The Deputy President’s political house is veritably on a self-willed fire

There is an African saying that as a man dances so are the drums beaten for him. Deputy President William Ruto is dancing the fire dance.

The drumbeaters are in their element, for him. To paraphrase Chinua Achebe, the drums are beating. The flutes are singing.

The spectators are holding their breath. The Deputy President’s political house is veritably on a self-willed fire. He may need more than the magic of a presidential intervention in Bomet and sundry parts of the Rift Valley to put out the fire.

The DP has opened up far too many war-fronts, all at once. ICC, CORD, Raila Odinga, Gideon Moi, Kanu, Isaac Ruto and rebellious governors in URP, MCAs from Bomet, the media, old people, anti-corruption crusaders, an Ojwang – and others. Wooweh! Now this is not a very intelligent thing to do. When you want to go to war, you begin by recruiting allies.

You sign peace and alliance treaties. You engage in covenants of neutrality with those likely to divert your focus from the principal enemy. You do not fight everybody at the same time. This is not clever at all. And it will be DP Ruto’s political undoing.

The sinister hooting owl of the ICC has hanged above the DP’s head like the sword of Damocles these past five years. From some uncanny reckoning, however, the ICC brought some good fortune. It has been said that it is (only) an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

The tempest that is the ICC brought the bounty of the Deputy Presidency, after the ICC was successfully made an election campaign issue. But did the DP miss the point at which he should have changed his style?

The conversation around the ICC has been informed by acrimony. It has been belligerent. The protagonists have engaged each other in public displays of uncontrolled anger and abusive idiom. This is only to be expected. For the ICC is not a children’s tea party.

The court could pack a gentleman away for three decades, eating the bread of sorrow and drinking of the cup of affliction. The DP’s angry style when addressing this matter is therefore only human. Who wants to eat the bread of sorrow for three decades? Instructively, however, some others chose a different style.

The soft spoken, composed and humble former Commissioner of the Kenya Police, Hussein Ali, and the unassuming Henry Kosgey (formerly an ODM maestro) together with Francis Muthaura, the self-effacing former Head of the Public Service were the first to get off the ICC hook.

Eventually, too, the case against President Uhuru Kenyatta came to naught. Maybe it was only a coincidence, yet it is hard not to notice the concurrence in the controlled mien of Muthaura, Ali and Kosgey. Our people say the galloping calf will end up in the ditch.

More to the point, one would usually expect that a man with such a huge burden around his neck would ponder how to disentangle himself before embarking on so many other wars. Alternatively, he would choose a less visibly combative style for his other battles. They say, however, that there are different strokes for different folks. The DP has, accordingly, kept to an acrimonious and highhanded style, even when dealing with friends. Where President Kenyatta has endeared himself to his core constituencies in central Kenya, his deputy has antagonised himself with a critical section of his own turf.

While President Kenyatta sorts out contentious issues with his core constituents in quiet forums, the DP washes his dirty linen at the public market place. President Kenyatta got the central Kenya governors to go silent on the Pesa Mashinani debate through backroom methods.

The Kabete by-election and that in Gatundu South were handled in the same way. The public at large never got to know of the intense lobbying in the background. The DP elects to humiliate and intimidate his people in the Rift Valley. He publicly tells them things like, “Without me, you will be finished in 2017.” The President builds winning teams in his core constituency. The DP behaves like an owner of the people in his constituency.

The mentality of an owner of people, complete with public explosions of anger, never did any leader any good. For his political self-preservation, the DP may have to learn to listen to divergent opinion. He will need to know how to disagree with people while also showing that he respects them and their right to an opinion, no matter how wrong he considers it to be.

He will also rely less on the counsel of political greenhorns. Advisers like Onesimas Kipchumba Murkomen were born in 1979–80. They know about Kenya only from what they have read in history books and from gossip. They have no national institutional memory whatsoever. They should never be anybody’s first line advisers. They should be sitting and learning at respected elders’ feet.

The DP may want to reflect on his relationship with his mentor, Mzee Daniel Arap Moi, as well as his attitude towards elders generally. Our people say that elders are next to the ancestors and ancestors next to the gods. Yet the DP has no time for elders. He holds age in extreme contempt, going by his public pronouncements. But age is the repository of both institutional memory and the accumulated experience called wisdom. You spurn and deride it at your own peril.

In the end, the DP must do several crucial things. First he must reduce the number of warfronts. The CORD fraternity is more than enough to keep him going, leaving aside the hooting ICC owl. He must mend fences within URP and in the Jubilee fraternity. Then he will need to reach out to communities outside the Jubilee family, with a measure of humility and genuine fellow feeling – at a trustworthy human level. Next to this, the DP needs to find a quiet moment to reflect on why people seem to see his fingerprints on every corrupt deal. He cannot shout this away, regardless of his capacity for public display of anger.

Finally, very finally, he needs to give the President space to be the President. While the democratic practice of running mates is normal in many parts of the world, the Deputy President always recognises that he is not a co-principal in the Presidency.

The Obama Presidency in the US is hence not an Obama-Biden confederacy. It is Obama’s watch.  Ruto needs to sit back and allow Kenyatta to work, even as he supports him, prays against the ICC and diplomatically builds alliances that could help his own presidential dream in the future.

Conversely, he can continue to open up a plethora of battlefronts, engage in angry public frolics, congest the Presidency and practice politics of exclusion. In which case, he must prepare to kiss goodbye his presidential dreams. Meanwhile, the dance of the jungle goes on, and the drums too.