants to achieve.
That may be true but it is a little early in the day and the arena of context is wrong.
His real test comes with how he will use those Houses to deal with the real big issues that affect wananchi very directly.
By the wrong context, I mean that it was a non-negotiable fact that he was going to try to control the two main legislative Houses or his administration could be dead in the water.
A parliamentary majority (or at least control of Parliament by whichever means) is an absolute minimum for any government in the world.
Bipartisanship is not a concept that works within our shores and unless President Ruto planned to park truckloads of cash for bribing at Parliament buildings every time he sought approval to progress a policy, he just had to railroad both Houses to accept Moses Wetang’ula and Amason Kingi as the Speakers of the National Assembly and the Senate respectively.
What he does with that control is the more fascinating question.
There will be plenty of occasions against which to check this.
Hustler goodies
A key one will be when he seeks to reallocate already committed resources to his key elections pledge – to invest billions in uplifting the lives of the mama mbogas and the boda boda operators (representative of the wide swathe of micro, small and medium-scale enterprises) around who Dr Ruto’s central election pledge pivots.
He needs to grab from somewhere the Sh150 billion or more that he promised to ring-fence as a pot for the hustlers to get grants or easy payback loans.
President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Sh3.3 trillion last budget, which will be President Ruto’s first, has no provisions for the hustler goodies.
Other budget lines will have to be compressed or be jettisoned altogether to release those funds and Parliament will have to approve.
Will President Ruto allow freedom to vote according to one’s convictions and in the interests of the constituents that they represent?
The other acid test is the cost of living and how he intends to tackle that. We all know that the Kenya Kwanza pledge that something significant will be done in the first 100 days of his presidency to put a smile back on the faces of hopeless Kenyans was campaign rhetoric.
Nonetheless, something must be done to control the prices of food, whose movement up or down is closely linked to the price of energy, or more specifically, petrol.
Will this Parliament be persuaded to sign off on the IMF preferred plan (and conditionality for continued budgetary support) to scrap the fuel subsidy extended by President Kenyatta that currently holds the litre price of petrol at about Sh50 less than it should be?
Or will political reality override sense and the same House insist that the levy stays because removing it immediately triggers a negative chain reaction on the cost of basic products across a wide variety of basic household goods?
National debt
And what of the staggering national debt? The 12th Parliament raised the borrowing threshold above the Sh9 trillion initially approved.
Will the 13th parliament have the guts and backing to reduce that threshold and enforce the fiscal discipline that time and again has been called for to ensure that the government lives within its means?
Whether the answer to that question is a yes or no will be demonstrated by the level of maturity the MPs display when the issue of their allowances scrapped by the Salaries and Remuneration Review Committee comes up very shortly.
Then there is the issue of how Ruto’s government will handle corruption, the monster no government before his has been willing or able to deal with decisively.
He said during campaigns and even after that, his plan is to allow the institutions created to deal with corruption to do so.
Those institutions, which we all know, are approved and funded by Parliament. Whatever he plans to do will most probably have to come to Parliament for debate and concurrence or rejection. So we can only wait and see.
What is clear however is that by winning the battle to control Parliament and Senate, he now has the platform to rule in his own image.
What image will it be? Will it be the pragmatic but pious Solomon or the cold, calculating and cruel Lucifer? Tuesday will be the first day on the journey to finding out.
(The writer, a former Chief Editor of the Nation Group, is now consulting. [email protected]; @TMshindi)
